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by ANGELA MOTT0 views·Updated Apr 5, 2022
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  1. Hi,
  2. my name is Angela Mott and I'm going to address the
  3. question of what kind of career skill and live training enhancements.
  4. We can offer
  5. adolescents aging out of our foster care system.
  6. Through what I consider some resilient strategies.
  7. So currently there are about 20,000 adolescents aging
  8. out of the foster care system every year.
  9. Our special kids special needs Children are twice as likely to age out,
  10. not be adopted or placed and 50 kids per day, age out of the system each year
  11. in the state of florida,
  12. we have more Children in the system than families able to adopt and more
  13. Children in the system than social workers are able to adequately attend to.
  14. So florida does have quite a few career and life skill
  15. um, services and resources available.
  16. The issue is that our foster care systems are
  17. privately owned or run and they are siloed out.
  18. So there's no cohesive way to get that information or those sources
  19. into the hands of our foster care Children before they age out.
  20. So instead of addressing it after they age out,
  21. my policy recommendation would be to use federal funding
  22. to create a transition readiness pathway system
  23. or database for the state of florida.
  24. It would be coordinating the child's needs through a virtual web of care
  25. would create a nuanced profile for each child as an enter middle school
  26. or high school that would create a readiness score that could be tracked
  27. through the system and that they have milestones to achieve in order to
  28. attain that score before they transition out of the system.
  29. It would be also a centralized data
  30. um forum for the state to pull and use that
  31. data for legislation for funding for lobbying for other resources
  32. for the state as we see these scores being achieved
  33. by the foster care child and as they age out,
  34. we're able to attract to see how successful they are.
  35. Um and these would include life skills and career training services.
  36. It's also a resilient model because as technology changes as time goes on,
  37. you could tweak the model.
  38. So
  39. it also affords a couple of progressive ways to foster.
  40. One is through community fostering with private organizations,
  41. being able to link their services up into the database and the readiness pathway.
  42. Being able to list all of these different services for
  43. foster care Children as they age out of the system.
  44. And then secondly, it would also offer a virtual
  45. social worker um that will supplement our social workers
  46. or clinical social workers to track these milestones.
  47. So do they have their bank account driver's license, health insurance,
  48. college prep readiness.
  49. Have they done job search,
  50. resume skill training and all this could be tracked in the pathway database
  51. and also be attracted by the foster child through an app
  52. that they could use to go in and see
  53. how how they're progressing through their stages of transition.
  54. So in closing my recommendation would be to draft a bill
  55. that proposes this federal funding to create the transition readiness pathway.
  56. Um It could centralize our data, hold our foster care agencies accountable to
  57. our Children and provide ease and accessing the myriad of resources
  58. available in the state of florida to our foster care system,
  59. and also give them motivation to continue to progress
  60. and to achieve these goals as a transition.
  61. Thank you.