I am very honored to have spoken with Peggy Carlson, OSPI Foster Care Program Supervisor. She is a former foster and adoptive mother, author of SB5184, and forward thinker. We talked about the importance of boundaries for caregivers and how the “Hero” model for caregivers highlights a lack of systemic support. Part of OneSchool is a safe always open space, which Peggy brought to life during her tenure working with a local public high school. Peggy had challenges with having some potential space to use as a “living room” but couldn’t out of fear of liability. She shares a personal story about fostering and supporting biological parents. And I’m excited to learn about a school based health center!
25 – Spencer Goad, Music Teacher and Capoierista – OneSchool Project
Transcript:
keevin bybee 0:00
Welcome to the one school podcast. My name is keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician exploring how we might turn schools into 24/7 safe centers for all of our children with wraparound Social Services. Today, I’m joined by Peggy Carlson. She is Foster Care Program Supervisor for the state of Washington. Peggy, thank you so much for being here. Today, I would love to hear a little bit about your story and how you found yourself on the other side of an internet microphone with me today.
peggy carlson 0:29
Thank you for inviting me. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. So I work for just for clarity sake, I work for the State Education Agency. And so I’m on the education side of foster care. In my role, I support school districts in implementing state and federal law as it relates to students in foster care. How did I get here, I think Foster Care has always been near and dear to my heart. And when my husband and I were younger, in our 20s, we were licensed as what they called specialized treatment foster parents. Really what that meant is we took older kids teenagers, that the Department found difficult to place or something, they would call them hard to place. And we we just would take one child at a time we make them part of our family, our biological kids were little and so our foster kids were teenagers, it was a nice mix. And and we did that for close to nine years later, I went to work for a big school district in the Vancouver area. And I was the McKinney vento liaison, which is really the district person who’s responsible for making sure students experiencing homelessness have everything they need, and that the district is following all the laws related to students experiencing homelessness. So I did that for several years, and then found this great opportunity to jump up to the State Education Agency. Again, it’s I have a foster care focus. People get confused sometimes and think I’m with the Department of Children, Youth and Families. And I’m not I’m on the education side. But I work really closely with the Department in all of the work that I do.
keevin bybee 2:29
Wonderful stuff, you know, as a family doc, it became painfully obvious very quickly how a home environment will in effect somebodies you know, health status. And I’m sure, it should be painfully obvious how home status or not or the all the spectrum in between can affect somebody’s ability to do well at school. Tell me why you think making schools more robust can kind of help all over life?
peggy carlson 3:03
Yeah, yeah. Well, when I saw your idea about having schools be the hub for everything, I it just really spoke to my heart when, especially when I was in the district working with families experiencing homelessness. You can see there were so many unmet needs. And you think about a family who doesn’t have a stable place to live, and something simple like a cold or they need vaccinations or the kids want to participate in sports, but the school requires a physical. All of those things are barriers to kids being actively involved in school and succeeding in school. The same is true for students in foster care. What we see with with those kiddos is they tend to bounce from foster home to foster home. And sometimes the medical piece kind of gets lost in that because a student wasn’t in one home long enough to get their medical records caught up. So I think we see similar challenges and barriers for those kids.
keevin bybee 4:13
I’ve been I mentioned this a couple of times, but I had one kid who was having a lot of behavioral outbursts at school, but part of the problem was that they had he had no safe place to go. And because of moms on medical conditions, homeless shelters weren’t the right answer. And so I was trying to think about what are some ways that if the school could if house but that might be more challenging, but if not, how is directly how could a school better be a hub for making sure kids have a consistent safe place to spend the night?
peggy carlson 4:47
Yeah, when I was in the district. The district gave me a portable for my office. And what I did is I made that portable like a living. I had a big nice flip rug, and I had comfortable couches and chairs, we had a microwave. So if kids needed to, you know, heat up a cup of soup or something, we had a little desk area with computers. So sometimes families would come in need to fill out applications. And the teenagers could relax on the couch. We even had a little play area for smaller kids. And in really my thinking behind that was trying to create a space for primarily the teenagers because a lot of them don’t have anywhere to go after school. And I wanted them to just feel like they have this safe, comfortable place. They didn’t have to talk to me, they didn’t have to, you know, they could just veg out on their phones, lay on the couch. We had lots of snacks. And I think I would love to see schools do that in every building, that there would be kind of a community space where kids could just relax and be warm and safe and have snacks. When, when our district when I was working in the district, we had an early childhood center and it was several portables and all of the kids who were in early childhood attended classes in those portables. Well at some point the district decided to move those children out to the individual schools where they live. And so we had all of these empty portables they had bathrooms and running water. And I begged and pleaded with the district get to use those portables Can Can I just use those for our families and for our kids. At the time we had families who were sleeping in their car, they didn’t have a lot of electricity running water in here. We had a whole fleet empty portables. And the district said no, because they said the portables were condemned and it wouldn’t be safe. And I understand that. But I think what happens with districts is they’re very liability focused, and they don’t want to do anything that would put the district in a position of being sued or anything like that. So that that tends to be where I would get pushback. I tried to convince the district to have shelters in that school buildings. So my husband teaches at a middle school. And I thought, why can we bring in some cots? And we could have there’s a locker room. There’s locker rooms, right there showers, we could have computers, we could bring in tutors if kids needed some. I mean, there’s so much we could do. And again, the district was reluctant. Well, they said no. So, but I love the idea, because I think you know, there’s so many kids who would benefit from having that space. Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this evergreen High School has a health clinic in the school now. It’s brand new, I think it just opened last year. And oh my gosh, isn’t that a wonderful thing to have in the high school. So if kids have any kind of medical issue, they can go they can go to the health clinic right in the hallway and their main school Simon get get what they need. The sports physicals, that’s a big one, immunizations, vaccines, any any medical need, I think the district partners with seamer to do that clinic. I would love that to be in every school, elementary, middle high school. And and I think the clinic will treat family members of students as well. And so think of that of having a school building with a medical clinic right there. It would remove so many barriers in so many ways for so many kids. So I think it’s exciting that they’ve done it. And I don’t know if there are plans for them to do more of that. It’s really cool.
keevin bybee 9:15
Yeah, exactly. You’re singing my song. When I was first brainstorming this project that was a critical piece of it. How many kids have to go home with the sniffles every day where if we had a dedicated clinic and you know a nurse practitioner PA and or you know nurse of some level, then kids would be able to be observed in a safe spot.
peggy carlson 9:38
In the the transportation piece is a big one too. So a lot of our families don’t have access to transportation. And so when they need to do something like a sports physical or just to check up, they have to figure out you know how to get on this bus to go to this bus and this bus and then they have to walk from the bus stop to the doctor’s office. And you think about a weather and families that have men worked with families where they would have an infant, and, you know, maybe an elementary school child and then a middle, and then they’re trying to cart all these kids around on the bus and try and get to the appointment. And then if they’re late, often the clinic won’t see them because they were too late for the appointment. And so you think about having it on site makes it so much more accessible. And isn’t that what we want, we want our kids to have access to services.
keevin bybee 10:35
It’s been said so many times, it’s trite yet I don’t feel that people actually live it. But kids are literally, the next generation kids are literally the best investment we have into this civilizational project. And so if we care about having a civilization in 40 years, it would behoove us to do whatever we can to make it easier for the kids. The fact that we’re so scared of legal liability, that we’d rather let people suffer because we’re afraid of getting sued just shows how misaligned our incentives are in the factors that we find salient are so misaligned with what’s actually important. And I’ve been trying to find somebody who is in education law to help me navigate that space. So if anybody’s listening or if you know, anybody, any any lawyers, you want to help me take this on, that would be wonderful.
peggy carlson 11:34
Well, and the tricky thing, I don’t know if you know this about Washington state, but we’re what they call a local control state, which means every school district operates independently independently of the others. And the agency where I work. We are a technical assistance and guidance agency, but we don’t have, in most cases, authority over districts. So we can’t tell districts, you have to do this, this and this, we we do let districts know what the law requires. And we let them know when they’re out of compliance with the law. But it makes trying to tackle a big project like this, you you would almost have to go district by district to do that. Because they operate on their own, they have a school board and superintendent, but they all have their own policies and procedures. And they they would all have their own assessment of how much liability risk would be involved in in having kids stay after school or overnight on campuses. That does make it hard. I think a lot of times people think that the state education agency is kind of the ruler and that that we can say all right, all districts now have to open shelters in their schools. But that’s really a district level decision.
keevin bybee 13:02
Yeah, it seems that there’s this weird conundrum between we have the wrong kind of top down mandates and the wrong kind of bottom up execution, and not completely, but in certain specific spots. I don’t know what to do about that. But it’s just interesting. That observation, I think you had mentioned when you were having the those portables to kind of create a mock living room or an extra living room for people. How, what were the hours of access? And what was the need? Like were You were there more people than you had room for? Like, what was what did that look like logistically and how many how much space would you want? Oh,
peggy carlson 13:49
my gosh, I would want I would want the whole school as a no but but I had a portable and it was primarily I was on a high school campus. So it was primarily high school kids who utilize that. I I’ve always had horrible boundaries when it comes to work life and personal life. So I would stay in the portable as long as kids needed to be in there. I had a I had a few students, the sisters, and they were they were experiencing homelessness had been for years. And at the time, they were staying in different motels in Portland. And every night it would be in different motel. But they wouldn’t know which motel they were going to until their mom had gotten there and checked in. And so the girls would come to my portable and they work on homework and they’d have snacks. Sometimes they’d sleep and I would just leave it open until they finally heard their mom you know, their mom would text and say okay, we’re we’re staying In this motel, and you think of these kids, one of them was a middle schooler, she was in the middle school next door. And then the older two were high schoolers. And they just hung out in the portable until they got that text. Sometimes it’d be seven o’clock at night. And I think about these kids and the resilience they have in the skills they have. I remember thinking at the time that my own kids who were very bright, you know, do great on testing and like that kind of stuff. If you would have said, All right, you need to go to this motel in Portland, they would have no idea how to how to navigate that these girls had to take a seat Tran and then they had to switch transit center. And then they had to take a max and they had to take you know, it was and they were doing it in the dark. And so yeah, my portable was just kind of opened based on need. I think in an ideal world, you would want to have additional staffing. So you weren’t just one person there from seven in the morning till seven at night. And then we also had families that come in like they would I had computers set up so that they could fill out food stamp applications, TANF, things like that. And I started a relationship with DHS, which was right down the street from the high school, because we had unaccompanied homeless youth who are older, not Well, not always older, they’re their kids who are not living with their parents. Usually, couchsurfing staying with different friends different places.
Whenever I identified a student as being an unaccompanied homeless youth, the first thing I wanted to do is get them signed up for food stamps. So they fill out their application, they go down to DSHS, and then DSHS would get confused. Because where’s the parent? What’s the, so what I ended up doing is going down DSHS, I found the right person to talk to she invited me to come do staff trainings for the DSHS staff to really explain what what are unaccompanied homeless youth? What does that look like? And what kinds of challenges are these kids facing? And their staff once they knew man, they were they were so supportive. And so we got it set up so that kids would come down if they if they used my name, then the DSHS people and say, oh, yeah, that’s Peggy from the school district, they would process it. And then we went a step further. And once a month, I would invite DSHS to come to my portable, and there was an empty portable right next to my portable. So they’d set up kind of these little stations, where when one student could go over and fill out the food stamps, I invited the State Health Insurance navigator, so she would be there. So kids get signed up for Apple Health and to you know, food stamps, whatever they needed. And we would actually bust kids from around the district on that day, so that they would come to my portable, when they weren’t filling out the forms and trying to get everything figured out on that end. They could what we call a shop at the portable weeks, we had coats and clothes and socks and shoes and school supplies and and hygiene supplies. And it was just great because those kids would and they’d hang out and they talk to each other. And I never said you know, Hey, these are all homeless kids. I just said, oh, yeah, this kids from this high school, and this one’s from there. So they, I don’t know that they knew they were all in this same homeless experience. But it was great. They were they they loved it. It was nice to have all of the services right there. Because then they didn’t have to. It’s hard. It’s hard to navigate these systems. And especially when you don’t have transportation. It’s it in the hours are often during school hours. So by the time you get done with school, you get down there and they’ve already closed the line. And so I think I would love that in an ideal world, we would have a school building that would have a DS HS representative their regular hours that you could just send families and students to we would have the Health Navigator people there to sign kids up for families up for state health insurance, we would have the health clinic. I mean, ideally we’d have daycare, you know, for younger kids we would have before and after school programs so kids could just come to school in in all of their needs would be met. Like that’s that’s my dream.
keevin bybee 19:57
My dream exactly the I mean the day Care pieces is so huge. I mean, why Oregon just passed universal daycare. And it’s still getting brought out. And you mentioned so many other points that I just real quick, kind of want to touch on. You know, you talked about how you had poor boundaries. And that sounds a lot like most caregiving professionals, I know, the whole hero movement that happened around COVID. Wow, superficially seems like a nice way to say thanks, again, is just a highlight of the fact that we weren’t making the system robust to begin with. And so this is what causes burnout and moral fatigue and suicide and alcoholism, and you name it.
peggy carlson 20:48
In my current position, I work with all of the district liaisons throughout the state. And I can tell you, most of them work way more hours than they’re paid. They come in this during the summer, when they’re not, there’s the there’s no salary for them in the summer, but they come in because they want to get transportation set up before school starts. They work long hours, the liaisons are lower on the pay scale, as far as how much they’re paid. And when you look at administrative pay, and how much superintendents get paid, and how much all of the people that work in district administration, there’s there’s a ton of money going out to those people. And and that’s great, they all work really hard. But I think about these people that are really at the building level, working with families working with students, and all of the ones that I know, just, they work so hard.
keevin bybee 21:47
And you mentioned how we need to have a navigator to get set up for health insurance or to get signed up for food stamps. Again, the my push with all of this is to show that one, there’s just life and any buckets, we chunk it into our buckets, we impose on it for convenience, which may end up being actually inconvenient or counterproductive. And I’m a big proponent for universal health care. So like, what, how much money would that save, if we didn’t have to pay somebody to sign kids up for health care, they just had it from conception. I know there’s a lot of controversy about universal basic income, the robots are coming and we can be prepared or not. And it doesn’t have to be straight up cash handout, but like universal basic income in terms of a grocery store only credit card universal, basic income can come in a lot of forms.
peggy carlson 22:42
I mean, I love the idea of universal basic income. You know, I think about the the food stamp thing. And and this is a common thing I’ve heard from my families that when they’re shopping, and then they use their EBT card, they they get a lot of judgment, people start looking at what they’re buying. And it’s just kind of creepy to me, because you know what, everybody deserves to be able to buy the signal cookies once in a while, or, or some junk food or whatever. I would like the idea of just giving people the money and and helping them if they need assistance around budgeting and planning and things like that. But I think we do a disservice when we act like people can’t make their own decisions around how to spend money. And like I said, I think budgeting would be helpful for a lot of folks because we don’t learn that in school.
keevin bybee 23:41
That brings up so many things. One is tying into the the judgment and how you mentioned you introduced kids as kids from a high school and not homeless kids. You know, I want anything that is open 24/7 to be attractive to everyone. So how do we work on the PR and the HR so that everyone’s like, Oh, this is just what I want to do so that the people who show off are the quote unquote, those kids. And then when we’re worried about the choices people make, there’s a an educational theorist that I just can’t get enough of, but he goes by the name Zachary’s goes by the name, his name is Zachary Stein. And his basic premise is that all problems are fundamentally educational problems. And I don’t mean that he doesn’t mean it in the superficial wages, like spit information at people, but really educate them, give them the tools that it takes for them to be moral agents in the world. And so if people are buying cookies, the issue isn’t that we gave them too much flexibility with their grocery store money, it’s that we need to provide the support so that they are they know how to make decisions that are in line with their physiology.
peggy carlson 24:55
Right, right. Exactly. I think about our portable Back to my portable Oh, I miss those days, my title, my official title and the district was the students in transition coordinator. And I think nowadays it would be harder to use that title because we have a lot of trans kids, and maybe they would think that was just for them. But um, but back then, kids didn’t really know what that meant. They just knew that they could go to this place, it was comfy and clean and warm, and they could hang out and relax. They knew I wasn’t, you know, if they were gonna swear or talk loudly, I didn’t care. They’re there. They had, you know, some freedom. And we had kids, we had students that weren’t experiencing homelessness, but would come in and hang out, too. And I think you’re right about that. We have to always be careful of stigmatizing kids. Most of the students experiencing homelessness, and I can tell you from my own personal experience with fostering kids don’t want to be labeled or stigmatized, our teenagers, and we ended up adopting two of our teenagers. They they didn’t, they wanted to call us mom and dad, when they were around their friends, they didn’t want to, they didn’t want their classmates or their teachers knowing that you were in foster care. Back then this was a long time ago. If you were in foster care, if you wanted to spend the night in another home, they had to do a background check. And they had to do all this stuff. So my son, Matt, he was very social, he had lots of friends. But he there was no way he would have allowed us to reach out to parents and say, Hey, we need to do background check, because he’s in foster care. So our house kind of became the hub. Now all the kids would come. And we let the kids spend the night at our house. But they’ve changed that. Now. I think now kids in foster care can go spend the night at a friend’s house. But it didn’t used to be that way. So only thing reminded me is that that thinking about stigma, and that’s why universal would be so wonderful, because everybody would everybody would have access. And it would just be there take it or leave it if you want it. Here it is. It’s not for some special group of kids, but just for any kids
keevin bybee 27:28
in a school like evergreen, or any of the ones that you’re familiar with, what would be the unhoused youth burden and what’s the unmet need in terms of places for kids to go?
peggy carlson 27:42
Well, it’s been, it’s been several years since I’ve been at the district level. But I can tell you when I was there, we had about over 100 students who who were identified as unaccompanied homeless youth, so those are the couch surfers, and that’s a tough, that’s a tough group to try and meet their needs. Because they can’t go to the shelter without an adult, they you can’t you know, all of these programs that we have, they can’t rent an apartment, even if they were able to get a bunch of friends together. Unless they’re 18. But even then they have no rental history and, and we do have a youth shelter in Vancouver. But because of the state regulations around youth shelters, it’s very strict. And I would have kids who didn’t have a place to go had no place to sleep. And there would be a bed open at the shelter. And they would prefer to go sleep over at the stadium or you know, just stay awake all night. Because when they went to the shelter, the shelter staff would confiscate their phone, they can have internet access, there were curfews they had. So we need a more flexible system to support these kids. And these are smart kids like the girls I talked about being able to navigate from Vancouver to any motel in Portland that they’ve never been to. And I think the regulations as they are, are too confining and narrow. And and, and these kids just they would they would prefer to sleep outside and then especially their phone, their phone is their lifeline and this, you know, we’re asking them to give up your phone while you’re here and it so I don’t know what the answer is. But I know it would have to be more flexible. And if we had all of these other surfaces, you know if we had mental health services available, these kids have experienced trauma and I don’t care if you’re talking about homeless kids or students in foster care, they have had a lot of trauma in their lives. And the way we see trauma manifest in a school setting is, you know, tends to be with these really challenging behaviors. If the school staff is not trauma informed. Often what happens is they see those behaviors as defiance, and you’re not my knee, my authority, and it gets this clash, escalates. kids in foster care, are kicked out of school at a higher rate than any other student group. And I think that’s because of trauma. And I also, I also think it has a lot to do with racism. We see when we disaggregate that data by race, we can see that black or African American students in foster care, 20% of them are either excluded from school either through in school suspension, out of school suspension, or expulsion. And I think it’s the combined trauma of whatever happened to put them into foster care, and then just being removed from their family and their community and having to live with strangers that’s traumatic. And then, if they have a different culture, they’re not, you know, our teachers are mostly white, or administrators are mostly white, we have very white culture in our school. And I think, you know, racism is another big thing that we need to tackle in order to make it better for our students.
keevin bybee 31:35
One so much to unpack to, again, it just shows how everything’s interconnected. My mediate reactions are we need to not just make education, the education of educators free, but I think we should stipend anybody that wants to be a teacher, like pay them to go to school. Absolutely. And then, you know, graduate three times as many and make sure that they make almost as much as a family physician. I mean, I would support that. 100%. Are you familiar with Dan Siegel, Dr. Dan Siegel, he’s a psychiatrist, one of his favorite my favorite quotes of his was every, quote, misbehavior is an unmet need. Right. And so I don’t want to put it on the teachers saying that they’re just not doing enough by labeling these kids as defiant, they’re already overstretched. salutely. And there needs to be a system for teachers to tap in and tap out. And
peggy carlson 32:33
yeah, class sizes need to be smaller. I mean, we have it. Yeah, think about a few of 30 kids. And some of them have experienced trauma, some of them not, may not be of the dominant culture. So they’re uncomfortable, or they’re viewed differently. Some of them may have special education needs, and how is one teacher supposed to navigate all of that, even if they are trauma informed? It’s too much, it’s too much to do for a teacher.
keevin bybee 33:03
Exactly. And then, to me, the fact that a kid can get kicked out of school on any level is among the most egregious of sins. The story that I just I keep rattling on just because it was so poignant to me, but he was getting kicked out of school on a weekly basis because of his misbehaviors. But if you’re functionally homeless, fleeing domestic violence, your mom has chronic medical diseases, like, what else are you going to do and like getting kicked out of school isn’t gonna fix anything?
peggy carlson 33:41
Well, and getting kicked out of school, when you are experiencing homelessness, or foster care, either one of those can jeopardize your your safety, your health, your well being students in foster care, they get kicked out, the foster parent has to come pick them up and take them home. And then foster parents can only do so much of that. And so what we see happen is placements disrupt, so then the student has to go to a new foster home, maybe it’s a temporary placement until they can find it. I mean, we’re just re traumatizing these kids over and over. And then when you have students who don’t have a place to go students with no home, and we kick them out, what are they supposed to do? Where are they supposed to go? And then we wonder why we’re seeing all of these behaviors.
keevin bybee 34:31
Another new word that I really like when new word to me, is Dom aside, that the death of the home or I mean, in one sense, just the loss of the home. When you think about back to Romeo and Juliet like how are they going to punish Romeo? It was banishment, right? And so it’s the loss of home loss of community that is among the most terrifying things. to human beings. So you’re right, like every time that this is disrupted on some level is another paper cut to stab wound in the trauma history.
peggy carlson 35:12
Yep. And with students in foster care, because we have so few foster homes in the state, what happens often is, if the placement disrupts, and let’s say the students in Vancouver, the open home they find might be in Spokane. So you know, talk about losing your community, you’re you’re all of a sudden dropped in a community, you don’t know where anything is, you don’t know any of the people the school is different that, you know, ah, it’s hard.
keevin bybee 35:44
And you mentioned lack of foster homes. Do you have any thoughts on what it would take to grease the skids to make it make it attractive to more parents or families, I should say and logistical barriers to getting set up as a foster home. So how was it that a local school could have a couple handful dozen families that would be the on call foster homes and thoughts on that,
peggy carlson 36:12
again, you are speaking my language, I’ve always thought that it would be great for schools to partner with the department to identify the department called a suitable other placement. So you can be a foster parent go through the whole licensing process. And then you get a stipend when you have a stupid child placed with you. But there’s also this other placement called a suitable other placement. And my husband and I did this just a few years ago, the department did background checks on us, they came in did a quick walkthrough of our house and we were a suitable placement, we didn’t receive a stipend for the child that we had, which was fine for us. But I always thought if we could get, you know, it could be anybody in that school community. It could be a teacher, a counselor, here, my cat, it could be some custodian or the lunch lady, just someone who is in that community where kids could stay temporarily, until we find a longer term placement for them in the community. And I think kind of what we’re seeing happening in schools happens with foster homes, in that we’re putting a lot on foster parents. And when my husband and I were licensed, and we said we would take teenagers, oh my goodness, the department would have given us sticks. If we didn’t, you know, if we said no, we just want one at a time. So what happens is the foster homes are overburdened, they’ve got all of these kids with lots of needs and lots of behaviors. And that leads to burnout. And and I think if we could get more foster homes in lower that number of kids per home, I think it would be more manageable. And I talked to people all the time who have said, I’ve kind of thought about being a foster parent, but they don’t take that next step in. So I don’t know if there’s a way that we could kind of encourage people to try it. Just Just take one kid. And and I think people think well, if you’re licensed then then you have to have a certain number of kids or you don’t have any say, which is not true. As a foster parent, you have. It’s up to you, the department will say, Oh, we have this child who needs a place to stay. You can get the background of that child and and you decide as a family will this work or will it not? So I think we just I don’t know, I wish people would those. I mean, there are people out there. They tell me all the time. Like I’ve always thought about doing that, but I’m not. I don’t know. They just that’s where they stop. So I think, yeah, and especially teenagers, like if we could get more foster homes. For teenagers. I think people kind of get scared of teenagers. But I’ve always thought they’re so much easier than littler kids. They know how to do everything on their own and, and you can have conversations with them. And if you just have one, then that’s manageable. You’re not having all of these kids feed off of each other and all of these behaviors and trying to puff up their chest and do all of that. So I think it would be I would love to see more homes that would just have one teenager
keevin bybee 39:57
and you mentioned the The How to Become a suitable other placement. Like, what are the How hard is it? Like? How many different websites and paperwork? Does anyone need to fill out? Like, how close is it to Amazon? One click, and it’s going to get delivered tomorrow?
peggy carlson 40:15
Yeah, it’s, it’s we’re not there. It does require the background check and its fingerprints. So that’s that that’s probably what takes the longest. And it has to be somebody that already has a relationship with the child. And that’s why I think if it were someone from the school community, that there’s the relationship, so they can do it pretty quickly,
keevin bybee 40:41
in in terms of something that’s done like at or near the school, like, how far out of their way would a family need to go to make this happen? Like, does somebody come to them to make this happen? I’m just trying to think of the ways that like I said, How can we grease the skids? So once they do decide to make the leap, it’s as frictionless as possible? And then how would we sell it to those people to want to do it in the first place? The I don’t know. But discussions at the school school wide meeting, say, Hey, we’ve got this year, we need 20 families to become a suitable other arrangement who’s going to pony up this year?
peggy carlson 41:21
Yeah, I love that idea. I know that in the schools around the Clark County area, they’ve worked with the Department and Leanne when she used to be with the the foster parent recruitment agency. They did things like they set up an information night at the school. And so they would tell all the parents, hey, if you’ve ever thought about becoming a foster parent, come to this information night will tell you, I think that is such a great idea to bring it to the school or somewhere easily accessible for families. And then I think if a family is considering doing it long term, you know, we’re kind of talking about two different things. The suitable other placement I see as just a stamp a temporary stop gap when when a student has an immediate removal, and we don’t want to send them to Spokane or Seattle, that this is when the lunch lady says oh, yeah, I’m a suitable other than they they placed the child there Intel, they can identify a longer term placement in in our area. I think that’s one thing that should happen. And you know, if we had, if you have four people in each school, who who are already approved to be a suitable other placement, they may never get it. They may never get a child with me. Maybe maybe they wouldn’t. But um, the longer term like becoming a licensed foster parent, I think that process is a little longer, but it’s they’re making it easier. They’re doing a lot. I think you can do the classes online now. So that’s a that’s a big switch when I became a foster parent we had do in person classes. So then you’re all of those same issues that we’re talking about transportation, childcare becomes more difficult were so having it online is great. I don’t know, it’s, it would be I mean, we want to make sure our kids are in a safe place, too. So that’s why you can’t do the Amazon. One Stop button. But I don’t know. I think it could be so different. And I know that the department has gone to office. So they moved their recruitment efforts to the local offices. So that’s somebody you might want to bring on your podcast is I think her name’s Cesana white, and I can give you her contact information. She would probably love to hear any ideas you have for trying to recruit new homes. We need homes for LGBTQ kids. We it would be amazing if we had foster parents of color to support our students of color. Foster parents who speak other languages. Imagine being a child where English you just speak English at school, but when you go home, you speak another language. And then you’re placed in this white foster home where they only speak English and they have different food and different smells and it’s just different culture, everything. Going back to that trauma piece. It’s just additional trauma to those kids.
keevin bybee 44:49
Absolutely. Well, yeah, I’d love to be put in touch with what’s her name again.
peggy carlson 44:53
I think it’s T*** White. I, look up her contact information.
keevin bybee 45:00
Well, you know, I do a lot of theorizing and talking about what I would love to see, but I am super impressed that gotten stuff done. Tell me a little bit about state bill 5184.
peggy carlson 45:13
Ah, I’m so excited about this. So this was a proposal that I wrote and then OSPI liked it so much that they, they decided to make it part of their agency request legislation. And then we had this amazing sponsor, Senator Tawana nobles who is is amazing. And she also has lived experience in foster care. So it was really meaningful to have her sponsor that bill. What it does is it requires every school in the state, so middle school, elementary school, high school, every school, they have to designate a foster care building point of contact. They don’t have to hire additional staff. They just have to designate one person in each school, who knows which students are in foster care. And know what what laws apply to those students. What what are those students rights? If it passed, everybody voted yes. for it. We’re, it’s it’s super exciting. We’re working on the guidance now. Really, what the guidance is, is we were thinking, a checklist, that if you’re the building point of contact, you would have this checklist and some of it is just normal stuff that you don’t think of like on the first day of school, what does the student need, they need to know where their locker is, they need to know how to get to the lunch room, they know, they need to know how to enter in their lunch code. They need to know where the health room is weigh in that person would also work with students to make sure they’re signed up for extracurricular activities kind of assess their need their academic needs, do they need tutoring? Do they mean? are they receiving special education services? And is their IEP up to date? Do they have health concerns, mental health concerns all of that. So we’ve, we’re developing this checklist. But really, the idea is just to have one person in that school, who knows who those kids are? It before this bill, I would say in a lot of schools, they didn’t know who was in foster care. The law before was that there has to be a district level foster care liaison. So that’s one person at the district level, who knows, all the students who are in the district who are in foster care knows where they are which buildings, but it’s one person. And that person often never even sees the student, because they’re at a district office somewhere. And it’s also a ton of work to put on the one district foster care liaison to so so we weren’t seeing kind of this individualized assessment and support for kids, which is what we hope to see with building points of contact. And already, you know, the law went into effect this summer. And already, I’ve received so many emails from newly designated building points of contact, and they’re eager, they want to know what, what resources are out there, and what can I do and how can I help? And, you know, it’s, it’s exciting.
keevin bybee 48:39
Yeah, I’m just super happy to hear that we’re, people are taking it seriously on the legislative level. And I’m always humbled by people who are able to write that stuff and get it passed, it seems like a black box to me. So I’m just super happy that you were able to write it and get it done, and that it’s having an effect.
peggy carlson 49:03
And so and I would say Senator nobles, having her be the sponsor, you know, when when a bill is proposed, they have a hearing and the sponsor kind of gives a summary of the bill. And she was she was shared about her own personal experience, which I thought was so generous of her to share about that, and it was it was very impactful for the senators hearing it in, like I said, overall support. Republicans, Democrats, everybody in that bill did not get a single no vote, everybody. So I think our community cares, our legislators care. But going back to what you said, we’ve got to do better with the way the system is set up. It’s too much to put on You know, just a district liaison or even the building point of contact, we need to come together as a community, and really make sure these needs are being met and not just for students in foster care, not just students experiencing homelessness for all students think of how much better it would be. Yeah.
keevin bybee 50:24
The I mean, it takes a village to raise a kid. And, again, it seems so trite to say that, but at the same time, it’s literally the most true thing that we could say. Zachary Stein said that, if you think about what the definition of civilization is, it’s the intergenerational transmission of information. What is education, the intergenerational transmission of education, literally, our entire civilizational project should be and so on some sense is but we only give it tacit acknowledgement instead of explicit acknowledgement that the most important thing we can do is keep our kids safe and teach them how to be moral agents and adults right
peggy carlson 51:15
And we do that by supporting families. And yes, think about could that even reduce the number of students in foster care if we were meeting family’s needs prior to it, you know, escalating to a situation where it’s unsafe for the child to remain in the home, if we were providing services on the front end, like this mom doesn’t have daycare, and she’s trying to do this job. And these kids are going to school and they don’t, their IEPs are all messed up. And then she’s got, you know, it’s, it’s so much families have so much. And you can see how that can turn into a dysfunctional situation. And what if we, what if we provided all of those services to everyone, maybe we can avoid a lot of removals.
keevin bybee 52:10
My wife, when she before she went back to grad school to do marriage therapy, she worked for an organization called adoption mosaic. And it was a nonprofit that provided inter cultural intergenerational adoptive families with the information that your typical middle class white person who’s just doing good in the world by adopting a kid without any of the knowledge or cultural prerequisites, how do you fill that gap? And the more you I learned about it, and the more my wife learned about it, the if we were ever to think about adopting, well, that $50,000 that it would take to get the process started, wouldn’t that be better off just given to the parents of the kid so that they wouldn’t have to put them up for adoption in the first place? And so like you said, like, how do we get upstream as far as possible so that fewer kids need to be in foster care in the first place, or are at risk for being homeless in the first place. And we just need to pony up and put that money to support families, first of all,
peggy carlson 53:21
and there needs to be a shift and I’m seeing it happen more and more now. But a shift as far as foster care. Now, I was a foster parent. This was in the 90s. Most of the foster parents I talked to kind of have this us versus them when thinking about the biological parents. And I remember they thought my husband and I were insane for really including families in in like so my son that was a teenager, he loved his mom. She had a lot of challenges, but he loved her. And she lived in our in the same city. And so when he had track meats or wrestling meats or football games, he wanted his mom there to watch him. And so we would go pick her up wherever and she bounced around a lot, but we would pick her up we would bring her to the game. And that made him that made his life so much easier that it it he didn’t have to choose between his biological family and his foster family. And when we adopted him, he was 17. His mom, he, he wanted to be adopted, he wanted to have the Carlson name and he wanted his mom to give her blessing. And she did. And I think about how unique that was that she she came to that we picked her up for high school graduation, we all sat together and cheered him on for high school graduation. Last summer he got married, he’s in his 30s. Now, his mom and I both walked him down the aisle together, because that’s, that was best for him. And I’m starting to see that shift in the foster care world where foster parents really hard working with the biological parents and, you know, don’t we want kids to be with their families? And can we support reunification? And we can if, if, if we work together?
keevin bybee 55:35
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s a team sport. And thank you for sharing your story. Powerful stuff? Well, we’ve been talking for an hour now. And it’s Sunday, and you’ve probably got stuff to do. So I mean, I could chat, like all day about this stuff. Is there anything else that you feel would be important for me or anybody listening to this to know anything else that you’d want us or that you would like to share?
peggy carlson 56:03
I’m going to go back to the foster care thing. And if anybody is listening, who has ever even thought a little bit about becoming a foster parent, please reach out they they you can do it online. I think, give it a try. You can you can do respite care where you just have a student or child come to you on the weekend. And you can kind of try it out, get your feet wet, see if it works for your family. Yeah, that’s all I would leave with is I would just love to see more people with the mindset of how can we support families? And if the child needs to be somewhere else for a while? Would you be willing to be that safe? Place? The next
keevin bybee 56:47
PTA meeting? I’ll maybe put a plug out there and maybe we can put together a PowerPoint for it. Oh,
peggy carlson 56:54
yeah, I’m gonna connect you with T*** White. So you can you can do that.
keevin bybee 56:59
Very cool. All right. Well, my goal is to make this as tractional and actionable as possible on some level so well, thank you again, and
peggy carlson 57:09
okay, Thanksgiving, have a good day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai