School moves can significantly impact children in foster care, but new research suggests ways in which foster families can limit the damage, Around The O reported.

Researchers at the University of Oregon and the nonprofit Oregon Social Learning Center  revealed that foster children were more than three times more likely to change schools than their peers who are not in foster care, and four times more likely to move and change school districts during a school year.

For foster children, school moves tend to be accompanied with academic and behavioral problems requiring special interventions as they moved through elementary school.

"The sobering message of this paper is that foster children make a lot of moves, but the study also offers a ray of hope," Katherine C. Pears, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "For foster kids who entered kindergarten with good language and literacy skills the moves didn't have a negative effect on them. If you can start children out ready for entering the school system, you will be inoculating them to protect them against subsequent moves."

For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from 86 foster children and 55 children from non-foster families. They tracked these two groups from preschool to fifth grade, using information collected from children, caregivers, school districts and social service agencies in a mid-sized Pacific Northwest community.

"This gave us a real time look at what happened to these children between grades through records we gathered by following each child," Pears said. "We were able to track their movements, even when they moved to other nearby school districts, out of the county or out of state."

Based on the findings, Pears said there should be a concerted effort to keep foster children who move or must change families in the same schools or, at least, in the same school districts. This would provide social stability for foster children, allowing them to maintain already existing relationships with teachers and friends. This effort would also help foster children keep pace academically "within existing educational frameworks within a district," she said.

The findings are detailed in journal Child Development.