LOCAL | NATIONAL Foster Facts NATIONWIDE More than 650,000 American children reside in our foster care system today throughout the United States. Approximately 50,000 of these children are legally free to be adopted. Though foster care was meant to provide a temporary haven for abused and neglected children, a trek through foster care is often anything but short-lived. Recent federal legislation has only worsened this, as it sets long-term placement on par with permanent placement. Protracted stays in foster care, re-entry to the system, and lengthy delays to adoption partly explain the growth of the substitute care population. The impetus behind this growth: a federal funding scheme that continues to reimburse public child welfare agencies on a per-day, per-child basis; reluctance to terminate the parental rights of even the most abusive biological parents; government monopoly on most elements of the system, many of which could (and in some states have been) safely contracted to private providers including community-based and faith-based groups. Some 15,000 foster children will leave the system without permanent families - by reaching the age of seventeen. The social cost of foster care's poor outcomes are staggering. In New York City, more than 60% of the homeless populations in municipal shelters are former foster children. Wesat, Inc. of Rockville, MD., found that 2.5 to four years after youths left foster care, "46% had not completed high school, 38% had not held a job for more than one year, 25% had been homeless for at least one night and 60% of young women had given birth to a child. 40% had been on public assistance, incarcerated or a cost to the community in some other way.