A practical resource hub for foster youth education in Ohio
Fostering Potential helps Ohio make school, graduation, and opportunity more stable and reachable for foster youth by turning legal knowledge, lived experience, and expert guidance into practical tools.
Start with your role. Find plain-language information, trusted resources, role-specific tools, and learning materials designed to help people ask better questions and take the next practical step.
For foster youth and alumni, caregivers, schools, child welfare professionals, advocates, and others working toward educational success.
Why a clear starting point matters
When school changes, people need a clear place to begin.
When a young person in foster care changes homes or schools, the people around them may need to make decisions quickly. Young people may be trying to protect relationships and stay on track. Caregivers may be sorting through enrollment, records, transportation, credits, services, or communication. School and child welfare professionals may be working across systems with different responsibilities and timelines.
Important legal protections, public resources, and practical lessons already exist. They are not always easy to find, understand, or use together. Fostering Potential is building one place where people can choose their role, understand the issue, find trustworthy resources, explore relevant learning materials, and know what questions to ask next.
Choose the role closest to the question
Where do I start?
Each pathway begins with practical questions and connects you to resources, tools, and learning materials.
Role pathway
Foster youth and alumni
Understand school-related protections, find supportive adults, and explore trusted next steps. The burden of making systems work should not fall on you.
Role pathway
Foster parents and caregivers
Find practical questions and next steps when a young person changes schools or needs help with enrollment, records, transportation, credits, services, or communication.
Role pathway
School staff
Recognize common school-stability concerns, offer steady support, and route coordination questions to the right people without asking a student to disclose more than they choose.
Role pathway
Child welfare professionals
Build school questions into placement changes, case planning, transportation, records, and cross-system follow-through while keeping the young person’s own goals visible.
Find what is useful now
A resource hub built around real questions
You should not need to know the name of a law, agency, program, or professional role before you can find a useful place to begin.
Trusted resources
Start with plain-language orientation and reviewed links to official public resources.
Tools for your role
Use questions, checklists, documents to gather, people to contact, and clear boundaries tailored to your role.
Videos and learning
Explore public sessions, working transcripts, role modules, and topic modules as materials are reviewed and developed.
Explore by topic
Start with a practical question
The Resource Hub organizes information by role and topic. These starting points show how the full library will work.
Start here
New to foster youth education?
Begin with a plain-language overview and a map of the role, topic, tool, and learning pathways.
School stability
Trying to keep a young person connected to school?
Review the practical questions, official sources, and related modules that help people think about continuity and shared responsibility.
Enrollment and progress
Enrollment, records, credits, or graduation concern?
Find a clearer route through enrollment, record transfer, transcript review, credits, graduation planning, and related tools.
School of origin and transportation
Transportation or school-of-origin question?
See the questions that often require timely coordination among youth, caregivers, schools, child welfare, and advocates.
Source and update note: pages that depend on changing law, legislation, agency information, or other current sources will identify when those sources were last checked and will link to official or primary sources wherever possible.
Learning Library preview
Learn from the series — and from what comes next
Fostering Potential began as a cross-system webinar series. The Learning Library is turning that source material into role and topic modules with working transcripts, related tools, source-session links, and clear development status.
School Stability 101
A common foundation on why school stability matters, which systems share responsibility, and where to go next in the role and topic pathways.
Working transcript available; video in development.
What to Ask, What to Save, and Who to Call
A calm caregiver roadmap for asking early questions, saving key information, supporting youth voice, and helping responsible systems follow through after a change.
Working transcript available; video in development.
When Foster Care and Disability Intersect
A careful, non-diagnostic overview of how mobility, disability-related needs, records, services, and discipline concerns can intersect—and when qualified help is needed.
Working transcript available; video in development.
From conversations to usable support
Built from work already underway
Fostering Potential is not starting from a blank page. It grew from a webinar series and a growing source archive that brought together lived experience, public resources, law and policy, and professional practice.
- A cross-system series focused on foster youth educational success
- Recordings, transcripts, slides, and resource lists that can be organized for wider use
- Lived-experience and professional perspectives that show where people need clearer tools
- A plan to turn source material into reviewed, accessible resources, role-specific tools, and learning materials
Future sessions and resources
Stay connected
Join the invitation list for future Fostering Potential sessions and occasional resource updates, or use the Contact page to see the project’s planned ways to connect.
Privacy reminder: please do not submit confidential student, school, child welfare, medical, legal-case, disability, placement, or education-record information through website forms. Forms remain inactive until governance, routing, privacy, and retention decisions are approved.