This story was originally published by The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice. Sign up for The Imprint’s free newsletters here.
In 2022, Zoua Vue was a single woman working full time when she decided to foster three siblings, ages 5, 6 and 7. She knew that getting the kids enrolled in programs before and after school would be the only way to make it all work.
But when the Hugo, Minnesota foster mom tried to sign them up, the programs were full. Waitlists were the only option offered. After spending hours pleading with school officials and the children’s social worker for help, she secured spots for them days before the school year began. But the experience left her questioning whether fostering was something she could continue to do.
“The amount of stress this created was incredibly frustrating,’’ Vue told Minnesota lawmakers in March. “I told a county worker that I could not continue to foster if we could not get them into a program.”
Minnesota foster families signing up for extracurriculars will have a different experience when school starts next month. A law passed in May requires K-12 school districts to ensure that priority enrollment is given to foster youth applying for before- and after-school programs.
Proponents of the law say improving access to these programs, which often serve as a vital form of childcare for families, will provide better support for foster youth and caregivers, who, in turn, may foster children longer.
“They are the responsibility of the state, so they’re all of our kids,’’ Rep. Mary Frances Clardy said in an interview. Her proposal to prioritize foster youth was passed as part of a package of bills earlier this year. “We need to make sure that there’s more stability for the kids and support for the families.”
Clardy, who represents a portion of the southeast Twin Cities area, authored a similar bill in 2024 that failed to pass.
Under state guidance, there are only short windows of time that younger children should be left home alone, so a lack of support from schools “puts foster parents in a situation where they might have to make some bad choices,” Clardy said.
Osahon Akpata-Tanious, executive director of St. Paul-based nonprofit Foster Advocates, testified in support of the bill earlier this year. A report by her nonprofit found that exclusion from extracurriculars, like sports and clubs, made foster youth feel disconnected from their peers.
Schools can ask for documentation to verify that the youth is in foster care.
But the new law does not include enforcement or accountability measures, Akpata-Tanious noted. Her nonprofit is advocating for a provision that would require school districts to track foster youth enrollment in before- and after-school programs.
“It was a good first step,” she said. “But there’s a lot more work to do in making sure that fosters are truly being supported.”
The need for programming
Arianna Baxter spent nearly her entire childhood in east Twin Cities foster homes and missed out on extracurriculars. She once wanted to join a swim team that all of her friends were on, but her foster parents weren’t willing to drive her to practices and meets, she told The Imprint.
Baxter said it never seemed worth it to join clubs as a teenager because she was always on the move, cycling through seven high schools before graduating at the age of 21.
Now 24, she knows that extracurricular involvement during her younger years might have allowed her to build friendships and a stronger connection to adults at her schools, she said. And that might have helped her find someone to talk to about the many hard things in her life — her academic struggles, the siblings she was separated from and missed, and the school days when she felt so overwhelmed that she had to leave class.
She was glad to hear about the new law, which she believes will give foster youth a chance to find all that she missed out on.
“It made me excited that young kids could actually build a community,” Baxter said.
‘Kids do better when they’re active’
Some Minnesota school districts had already been saving spots in programs for foster youth prior to the law’s passage. Saint Paul Public Schools tries to make sure foster youth get a chance to participate in summer extracurriculars, said Heather Alden, supervisor for the district’s Fostering Connections program. There were about 125 foster youth enrolled in the last school year, and roughly a quarter of them attended off-hours programs.
She said she has saved a handful of spots in several of the districts’ offerings: a six-week CDF Freedom School — an “activity-based curriculum to promote social, cultural and historical awareness” — an arts program, and a STEM program for middle school students.
Reserving spaces for foster youth and students experiencing homelessness is only fair, Alden said. They experience frequent transitions, so their caregivers don’t have the ability to sign up for extracurriculars ahead of time. And before- and after-school programs can be an important source of stability.
“That might keep things, for lack of a better word, ‘normal’ when things feel fully out of control,” Alden said. “It allows them to have friends and another cool grown-up, like coaches. Kids do better when they’re active.”
Minneapolis Public Schools has also prioritized foster youth enrollment for before and after school programs, and district officials support the new law, a spokesperson said.
“Access to consistent, reliable childcare before and after school is one of the most significant barriers to school engagement for students,” the statement read. “We recognize that caregivers have demanding schedules and that school hours do not always align with other obligations — having a safe, stable place for students to go outside of school hours is critically important.”
Vue, whose encounters with foster youth while working as a teacher inspired her to become a foster mom, said she was “overwhelmed’’ by the amount of work it took to make sure the children in her care had a place to go before and after school.
But one of the things the new law doesn’t address is the cost of that care, she pointed out to lawmakers during her March testimony. Two school years of programs for all three children cost her $26,000, she said, an expense no one prepared her for when she was training to become a foster parent. Meanwhile, she only received a $600 monthly stipend from the county for the children’s care.
It was a hardship, but not sending them to the programs, Vue said, would have meant giving up “the structure and routine that we worked so hard for.”
That wasn’t an option — nor was giving them up. She ended up adopting the children.
“This was my kids’ fifth placement, how could I look them in the eye and give them up just because school programming was too expensive?’’ she said.
