The effects of the increasing use of foster care on children's personal view of culture

As the opiate abuse crisis creates the need for more out-of-home placements of children all over the state, we will be encountering more youth who are increasingly challenged to know who they are and where they came from. While relative placements are legally preferred over foster care, many kids in the recent wave of removals from home are going into foster placements. Child-placing agencies try to match children with culturally-appropriate caregivers, but this is often hard to achieve.
Some children get split up from siblings in this process, especially if the number of siblings is large, or if the age separation is great, or if there are special needs involved. Some children get placed at a substantial geographical distance from home, if local placements are not available. Some youth get repeated changes of placement, which often involves multiple transitions into and out of very disparate schools and communities. Many addicted parents don't visit their children very often, increasing the isolation of their children from their birth family.
These kinds of kids are not as rare as we wish they were. Some will end up in the adoption search process, where caseworkers work with the youth on "Lifebooks". These are memory-recording devices, in an effort for children to maintain some connection to their roots, to their family, to their culture. A lot of these young people don't know what their culture is. Or, they identify with a culture with which they connected while removed from home. Once such a youth ages out, they may identify with a culture that might not recognize them in return.
Recent changes in the law make it where even after turning 18, some of the high-schoolers we deal with may remain in the foster care/child welfare system until they turn 21.
Maybe check in with a child's caseworker sometime. They sometimes do school visits.