101PD SAMPLEChapter 1 — The Rights and the Partnership: School as the Case's Biggest Daytime System Education Advocacy, School Stability, and IEP Basics — a 101PD training course. Training-hour acceptance is determined by your county or foster family agency. Confirm this course with your RFA worker before relying on it for required hours. This course is training, not legal advice; education-rights specifics vary by case and district, and formal disputes warrant qualified advocacy or counsel. §1 Why School Is the Case — the Stakes, Stated First A child in foster care spends more waking hours in school than anywhere except your home, and this course opens with the honest stakes, because caregivers who understand what school means for this population advocate differently than caregivers who see report cards. The statistical picture, held without fatalism: children in foster care, as a population, change schools far more often than their peers, lose academic ground with each move, are over-represented in special-education categories and school discipline, and graduate at rates that should embarrass everyone — and the drivers are substantially structural (the placement changes that severed school ties, the records that lagged, the credits that vanished in transfers, the adults who rotated too fast to advocate) rather than anything about the children's capacity. Which is exactly why the law moved: California built, across two decades of legislation, an education-stability architecture specifically for foster youth — the school-of-origin rights, the immediate-enrollment guarantees, the liaison roles, the partial-credit protections, the graduation flexibilities this chapter walks — and federal law reinforced the same commitments; the rights exist because the harms were documented, and the rights work almost exclusively when some adult in the child's daily life knows them and politely insists. That adult, structurally, is you: workers carry caseloads and rotate; attorneys see the child episodically; teachers see one year; the caregiver is the only adult who attends the child's education daily across years — which makes the household's education role less like homework help and more like case management: the records kept, the meetings attended, the rights invoked, the timeline watched, the child's story carried across the school years by the one adult who was there for all of them. What the role is not, drawn with this vertical's standing lane discipline: the caregiver is not automatically the education-rights holder (a dependency case designates who makes formal education decisions — often a parent retains these rights, sometimes the court limits them and appoints another adult, and caregivers can be appointed; §4 walks this), and the household's advocacy always runs inside the case's actual authority structure — pushing the school hard and the case's channels properly, a combination this course will model throughout. And the stakes' other side, said because it powers the whole course: education is the single most portable asset this system can give a child — placements change, workers change, families change, and the diploma, the reading level, the credits, and the learned experience of school success travel with the child through every address