Sapkota 1
Sapkota 2
Prachin Sapkota
Donna Powell
English 300
12 September 2018
Foster Care: Road to Homelessness
As we all know and must worry about, the number of kids being dumped into foster care is rising immensely. Even though foster care is provided with the main reason for the protection and welfare of the children, some, if not most of the children sent to foster care later become homeless. Foster care is itself a huge problem amongst families and it is also becoming a leading cause to homelessness.
People tend to undermine this fact which only results it to grow. “More than 23,000 children will age out of the US foster care system every year” (NFYIADMIN). Which means that amongst those 23,000 children estimated to age out this year, about 20 percent of them, that is 4,600 children will become homeless instantly. The numbers may rise as those who were not homeless instantly, also have high risks of being homeless later in their life. There are many reasons as to why we need to worry about these growing numbers. One of the reasons would be that we would not want anyone would fall under this category of living under harsh intolerable situations and would be inhumane to think otherwise. Another reason is that it may be creating more problems to us than we know, not directly but indirectly. In this, one problem is that, as more homeless people grow, the more pollution they bring with them. Which means damage to our environment, and the workforce it takes to clean up their mess. This results in the costs for which the public needs to pay for in tax money simply because labor isn’t free. This might be a small problem but given the circumstances that homeless people are increasing, it might later prove to be a problem worth looking at. Another problem is directed straight to our pockets, as when there are more homeless people present, the more governmental programs will be directed towards the help of the homeless which in simple terms means more money out of the taxpayer's pocket which happened to be us. The main programs which takes up public money is healthcare, incarceration costs, and shelters and supportive housing costs. The costs of all these services provided free since they fall in the category of homelessness, are in millions. One big example would be healthcare. An average homeless person on average spends about 3 nights per visit which can cost up to $9000 and visit as much as five times per year or higher. (Garrett) There isn’t a full solution to homelessness with a fix to foster care, but it could surely mean that the number of homeless can go down drastically. The reason as to why the number of homeless would go down if there was a fix to foster care is because “about 50 percent of the current homeless population were once in foster care” (Beam 62).
Child welfare and foster care alone is horrible for the fact that these kids are taken away from their parents, the most important and influential people in their lives. The amo...
