There are records that show I was enrolled in school for most of my childhood. There are no records that show whether I was actually educated. On paper, everything checks out: attendance logs, enrollment forms, report cards. The system can prove I was present. What it cannot prove is whether I learned anything. Learning requires continuity, and continuity did not exist.
I entered foster care as an infant after my siblings and I were abandoned — left alone in an apartment without care. That is how my record began. By the time I was 14, I had been moved 36 times. Within months, that number became 39. Fourteen years is 168 months. That comes out to a move every four to five months. Every four to five months, everything changed — new home, new school, new teachers, new expectations. Every four to five months, I wasn’t continuing my education. I was starting over. But movement alone doesn’t explain what school was like. What matters is the life happening outside the classroom.
When I sat in school, I wasn’t just dealing with lessons I hadn’t been taught. I was dealing with hunger. While other kids were focused on assignments, I was focused on whether I would eat. While they talked about what they were doing after school, I was trying to figure out where I was going. Some of them were going home. I wasn’t always sure I had one. There were nights when other kids went to bed in a place they knew they would wake up in. I was waiting for buildings to go quiet so I could find somewhere to sleep. Sometimes, that meant a hallway. And the next morning, I was expected to show up to school and function like everything was normal — like I had slept, like I had eaten, like I had stability.
I wasn’t a student falling behind. I was experiencing adult life inside a child’s body and being graded like a student. That creates a gap most systems don’t measure. School measures one kind of intelligence: focus, memory, consistency, structure. Survival teaches another: awareness, adaptation, reading people, managing risk, making decisions under pressure. I was being graded in one while being trained in the other.
So when I walked into a classroom, I wasn’t just behind academically. I was exhausted. I wasn’t exhausted from staying up too late, but from living a life I wasn’t supposed to be living yet. By the time I got to school, I wasn’t ready to learn. I was already burnt out. Every placement was documented. Every move had a date. Every location had a record. The system can tell you exactly where I was. It cannot tell you what each move cost. There is no record for lessons interrupted, for credits lost, and for the mental strain of constantly adjusting while trying to keep up. The system tracks movement. It does not track damage.
There was one placement where everything changed: the McCoys. I was the same child with the same history and file, living in different conditions. There was stability, structure, and care. For the first time, expectations didn’t reset every few months. I wasn’t walking into classrooms already behind. There was time to build, understand, and actually move forward. Learning felt like progress — not recovery. My ability to function improved not slightly but noticeably.
That wasn’t luck. That is what happens when continuity exists. By age 12, I had experienced homelessness. Between 12 and 14, I was incarcerated. Those outcomes didn’t come later. They showed up during the process while I was still being moved, still being enrolled, and still being counted. A child living like an adult is not being educated. They are surviving.
If the state takes custody of a child, it assumes responsibility for that child’s development. That includes education. But that responsibility cannot reset every time the child is moved. When education resets, the outcome doesn’t. It accumulates. Gaps widen. Confidence drops. Expectations are lowered. And eventually, the system begins to respond not to potential, but to the consequences it helped create.
We ask why children in foster care fall behind. We point to behavior, instability, or individual circumstances. But we avoid the structural reality. What happens when a child is expected to perform academically while living a life that makes that performance nearly impossible? My experience wasn’t hidden. It was documented. The placements were counted. The schools were recorded. The enrollment was verified. The system has the record. The question is not “What happened?” The question is “Why is it still being called education?”
