At Risk Students- Students at risk of school failure with an emphasis Research Paper

At Risk Students- Students at risk of school failure with an emphasis on students placed in foster care - Research Paper Example Such problems necessitate the removal of a child from their home for the purposes of their emotional and physical safety. At any given time, approximately 10,000 children are under foster care, 35% being in the care of their relatives. . How students in foster care become at risk students There are many factors that contribute to students placed in foster care becoming at risk students. These include the frequent school moves which result to disruption of their educational progress. This is mainly because such children are normally forced to leave their communities and schools on entering into foster care due to limited residential resources within the present district of the child. Such transfers force these children to join other students in their new schools despite the disparity in syllabus coverage between the two schools. According to Riley (1986), the impact of school transfers is great because most of such transfers take place mid of the school year and the mobility rates are higher for those entering into foster care for the first time. By the time some of these students go through the curriculum, they could have change schools up to five times. According to a 1996 study done in Chicago Public Schools, students who had changed schools for about four or more times had lost about a year of educational growth by their 6th year. If such student’s do not receive enough attention to orient them to the new school and remedial services to catch up with the rest, they end up lagging behind the rest all the academic years (Pecora et al, 2003). Some of the students under foster care attend to medical appointments or court cases. Such activities usually take the student out of school and could even result to emotional upheaval (Pecora et al, 2003). This means that the student will always have class work or content gaps due to frequent unavoidable absenteeism. This makes these students become at risk students because they may never cope successfully with the rest of the class leading to a general low performance. This causes the student to loose self-confidence leading to a continuation of the trend. Green (1986) notes that students placed under foster care have higher rates of inappropriate behavior like truancy, drug addiction or impulsive behavior. This could be due to lack of proper and continuous monitoring because social workers and care givers may change several times during the stay of a child in foster care. This makes their margin of suspended and/or expelled students wider compared to that of students who are not out of home. A combination of such suspensions and/or expulsions, and inappropriate behavior results to high school failure and drop out rates among them students placed under foster care. Help and support to at risk students At risk students need a lot of help and support from parents, teachers and counselors in order to enhance their educational levels and achievements. As noted earlier, these students experience more failure than the rest of the class and hence they fall behind their peers. This causes them to have low self-esteem which negatively affects their attitude towards education and to underestimate their potentialities. Beveridge (2010) states that the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), supports educational reforms that are standards-based. This is based on a belief that establishment of goals and setting of high standards can improve the educational outcomes