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, Brenda Montgomery’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 Couchsurfing). 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