In Connecticut, The Department of Children and Families provides foster youth with $28,500 to pursue a Bachelor's degree if the child can maintain a 2.0 GPA. While this program allows foster kids to finally be able to enter the field of higher education like their non-foster peers and work to obtain a higher education degree or certification, only 2% of all children in foster care will graduate with a degree. The majority of foster youth enter trades, drop out of college, or do not attempt to further their education beyond a high school diploma. Yet, the $28,500 is already allocated for every child in foster care throughout the State of Connecticut every year, despite only the 2% of youth who use it. Since so many kids do not have the resources to be college bound students, the money intended for college funding goes back to the State at the end of the fiscal year and does not get reinvested into education but rather gets reallocated somewhere else in the DCF budget. Since the money is already there, We, the foster children of Connecticut, want access to these funds. 

Foster children are abused and neglected youth who have to overcome social issues, family conflict, and legal troubles while simultaneously taking on the everyday academic challenges that every student in every high school across this country endures. A combination of all these struggles creates socioeconomic barriers to higher education that require an immense amount of resilience, integrity, and tenacity just to be able to walk inside a college classroom. Many foster children are unable to acquire a co-signer to take out student loans to further their education. The barriers are so difficult to overcome that the number of foster children who enter a master's program, law school, or medical school is so low it can't be measured or charted. We write this petition to ask The Connecticut General Assembly to pass legislation that requires DCF to reinvest all unused college funds to foster youth who have been admitted to a graduate, law, or medical school program. 

We are asking our guardian, The State, to invest in us as a parent would invest in their child. To give us the opportunity to maximize our potential and become the young kids who make it out of broken homes and break the cycle of child welfare recidivism. Today, foster children make up a massive portion of individuals who do not enter higher education, and an even larger portion of all high school dropouts in the United States. Foster children who age out of the system are more likely to have their own children removed due to abuse and neglect compared to children who were not in foster care. There is a causal relationship between higher education and less child welfare involvement. Investment in our education is an investment in us as people, investment in our families, and an investment in society. We write this petition not because we are ungrateful for the support we already receive but rather to tell our legislature that we need additional support. To inform them we need a ladder rather than a stepping stool to have a chance at achieving our dreams, to fight recidivism and maximize our full academic potential to have a more fair chance at competing with our non-foster peers, in the higher ed. admissions process, the job market, and in providing our own children the opportunity to strive for their dreams.