Saving Lives in Boarding Schools?
By Paul Offner

For most of the last century, children who have been removed from their families have been placed in foster care. Today, there are about 600,000 such children, and the system is beset by problems--a shortage of competent staff, children who spend much of their youth bouncing around from one family to another, and poor outcomes (high rate of teen pregnancy, for instance). And the system is overburdened. Caseloads have doubled over the last 20 years (largely as a result of the crack epidemic), while the number of foster families has declined.

 

Faced with these challenges, some reformers propose making greater use of boarding schools. Such institutions exist across the nation--like Boys Town in Nebraska, Philadelphia's Girard College, and the Piney Woods School in Mississippi--and many have good track records in preparing disadvantaged children for college and future careers. But the social services people want no part of that, as Newt Gingrich discovered in 1994 when he spoke out on the subject. Society's sole objective should be to unite children with their families, they argue.

 

The problem with this position can be summarized in two words: Brianna Blackwood. Brianna was the two-year-old who was taken from a loving foster family and returned to her mentally retarded mother in the District of Columbia three years ago. Two weeks later, Brianna was dead. Her case is hardly unique. Many biological parents are unfit to look after their children either because of drug use, mental illness, family instability, or similar problems.

 

In such cases, say the family preservationists, the children should be put up for adoption. If only it were that easy. While there is a high demand for healthy white infants, over 60 percent of the children in foster care are minorities. In 1999, the average age of a child waiting to be adopted was eight, and over 25 percent of children were over ten. This is not what the average adoptive parents are looking for. The legislative history of child welfare services, writes Joyce Ladner, former Howard University provost and now a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, has focused on family reunification and adoption. "But Congress has never grasped the fact that, for an increasing number of children, neither is appropriate to their particular needs and circumstances."

 

While boarding school opponents like to conjure up images of Dickensian warehouses, these have little relevance to the current situation. The best of these institutions more closely resemble the New England prep schools that cater to this nation's elite. According to the Coalition for Residential Education (CORE), the group representing the schools, about three quarters of their graduates go on to college. Of course, it may not be the schools that deserve the credit--because of personal motivation and innate ability, it may be that the children coming out of Milton Hershey and Piney Woods would have made it on their own. Things could change for the worse if these schools start dealing with unmotivated children referred by the social services system. So rigorous evaluations are needed. Meanwhile, though, shouldn't boarding schools at least be added to the menu of options?

 

Across the nation, boarding schools are springing up to serve students from high-poverty areas. In many places, the charter school movement has provided the impetus. Sometimes, the boarding option is a response to student needs. In Washington, D.C., the Maya Angelou Charter School started out as a day school for teens from the city's poorest neighborhoods. Only later did the managers realize that some of its students needed room and board if they were to succeed there. Today, a fifth of Maya Angelou's students are boarders.

 

Too many of the children living in our urban ghettoes have values that are well out of the mainstream. That must change if they are to have any chance of getting ahead. Boarding schools, with their emphasis on discipline and mainstream values, may be able to help in that effort.

 

No one believes that we should empty out foster care, but surely it makes sense to consider boarding schools as one of the options. Foster care is obviously broken, and we face a shortage of foster homes in the future. For many of the children who are poorly served by the current system, adoption is not in the cards. Under these circumstances, shouldn't we try some other approaches and see whether we can come up with something better? These children's lives depend on it.

 

Paul Offner is a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.