Taylor Sartor champions legal protections for Foster Children
The FosterPower app puts vital information about benefits, protections, and legal rights directly in the hands of children in foster care
As a senior staff attorney with Bay Area Legal Services’ L. David Shear Children’s Law Center, and creator and legal director of the non-profit FosterPower, Taylor Sartor steers clear of lobbying.
But if she had a magic wand, group care would be eliminated, no child would be removed from a home for behavioral issues — “I think that’s where we’re really letting kids down” — and all foster children would be required to have an attorney.
“All of the judges that I have practiced before really do care about children,” Sartor said. “But what I have seen is, when the child doesn’t have legal counsel, their voice can get lost.”
From a young age, Sartor decided to be that voice.
“I always knew that I wanted to become lawyer, and I knew that I wanted to help people,” she said. “I became a guardian ad litem on my 21st birthday.”
Today, Sartor specializes in issues related to human trafficking, disabilities, commitment in psychiatric facilities, aging out of foster care, school-to-prison pipeline prevention, and more.
The practice area can be emotionally challenging, to say the least.
Taylor Sartor: 'I always knew that I wanted to become lawyer, and I knew that I wanted to help people. I became a guardian ad litem on my 21st birthday.'
“People often say, ‘How do you do this work?’ Child abuse and everything, it’s so taxing,” she says. “What really keeps me going is knowing that they wouldn’t have gotten the outcome that they got if there wasn’t an attorney fighting for their position.”
In Florida, between 20,000 and 30,000 children are in dependency at any given time. Nationally, the figure zooms to 400,000.
State and federal laws guarantee foster children a host of rights, but most children are unaware of them, or too traumatized or disoriented to speak up when those rights aren’t honored, Sartor says.
She should know. The Seminole County native began a five-year stint as a volunteer guardian ad litem in 2013. Her service continued through her undergraduate years at Florida State University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, graduating magna cum laude in 2014.
GALs meet regularly with the foster children they are paired with and caregivers, attend proceedings, and make recommendations to the court on what they believe is in the child’s best interest.
The role is different from being a foster child’s attorney, Sartor stresses. Sometimes a child will have a legitimate disagreement with a guardian, or the state concerning a best-interest determination.
“Not everybody agrees,” Sartor says. “That’s the nature of litigation.”
For example, Florida law mandates that foster children have regular sibling visitation, Sartor says.
“Well, if you’re in a group home, who’s driving you to sibling visitation? That’s an issue we’re dealing with. Sometimes we go on cases and kids haven’t seen their siblings in years, they have no idea they have a right to see their siblings.”
Foster children often complain about being prescribed psychotropic medication, Sartor says.
“They may be having side effects, they may want second opinions, and a lawyer can advocate for all of those things,” she says. “I could go on and on.”
Sartor is considered an expert on the rights of foster children, and her work has been featured in national media, including NPR’s “Market Place.” The reputation is well earned.
Sartor spent a “gap year” between FSU graduation and Stetson Law serving as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Orlando-area schools, where she tutored 40 students in English and mentored 10 experiencing homelessness.
During that time, Sartor helped a foster child in a group home who was in danger of falling through the cracks.
“He didn’t have food, anybody to drive him to school,” she says. “And I saw how much better his life got when we finally got him into a foster family. So that’s when I knew after that year that I did AmeriCorps that I was going to be a lawyer for kids in group homes.”
After graduating Stetson Law in 2018, Sartor was awarded a coveted Equal Justice Works fellowship at the Children’s Law Center. She spent two years representing youth in group home care and successfully advocated for over 85% of her clients to transition into family-like settings.
In her final year at Stetson, Sartor was serving as a guardian ad litem to two teenagers and was growing frustrated with her inability to find answers to basic questions.
How much is an allowance? Who’s responsible for taking a foster child to the doctor? How does a youth qualify for extended foster care?
Sartor decided to create “Know Your Rights,” an informational guide for youth in foster care. She and a team of fellow law students spent 300 hours researching and organizing content. Volunteers from Greenberg Traurig joined the effort. Eventually, a new “funding opportunity” came along, according to an online history.
“By this point, dozens more attorneys from the Greenberg Traurig and Stetson students continued to help Taylor update the content and add more sections.”
The effort grew to include research and testing by current and former foster youth, who used their personal experience to help shape the content.
When Sartor learned the foster children were having difficulty keeping track of their printed guides the effort turned digital.
The result is a FosterPower app that puts vital information about a foster child’s benefits, protections, and rights, in the palm of a user’s hands.
Given privacy restrictions, it’s difficult to say how many users there are. Sartor estimates that the app has been downloaded some 5,000 times.
She is doing her best to spread the word, including contacting social service agencies and launching a digital marketing campaign.
“In Hillsborough, all of the case managers have the app on their phones, the judges all know about the app,” she said. “The next step is really getting that around the state of Florida.”
