Please consider adding language to this bill that ensures students who have Individual Education Plans will also have their plans preserved if they are placed in the Foster Care system. Considering that typically these are hostile situations where a parent is fighting the locality, there needs to be some barrier to the students and the parents rights as they are going through the process. In my family’s case, there was wrong doing and criminal activity identified as the perpetrators were the employees of the Fairfax County Department of Social Services. These bad actors intentionally stripped out all of the services that were written into my daughters IEP so my daughter would have less federal procedures in place to protect her from what the County employees were doing to her and my family.

Dear Chairwoman Simonds and members of the subcommittee, Our names are Ryan Carp and Divya Sharma, and we are students in the State and Local Government Policy Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law. The views we express in this testimony are our own, and not those of the University or the Law School. We have had the privilege of working with Delegate Callsen to develop this legislation, and we ask that you vote for HB 777. Placement and living instability can wreak havoc on a child’s educational progress. Virginia already offers some educational protections to children in the foster care system. Specifically, children in formal foster care placements have the flexibility to either enroll immediately in a school in their new jurisdiction or to stay in their current school when placed outside of their district. HB 777 extends these educational protections so that they also apply to children who transition out of foster care and children in informal kinship care (also known as alternative living arrangements), limited to the end of the ongoing school year. As a result, HB 777 will provide two significant benefits for Virginia’s most vulnerable children. First, it will offer educational stability for every child involved in the foster care system. This stability will help these students (1) maintain continuity in education, (2) preserve important relationships, and (3) find a source of security during a very traumatic time. Second, HB 777 will eliminate the need to delay beneficial transitions in living arrangements until the end of the school year out of fear of disrupting the child’s education. Instead, the child’s family and local DSS can prioritize the child’s well-being without having to sacrifice their educational progress. Ultimately, by giving all children involved in the foster care system the option to prioritize educational stability, school enrollment will no longer serve as a barrier to viable placements and children will experience better long-term educational and social outcomes. For these reasons, and those that will be given by Delegate Callsen, we strongly urge you to vote for HB 777. Thank you so much! Ryan Carp and Divya Sharma