From Foster Child to Adulthood--a Tough Transition

Kathleen, who lives with a foster family in Granada Hills, is model-pretty, stylish, bright and confident. She could be a poster girl extolling the success of the foster care system’s efforts to prepare its youth for adulthood.

She gets good grades as a first-year student studying business and communications at Cal State Northridge. She works 30 hours a week and wants someday to be a television journalist. When she turns 18 next month, Kathleen will have a solid grip on a promising future.

But she knows that she’s unusual. Many foster children “don’t think about once you turn 18, you’re cut off completely . . . and you have to prepare for it,” Kathleen said. “No one’s out there for you, except for you.”

Foster care officials, social workers, group home operators, parents and foster children in the San Fernando Valley acknowledge that Kathleen, which is not her real name, is not representative of youths in the foster care system. The vast majority are turned loose at 18 lacking a vocation, emotional maturity or even such basics as knowing how to behave at a job interview, open a checking account or read a bus schedule.

Their lives have been scarred by family conflict, sexual abuse, separation from relatives, emotional illness and other terrors. Yet they often have been sheltered from shouldering the responsibilities that they will face when they leave the system.

Shelters Reject Them

As a result, these young people often end up as welfare recipients, street people, prostitutes or drug pushers, officials acknowledge. They become victims or victimizers, and even many of the shelters aimed at serving young people consider them adults and turn them away.

“One of the greatest needs that we have in the juvenile justice system . . . is to develop assistance for young people to become responsible adults,” said Kathryn D. Todd, presiding judge of the juvenile division of Los Angeles Superior Court.

The court has the ultimate legal responsibility for youths in the custody of the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services, which provides foster care through a system of foster families, small group homes and larger institutions, such as the county-operated MacLaren Children’s Center.

But, Todd said, the system is “tremendously overloaded” and under-funded. “It’s very hard to get money for young people. Young people don’t vote . . . and funding . . . depends on politics.”

Emery Bontrager, executive assistant to the director of the Department of Children’s Services, said that in the past, individual foster parents and social workers have helped foster children become successful adults on a piecemeal basis. The combination of county, state and federal funds that pays for the system made no specific allocation for those services.

“When it worked, we all saw how it was supposed to be,” he said. “When it didn’t work, that was too bad.”

Court Ruling’s Effect

The politics and economics of the situation changed in 1985 when a former foster child who had become homeless won a New York Supreme Court ruling ordering the state to house him until he was 21. The court found that the state had failed in its responsibilities to provide foster children with vocational training and the skills necessary for independent living.

Fearing a spate of such lawsuits, Congress in 1985 approved a $45-million program to formally teach independent living skills, but the money was held up until 1987. Los Angeles County received $4.8 million to spend over 2 years on the Department of Children’s Services’ countywide Independent Living Program.

Kathleen knows that preparing for independence--known formally as emancipation--is not easy. “It took me 3 years . . . to psych myself up for it,” she said. She went through extensive counseling to cope with emotional difficulties, began working before her 16th birthday, and learned to budget her money and time, with the help of supportive foster parents.

The Independent Living Program is attempting to provide some of that preparation with 30 hours of classes for youths, 16 to 18, covering such topics as health, clothing, home maintenance, food preparation, finding a place to live, the consequences of choices, and finding and keeping a job.

The program offers classes at Mission College in San Fernando and Antelope Valley Community College in Lancaster as well as at 11 other colleges throughout the county.

(More than 300 young people attended the classes countywide this year, but that is fewer than half the number that the county sought to serve; another 1,000 did not meet the federal program’s strict eligibility criteria. And fewer than half of those who attended--none in the Valley--received vocational training.)

Such longtime advocates for children as Ivelise Markovitz, founder of Penny Lane, a psychiatric group home in Sepulveda, have been seeking such a program for many years. She said the new county program is “better than nothing. I would want more for our kids but the politics are not there.”

A changing job market and rising costs for tuition, housing, child care, and auto and medical insurance have made independence more difficult for all young adults. But there is more to independence than being able to afford it. The process of emancipation, of freeing oneself from one’s family and living independently as an adult, is considered by mental health experts to be one that each of us participates in, with varying degrees of success, throughout our lives.

An evaluation of the Independent Living Program by a team headed by Gloria Waldinger of the UCLA Center for Child and Family Studies said all adolescents have “a need for dependence and emotional support” as they experiment with living independently. But for many youths in foster care, according to the report, “separation is a one-time, all-or-nothing process.”

These are youths who typically have far greater emotional and educational needs than others. Less than half of the 2,000 foster care youths ages 16 to 18 surveyed by UCLA were making normal progress toward high school graduation; more than a 10th were functionally illiterate and 15% were in need of special education.

Such critics as Scott Greer, clinical director of Penny Lane, said the Independent Living Program does nothing to assist those most in need, including many of his patients who have severe psychological disorders. Some are so disabled that they would qualify for further treatment as adults, but he said overburdened social workers sometimes fail to make the necessary arrangements.

‘Nameless, Faceless Kids’

He referred to the case of a Penny Lane client now within months of turning 18. Greer said she is psychotic, has a low IQ and is “barely making it” in the sheltered environment at Penny Lane. But he said the girl’s social worker has yet to make sure that she has a place to live after her birthday.

“Quite clearly, the judge will turn her loose,” he said. “This person drops off the rolls. This is not a welfare client. This is a person who doesn’t exist. She’s just one more of the nameless, faceless kids out there.”

The Juvenile Court has the discretion to allow young people to stay within the system if they are likely to graduate from high school before the age of 19. But Greer said the court rarely agrees to do that in the interest of saving money.

Todd said judges decide whether to release a young person from the system based on recommendations from social workers, not the costs.

“It’s impossible to expect that someone will function as an adult just because he’s turning 18,” Todd said. “These programs to help in transition are terribly important.”

The UCLA report also concluded that as many as half of the foster care children who turn 18 every year are unable to survive on their own. One solution, the report said, would be to establish transitional housing that would allow young adults to live semi-independently.

Teen Canteen in Hollywood operates one of the only such facilities in the county. Young working people live in eight one-bedroom apartments with the help of rent subsidies from the Canteen. A case manager helps them with financial and other difficulties.

Thorough Program Sought

Dale Weaver, who started that effort, said it helps young people save enough money to move into their own apartments. But it is not a panacea. “It’s only for the cream of the crop, for that segment of the population that’s ready to be serious about becoming adults,” he said.

In fact, the staff of the Independent Living Program has recommended that the county provide all foster youths reaching the age of 18 with enough money for a security deposit and first and last month’s rent on an apartment, utility deposits and enough food until they receive their first paycheck. Department staff also recommended that services be extended for 6 months after youths leave the foster care program. But such services would not be covered by the federal programs that pay for much of the foster care.

Still, Earlleen Lloyd, a foster mother in Sepulveda, said the Independent Living Program is a step forward, telling foster children about the reality of life after emancipation.

She said young people typically think that they can make it on their own, without a high school diploma or a vocation, but reality hits hard and quick.

Lloyd told the story of a foster daughter who left Lloyd’s home as soon as she turned 18 to live with a sister. She quickly became involved with drugs and alcohol, and then spent 6 months in a drug rehabilitation program. When the young woman came by Lloyd’s house to visit recently, she expressed regrets.

‘It’s Too Late’

“She wishes she had stayed with me and gone to school, but it’s too late,” Lloyd said.

Yolanda, a stylish 18-year-old who attended the Independent Living classes, agrees that they can help. Before she was 16, she had left school and was living on her own, bouncing from friends to relatives to the street, sometimes in a drug- and alcohol-induced haze.

“You name it and I was probably involved in it,” said Yolanda, who spent the past 2 years with foster parents in San Fernando.

But she, like Kathleen, was lucky. The foster care system provided her with counseling, a foster home and foster parents who helped her find a job and finish high school, and now she is a college student. Without the services, she said, “I don’t think I would have made it.”