A child’s entrance into foster care in Massachusetts should trigger an immediate surge of services. But schools can’t provide help to vulnerable students at a vulnerable time if they don’t know who they are. Right now, the paper-based system the state uses to notify schools when children enter foster care leaves too many children falling through the cracks during what is often a deeply traumatic time in their lives.
Courtney Balacco, executive director of student supports at Framingham Public Schools, witnessed the system’s dysfunction recently. A student began struggling behaviorally and only later did the district learn the child had been placed in a group home two months earlier. “That’s two months we could have been providing social work and care for that student,” Balacco said.
Those are crucial days that could make the difference between helping a child navigate a huge disruption to their life and letting them become a statistic.
Here’s the way the notification system is supposed to work: A Department of Children and Families social worker is supposed to email a copy of a paper form, called a “Notice to Local Education Agency,” to the child’s school district. Any time a student enters care or switches placements, a meeting should be held to determine whether it is in the best interest of the student to stay in their school or move.
But the system is only as effective as each individual — often overworked — social worker. Multiple people who work with students in foster care told the editorial board that there are gaps. The form doesn’t always get submitted — and the meeting may not happen — if a child enters DCF custody but doesn’t switch schools. A school may not know a child is in foster care long-term if there was no recent notification. It may take days or weeks for the form to be submitted and reviewed. Schools often aren’t notified when a child returns home after a stay in foster care.
Suzanne Remington, education advocate with the Foster Children Evaluation Services clinic at UMass Chan Medical School, has been working with other advocates for children on an effort to improve information sharing between DCF, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and local schools. Her goal is to find a way for schools to be automatically notified when a child enters or leaves foster care or changes placements.
“Why use 1975 technology?” Remington said of the paper-based system. “Could we use 2025 technology to make it possible for the school to know all the time if a kid’s in care, when they return home, if a placement changed?”
Done well, an automated system could eliminate the need for a social worker to fill out a paper form and submit it. It would let schools know in real time which students need extra support. It would make it easier for schools to reach a guardian.
“It would give the school the ability to know that day that the child might need extra support, might need a trusted adult to talk to, and also to be aware there could be impacts on their academics or on their behavior,” said Jennifer White, education staff attorney with Massachusetts Advocates for Children.
The poor academic results for foster kids highlight the need to improve the system whenever possible. In 2024, only 59.8 percent of foster children graduated high school in four years, compared to 88.4 percent of all students, according to DESE.
Any data-sharing system needs privacy safeguards to ensure students’ personal information is only shared with authorized individuals. But both the child welfare system and school systems are already well-versed in handling private information.
Other states have data-sharing arrangements between their child welfare and education departments and local school districts. The US Department of Education in 2022 studied eight states with these kinds of arrangements. The frequency of data sharing ranged from daily to annually. The data shared can be as basic as a child’s name and date of birth, or it can include demographic data, educational records, and specifics about the student’s child welfare case. Some systems are fully automated, while others require staff work. There may be active notifications to school districts or a database schools can check.
In its most basic form, data sharing allows for functions like registering every foster child for free school lunch.
A more advanced system could look like California’s, where data about student attendance, discipline, and assessments are matched to a child welfare system database, with data flowing both ways between the child welfare and education agencies. That system can notify a child’s caseworker if, for example, their school attendance is declining.
No one appears to be opposed to better information sharing; the challenge is simply technology. Spokespeople for DCF and DESE told the editorial board in a joint statement that the agencies already work collaboratively and with local school districts to ensure students’ educational needs are met, and they are exploring “ways to use technology and automated processes to improve our work.”
For an automated system to work, DCF would have to send information to DESE, which would then have to send it to local school districts.
One particular challenge is a student’s assigned school district may not match their address if it’s deemed in the child’s best interest to stay in their old school when they move to a new town. That makes it harder to create a data-matching system.
Getting government technology and governmental agencies to communicate is never easy. But given modern technological capabilities, it should be possible. If data sharing can improve educational outcomes for children in foster care, setting it up should be a priority.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.