As a group Students in foster care have among the poorest education outcomes and are often highly mobile, changing home placements and schools multiple times during a school year, disrupting learning. REL West and Foster Youth Services staff at the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) are examining how many students in foster care across the county’s 80 school districts are enrolled in traditional or one of the alternative school types. They are also examining the school mobility and transfer rates from traditional to alternative schools for students in foster care. This project uses existing data in new ways to look at the rates of students in foster care enrolled in alternative schools that typically have more limited curricular and student support offerings and higher dropout rates than traditional schools.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education’s (LACOE’s) Educational Passport System (EPS) collects and links cross-sector data in education, child welfare, and juvenile justice across LACOE’s 80 school districts, This analytic technical assistance project is designed to (1) assess the data quality and comprehensiveness of the EPS for monitoring and reporting on school mobility and chronic absence; (2) improve the EPS so that it can be used effectively to address a co-developed research agenda on school mobility and chronic absence for students in foster care; and (3) develop a set of research questions that focus on examining school mobility and chronic absence for LACOE students in foster care.