Children who enter the foster care system don’t enter for positive reasons. There is a high likelihood that children enter foster care as a result of neglect or abuse, or at best, because their parents or guardians try their best, but are just not able to care for them properly.
“If you’ve got a 5- or 6-year-old and grandpa and grandma are like 80, that's kind of hard,” says LaQuista Peterson, treatment director of Specialized Alternatives for Families and Youth (SAFY) of South Carolina.
SAFY provides family-centered services to address the underlying causes of trauma in foster families.
“Or you have the teenagers and they are living with grandma and grandpa, grandma and grandpa can't move around like they should, to keep an eye on them in the house.”
And when kids do enter the foster care system, navigating it can become a serious challenge."
“It is hard enough to be a child,” says Margaret Bodman, director of the state Department of Children's Advocacy and the state’s chief child advocate. “Now add to it whatever it is that they're experiencing at home that is the reason that they're brought into care.”
The reason could involve food insecurity, for example.
“So that child's sitting in school hungry,” Bodman says. “They can't be thinking about arithmetic or pre-calculus if they're hungry and they're thinking about, where's my next meal coming from? If there's domestic violence going on, they're thinking about what happened last night. To their mom, to their dad, to their siblings, to themselves. They're thinking about what's going to happen tonight.”
Or, the child could be experiencing homelessness.
According to McKinney-Vento data, 16,245 school children in South Carolina experienced homelessness in the 2023-24 academic year. That’s up from almost 12,000 at the height of the Covid pandemic.
All these things can make school just one more burden for children in the state foster care system, Bodman says. She doesn’t blame the workers, whom she says are trying their best. She just thinks that carrying the physical and emotional fatigue of trying to cope with their situations isn’t very conducive to stellar academic performance.
And if one were to judge that perspective solely on high school graduation rates in South Carolina, one might easily agree with Margaret Bodman.
According to the state Department of Education’s report card on South Carolina schools, 44.8% of eligible students who were in foster care graduated from high school in 2025 -- effectively the same percentage who graduated at the height of the Covid pandemic.
For context, 45% is almost exactly half the rate of all South Carolina’s graduating students aggregated for the 2024-25 school year; and the rate of graduation among students experiencing homelessness was 69%.
Adding to whatever moved a child into foster care is the fact that once in the system, a child could be taken far from where they have lived.
“You have kids throughout South Carolina that are in foster care and not all of them are able to be placed in their county of origin,” Peterson says. “Like, here in Columbia, we may have a couple of kids that their home county is Greenville. Or you may have some kids from the Low Country who are in homes in the Upstate.”
And if kids in faraway counties have court ordered family visits in their home county, Peterson says, kids in foster care end up missing school time.
“You’ve got to travel, you're going to the family visit, and then the time back. Sometimes school is out,” she says.
On top of all that, kids in foster care often struggle to find permanent placement, meaning they might bounce around different school districts. And bouncing around can happen a lot.
“I moved between 12 different high schools alone,” says Amanda Moon.
Moon went to schools in multiple states after entering foster care as a teen. Today, she teaches in the education department at the University of South Carolina and has a PhD -- a rarity among adults who spent time as children in foster care.
Moon’s work concentrates on former foster care youth who attend college, and what got them there.
For her, at least, school was an escape, a place that felt safe, where she could sink her brain into schoolwork and sports. As a 13- or 14-year-old, Moon was what’s known as a “runner,” a kid who runs away from home. What happened to her, she says, was usually jail.
“ When I was a teenager, if you didn't have somewhere to go, you would be incarcerated in juvenile hall,” she says. “The longest time I ever spent incarcerated was about 90 days, but that's a long time to be in jail. Especially when I was like 13, 14.”
Moon says she started to excel in school when she found good sports coaches, and she encourages schools to build strong relationships between students in foster care and their coaches and teachers. But she’s also aware that kids in foster care face big challenges getting to practice or to arts activities.
“We have to ride the bus to and from school,” she says. “So there's no ability to even go to the library after elementary school, let alone participate in sports and the arts.”
Moon encourages state leaders to rethink how they look at children who’ve spent time in foster care. The myth, she says, is that kids in foster care are all embittered, ill-behaved, traumatized, and withdrawn.
What she has found in her research, however, is that, at least among former foster youth who went on to college, they are resilient, sharp, and excellent communicators. In fact, she says, many kids from foster care take to journalism classes because, having gone through reintroducing themselves numerous times to new families and schools, the kids develop “a unique storytelling ability,” the gift for reading people quickly, and the ability to generate narratives.
Moon also is an advocate for tuition waivers for students who come from foster care to college. South Carolina is the only state on the East Coast, one of two in the South, and one of nine states that has no form of tuition waiver or scholarship/grant program for foster youth.
According to the state Department of Social Services, 3,328 children were in foster care in South Carolina as of mid-December; a quarter of kids in foster care have spent at least 24 months in the system, the highest percentage for time.
While 3,328 is about a quarter of a percent of South Carolina’s 19-and-younger population, according to the U.S. Census, Moon says it’s a small enough pool of students to invest in.
Moon is currently helping to develop a legislative bill for the South Carolina Statehouse to consider tuition waivers. No bills regarding tuition are currently filed in the South Carolina Legislature.
