The other day I spoke with one of The Contributor vendors, and he mentioned a meeting with his former foster care mom. This was a stark reminder about how many people who experience homelessness have been in foster care.
May is designated as the National Foster Care Awareness Month. And maybe the timing was coincidental or specifically selected, but officials of Tennessee’s Department of Children Services were hit by a lawsuit in May that seeks to represent all 9,000 children who are currently in the state’s foster care.
The lawsuit, “alleges that the Department of Children Services (DCS) has persistently violated children’s constitutional rights and federal law, including Americans with Disabilities Act protections for kids with disabilities,” according to a report in the Tennessee Lookout.
The fact is that homelessness will not end if we do not take care of our kids and continue to inflict the trauma that led to their foster care placement to begin with.
The class action lawsuit is referred to as Keira M. v. Commissioner Quin and was filed by A Better Childhood, a national watch group out of New York, on behalf of 13 Tennessee foster children and their legal representatives. The lawsuit claims that, “foster kids in Tennessee are being denied the basic right to education, healthcare and stable homes and instead kept in unsafe institutions or bounced through multiple foster families for years at time, a lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of 13 children alleges,” per Anita Wadhwani’s article published in the Tennessee Lookout on May 21, 2025.
In its press release, A Better Childhood talked about the lives of two siblings — Amara and Zane — who are now eight and nine years old. (We used the names provided in the press release. They are usually changed to protect children.) They had been in foster care since 2017 due to neglect and abuse.
“After leaving their first foster home, they were placed with foster parents who sexually and physically abused them, but it was not discovered until they were removed from the home,” A Better Childhood stated. “Because of this history, both children have significant trauma and PTSD, but the state fails to consistently provide them the therapeutic services they need.
“Amara was eventually returned to the first foster home, but the state failed to find Zane a safe and permanent foster placement. At one point Zane was switched between institutions nightly and placed within an institution for teenagers as a 7-year-old.”
A Better Childhood continues that even now, by the filing of the lawsuit, Tennessee has not found an appropriate home for Zane. For the past eight years, a total of seven caseworkers have been assigned to the siblings at different times. The children have not seen each other in two years.
This is not the first lawsuit in recent months that was filed against DCS. Just last June, DCS made headlines for allegedly abusing children with disabilities who were in their custody while in Tennessee’s juvenile justice system. Back then, the Tennessee Lookout listed some details DCS wards experienced while in custody (cited from Tennessee Lookout article by Anita Wadhwani — June 27, 2024):
- A 17-year-old boy beaten more than 31 times;
- A 15-year-old girl shackled, dragged across the floor and placed in a solitary cell, where she was later pepper sprayed while naked;
- A single Middle Tennessee juvenile detention facility with 48 instances of pepper sprayings each month;
- Kids left in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, sleeping on bare bed frames in bug-infested cells with no education or mental health care provided;
- Multiple DCS facilities where “bounties” are used to induce kids to attack other kids, singling out those who filed grievances against staff or conditions. Ramen noodles were a popular reward for kids who beat other kids, the lawsuit noted.
About 25 years ago, when I was a daily news reporter, I covered foster care and juvenile justice, and DCS was part of my beat. Back then, there was a class action lawsuit filed, known as Brian A. It included similar allegations about lack of education, lack of healthcare, and appalling living situations.
Consequently, the Brian A. lawsuit led to federal court oversight that formally ended in 2017. It seems that the situation of children in DCS custody — whether in the foster care system due to neglect and/or abuse, or through the juvenile justice system — has again deteriorated to possibly a worse point than what led to the Brian A lawsuit.
As I mentioned earlier, the way we treat our foster youth relates directly to homelessness.
About 25 percent of former foster youth experience homelessness within four years of aging out of the foster care system, according to the National Foster Youth Institute.
Similarly, a blog post updated in July 2024 by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, listed the following key findings for youth that transition out of foster care:
- One in five report experiencing homelessness between ages 17 and 19, and over one in four (29 percent) report being homeless from 19 to 21. Among American Indian and Alaska Native young adults, the figure jumps to almost half (43 percent) for ages 19 to 21.
- One in five report being incarcerated between ages 17 to 19 as well as ages 19 to 21.
- One in 10 report becoming a parent between ages 17 to 19 while nearly one in four (23 percent) say they became parents between ages 19 to 21.
According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, about 20,000 youth age out of foster care each year. Based on the statistics above, we could expect that 5,800 of youth aged 19 to 21 pretty much exit to homelessness. In Tennessee, roughly 800 youth aged out of foster care in 2023, according to Tennessee Voices. That means an estimated 230 could end up being homeless.
The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) reports that as many as 46 percent of former foster care youth experience homelessness by the age of 26. This would increase our Tennessee estimate to about 360 former foster kids per year that age out of the system and become homeless by the age of 26.
Data for Davidson County was not readily available, but we know that when young people end up on the streets, they tend to move to a larger city. Youth and young adults are considered a subpopulation of homelessness, and the large majority of these young people are invisible to a casual observer.
For one, it is harder to spot young people on the streets as being unhoused since they tend to blend in with other youth. Secondly, a large portion is couch surfing, staying with friends and sleeping in different places, hopping from friends and relatives to other acquaintances.
When I looked into how many adults who experience homelessness have been in foster care, I saw different organizations saying that as many as 50 percent of unhoused adults had foster care experience. That seemed a little high to me. But I found an article that showed different research studies between 1991 and 2005, which claim anywhere between 10-39 percent of the adult homeless population had experienced foster care.
In any case, the claim that the foster care system is a pipeline to homelessness has become an undisputed fact and is a tragedy. We need to ensure that foster care systems, like DCS, do their jobs and stop inflicting further trauma on children while in their custody. I hope lawsuits like the ones filed in May 2025 and June 2024 can help.
Then, extended foster care programs seem to provide a great opportunity for young people to help them transition to adulthood. Critical to these programs are independent living programs, which help young people with developing life skills and following an academic or a career path.
However, while extended foster care programs are offered in Tennessee, the reality is that many young people who have lived under state custody for years are ready to be on their own. They do not wish to continue in foster care after the age of 18 — especially if they were subjected to more trauma and instability while in state custody.
The best way to ensure young people find stability is to create that support system as early in their lives as possible. This could include mentorships, group homes, shared independent housing with rental assistance and available support groups, peer support specialists where a young adult who may be in their mid-to-late 20s and has experienced foster care and homelessness is trained to offer support and link people to services if needed.
I spoke to one such young adult quite frequently. He became a staunch advocate for peer specialist services. He shared with me that when he talks to a young person, he usually can be more direct than other service providers and have what he termed as “real talk” with them.
But first and foremost, young people need to be offered choices. And that’s where we often fail. With current federal cuts in basic health care, food assistance, and rental subsidies, young people are likely to become even more vulnerable as organizations specializing in supporting kids aging out of foster care are starting to hemorrhage funding.
Here I would like to stress that not all children in foster care end up homeless. There are success stories where children were saved from neglect and abuse and found support through the foster care system.
Yet, there are still too many stories, like the ones listed in Keira M. v. Commissioner Quin. We can do better. We must do better.
And by doing better, we will be able to cut that direct line from foster care to homelessness. The reality is, no matter how much money we spend on chronic homelessness, we won’t be able to ever end it without taking care of your children, youth and young adults.