COLORADO SPRINGS — By the time Keyerah was adopted, she had lived in 14 foster homes, transferred schools multiple times and missed so many of her classes that she was getting mostly D’s and F’s.
She moved in and out of her biological parents’ home, where school was not a priority. “When I was with my bio parents, we never really went to school,” the 17-year-old said. “I’m at a very low level due to that.”
Keyerah’s struggle to reach graduation isn’t unusual. Children who grow up in foster care in Colorado have lower graduation rates than any other group — including kids who are homeless. Only 30% of foster teens graduate from high school on time, according to Colorado Department of Education data.
But Keyerah was able to bring up her grades and get on track to graduate next year because of a tutoring program specifically for kids who have been in the child welfare system. A Colorado Springs agency that for decades has trained foster and adoptive parents found a way to tap into Medicaid dollars to fund the program, which provides after-school help with homework along with exercises that help kids’ brains calm down enough to learn.
LEFT: Students and educators answer a daily prompt, “What do you want to be in the future?,” Nov. 15, 2023, at Kids Crossing in Colorado Springs. RIGHT: Students’ artwork and personal goals decorate Kids Crossing in Colorado Springs. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
ABOVE: Students and educators answer a daily prompt, “What do you want to be in the future?,” Nov. 15, 2023, at Kids Crossing in Colorado Springs. BELOW: Students’ artwork and personal goals decorate Kids Crossing in Colorado Springs. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
On a recent afternoon, Keyerah arrived at Kids Crossing way too upset to jump straight into homework. She had a private talk with her tutor, letting the tears roll, and then joined a group session in which everyone sat in a circle and shared what they wanted to do as an adult. Keyerah said she hoped to become an EMT, or maybe a chef. “We cooked a whole turkey dinner today at school,” she said. “We had turkey, ham, stuffing, corn, green beans, pumpkin pie.”
After about an hour at Kids Crossing, she was calm and ready to dig into her homework.
The tutoring program began in 2022 and is so new that Kids Crossing does not yet have data to prove that it’s helping kids finish school, but the individual stories of success are powerful.
Keyerah’s older sister, Dalila, who is 18, graduated last year and is now attending college in Colorado Springs. “She broke down crying to me about it,” Keyerah said, full of pride that her sister is a college student. “She said that she never knew that she would graduate. She never knew that she would come this far and that she is now in the real world versus when she was failing school and putting herself down for not being able to do certain things.”
Keyerah and Dalila were the first two foster teens in the tutoring program, which has worked with 45 kids in the past year and a half. Kids Crossing intends to track graduation rates, as well as information about how many schools each of the students attended, whether they had individualized education plans and whether they were suspended or expelled.
Tutors attend school district meetings to support foster parents
At 15, Keyerah arrived in the middle of the night to the home of long-time foster mom Jackie Brochu, who has since adopted her. “She was just perfect,” Brochu recalled. “I was just head over heels.” But along with Keyerah’s sweet personality came an inability to settle her mind, brought on by years of trauma and living in “fight-or-flight” mode.
“Foster kids are always behind,” Brochu said. “They have so much turmoil that they can’t think. Bad trauma, and a lot of schools don’t understand that.”
Brochu realized while she and Keyerah were shopping that the girl couldn’t count money and didn’t know the value of coins. Since then, Keyerah has attended summer school at Kids Crossing and helped two younger children build and operate a lemonade stand, which allowed her to practice counting change.
A tutor in the program discovered that Keyerah struggles to learn when she types on a computer, but can retain information if she writes with a pencil and paper. The tutor, who joins Brochu during meetings with the school district, persuaded Keyerah’s teacher to allow her to hand write her assignments.
Brochu’s other adopted child, first-grader Nevaeh, is the biological daughter of one of Brochu’s former foster teenagers. The boy who lived with her several years ago returned one day with his girlfriend and asked Brochu if she would adopt their baby.
Nevaeh, now 6, was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and spent a lot of kindergarten bouncing around the classroom and speaking out of turn. After learning how to concentrate and raise her hand, Nevaeh’s shocked teacher told her mother that she jumped four levels in school testing.
LEFT: Nevaeh, 6, prepares to play ‘Play Attention’, a game that features brain-monitoring technology to improve a player’s focus and attention. RIGHT: Nevaeh builds with Lego blocks at Kids Crossing. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
ABOVE: Nevaeh, 6, prepares to play ‘Play Attention’, a game that features brain-monitoring technology to improve a player’s focus and attention. BELOW: Nevaeh builds with Lego blocks at Kids Crossing. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
At Kids Crossing, in a colorful room with big windows and boxes filled with art supplies, Nevaeh sounded out words with her tutor. Later in her after-school session, she strapped a monitor on her arm for a video game called Play Attention, which measures brain activity and eye movement. If the child starts to lose focus on the tasks presented by the game, a whale swimming at the top of the computer screen begins to rise to the surface of the ocean. The software is meant to improve short-term memory and encourage kids to complete tasks.
Brochu, who has cared for dozens of foster children in the past 20 years, said the tutoring program has helped her girls at school in ways that she could not. “It saves my life,” she said.
“If you were on a job, you’d be fired right now”
Medicaid, the government insurance program for people with low incomes, is provided to foster kids and kids adopted from the child welfare system. It doesn’t cover tutoring, exactly, but reimburses the tutoring program as medically necessary care needed to help children who are diagnosed with mood dysregulation disorder.
Similarly, Kids Crossing runs a therapeutic work program called Ground Breakers, also funded with Medicaid dollars. Teens and young adults who have aged out of foster care receive coaching and counseling to help them get jobs and keep them. Young people in the program work at McDonald’s or other businesses, or they are on the Ground Breakers landscaping crew, which picks up jobs around Colorado Springs and works as a team.
If a teen has an outburst on the landscaping crew, “You can pull them aside and apply it to the job — ‘If you were on a job, you’d be fired right now,’” said Lee Oesterle, executive director of Kids Crossing. “And then you help them with other ways of dealing with situations where their brain flips and they are not regulated.”
Social workers at Kids Crossing help set up internships, and then will meet with employers and explain that the teenager might need a few chances. “We have somebody assigned to that kid, and if the kid has a meltdown at work, we say, ‘Please don’t fire him. Call us.’ We’ll come with him the next work day and try to work it out.”
Kids check their pulse, exercise or do puzzles to relax
Kids Crossing, founded in 1992 by a couple who were foster parents, began as an agency to train, license and supervise foster parents. The agency has offices in Colorado Springs, Denver, Pueblo and La Junta, and now has 102 foster homes. It places about 150 kids in those homes each year.
The organization later began offering “family preservation services,” which meant that foster parents — often kept out of the loop on child therapy sessions — could be part of the therapy team, Oesterle said. In 2018, the state legislature approved an increase in funding for the child welfare system, which has allowed Kids Crossing to expand further, taking on the therapeutic work program and creating the tutoring program.
The child welfare system focuses primarily on safety and “permanency,” which is the term to describe whether a child ends up returning to their biological family, getting adopted or aging out of the system. What gets lost is education, said Terry Oesterle, who is Lee’s wife and a former El Paso County child welfare caseworker. She’s now director of client services at Kids Crossing.
She’s thought about the education piece since she worked with teenagers in El Paso County, realizing that so many kids in the system were failing out of school. “They were so behind and there was no catching up, and they were so hopeless,” she said. “And then I’d be meeting these little ones whose parents have used meth, and Lord knows what that does to their little brains.”
Terry was shocked to learn that many of those kids were not on individualized education plans, called IEPs, in part because they moved around so often that their home school was always changing.
“Why aren’t they getting any special services at school?” she asked. “They get an hour of therapy a week through their Medicaid, so why isn’t there something for tutoring?”
She pitched the tutoring program as soon as Kids Crossing, a nonprofit, had funding available.
The agency was hearing about kids’ struggles in school from foster parents, too. Parents often report that as soon as they say “it’s time to do your homework,” the meltdowns begin.
“Kids like to learn, but if you’re in a situation where it’s stressful and you’re feeling like a failure, who would enjoy that?” Lee Oesterle said. “Who would want to get up and go do that the next day?”
This is why the tutoring program focuses first on helping students regulate their emotions and settle down before the actual tutoring starts. Some kids use a pulse oximeter to see how fast their heart is beating, then practice deep breathing to lower it. “It really helps them to watch this and watch it go down, and see how they feel,” said Linette Weise, who runs the tutoring program as director of education services. Others use a stationary bike, sit in a rocking chair, put together a puzzle, blow bubbles or go for walks outside.
“Trauma manifests itself in so many ways,” Weise said. “If we can’t help them out in school and have a team around them, they’re still going to struggle.”
A huge piece of her job, Weise said, is sitting in on school meetings and trying to convince administrators to work with students, and in some cases, not kick them out of school. She recently told one school that they were failing to follow the support plan to help a student stay out of trouble. “You’re suspending him for things that you are supposed to be working on with him,” she recalled telling school officials.
Extra help with online school
Jerome, a 17-year-old high school senior who is living in a foster home, was getting help at Kids Crossing on a November afternoon as he tried to analyze the dark themes in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Jerome hardly went to school from January through May because he was in and out of juvenile detention. “And then the second time I went to juvie, I didn’t have a place to go back home to, so they put me in foster care,” he said. “From April to May, I didn’t do any school work because I was locked up.”
LEFT: Jerome, 17, completes an English and literature exercise at Kids Crossing in Colorado Springs. Jerome, a senior in high school, has been attending the center five days a week since late summer of 2023. RIGHT: Jerome writes that he is thankful for “all my second chances I’ve been given” onto a decorative leaf. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
ABOVE: Jerome, 17, completes an English and literature exercise at Kids Crossing in Colorado Springs. Jerome, a senior in high school, has been attending the center five days a week since late summer of 2023. BELOW: Jerome writes that he is thankful for “all my second chances I’ve been given” onto a decorative leaf. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
Colorado’s juvenile justice centers have classrooms, but Jerome said he didn’t go, and when he did, he didn’t learn anything.
Now, though, he’s hoping to graduate within the next year, thanks in part to his Kids Crossing tutors who attended mediation meetings with school officials to advocate for his online learning path. Jerome said he planned to stay in the foster care system past his 18th birthday, through a program called “Youth in Transition,” and get on a waiting list for a tiny home.
For now, he does most of his online schoolwork on his own, but comes to Kids Crossing for help with English and math.
“I know what I can confidently get done on my own, and then the work that I need extra help on, I come here and get help.”