New Child Welfare Fact Sheets

  • The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) enhances collaboration between educators and child welfare agencies and includes provisions that ensure school stability for children in foster care. This Fact Sheet provides an overview of ESSA's impact on youth in foster care, with a focus on its implementation in Rhode Island.
  • Normalcy refers to all of the age- and developmentally-appropriate extracurricular and social opportunities that should make up the daily lives of youth within the context of a caring and supportive family. Youth in foster care, particularly those in a group home or residential facility, may have difficulty accessing these important everyday experiences due to their involvement in the child welfare system. This Fact Sheet provides recommendations for how to increase access to these important extracurricular and social opportunities for youth in foster care.
Issue Brief


Experiences during the first three years of a child's life are critical to healthy brain development and positive relationships with parents and caregivers and lay the foundation for social, emotional, cognitive, language, and physical development. Nationally and in Rhode Island, very young children are more likely to experience abuse and neglect than older children. In Rhode Island in 2018, nearly one in four victims of child abuse and neglect were infants and toddlers under age three (856 out of 3,505 victims).

For more information, including key recommendations to support infants and toddlers involved in the child welfare system, please see the Issue Brief .