Foster and Kinship Support

The Foster and Kinship program is coordinated and managed by the Youth Development Specialist (YDS), which provides a unique combination of crucial benefits, resources, group supports, and kinship families to ensure children thrive and become successful adults and focus on raising awareness around and supporting transition-aged kinship and foster youth.

The Role of the Youth and Development Specialist (YDS)

PUSD’s Youth Development Specialist’s role is to provide support, wrap-around services and case-management for families who are raising a relative’s child (e.g., grandparents raising grandchildren, older siblings raising younger siblings, aunts, and uncles raising other family members’ children or children couch surfing). Kinship also includes school-age parents who are still living at home and co-parenting, long-term family friends who have taken on the responsibility of raising a child, and unaccompanied children living with a sponsor.

Kinds of services that the Youth Development Specialist (YDS) provides:

Services for kinship families often include FREE Services such as:

Bi-weekly Support groups for caregivers, coordinated and facilitated by the YDS

The YDS coordinates the facilitation for the Caregiver Support and Networking group bi-weekly at the district office.

• Support includes information about accessing a wide variety of services, such as financial assistance and related public benefits, case management, legal assistance, support groups, respite care, and mental health counseling and treatment  
• Respite care, and individual counseling.
• Professional Caregiver Workshop Training and Presentations every third Tuesday in the Nurses training
• Caregivers also receive district and school sites updates via a monthly F&K newsletter

For Support Services, please click this Foster/Kinship link.