Centerpiece : Fostering the Future : Parents: Single people, working couples, retirees and other non-traditional families are opening their homes to children : in need.

Nearly two years ago, the Ventura County Department of Children’s Services launched an aggressive radio, television and print ad campaign to attract a new population of would-be foster parents. Single people, senior citizens and dual-career couples were encouraged to “foster the future” by opening their homes to a traumatized child.

Until then, the majority of foster families had fit a fairly typical profile: a married couple, with a working husband and a wife at home caring for the children. But times had changed and the county’s beleaguered foster care system could no longer rely solely on traditional families to meet its needs.

“Ideally, we’d still like that nuclear family. But, unfortunately, that’s in the past. Life isn’t like that anymore,” said Diana Caskey, Ventura County’s foster home recruiter. “Now, if we only looked to those families to provide foster care, we’d be in even worse shape than we are.”

Below are the stories of three non-traditional foster families that responded to the county’s call and how their lives changed when they decided to take a child into their homes.

The Hammetter Family: Retired but Still Teaching

One reason 65-year-old Arlene Hammetter said she never married is that the right person never came along. On the other hand, what she told prospective suitors probably didn’t help.

“The first thing I always said was that I wanted loads and loads of kids,” she said. “I never had a chance.”

Hammetter may have remained single, but she got her wish anyway. For 10 years, she was surrounded by children as an elementary teacher at Sheridan Way School and Elmhurst School, both in Ventura. For the next 20 years, until her retirement two years ago, she was principal at each of the schools.

Then there were the children who became her own. In 1967, when it was still uncommon, Hammetter became the first single woman in Ventura County to adopt children. She raised her two sons, now 24 and 25, in the three-bedroom Ventura house where she lives today, purchased 20 years ago at a fraction of its present value.

“Someone I once dated came by to see me after I got the boys and the house, and I still remember the insulted look he had on his face,” Hammetter said, laughing at the memory. “He said, ‘Why, you didn’t even need a man!’ ”

After her retirement, Hammetter became active in several charitable organizations, including the Catholic Detention Ministry, whose members go into juvenile halls and jails several times a week to provide friendship and help. At the urging of former school colleagues, she agreed to volunteer her services as chairman of the Portola School library. She also became a consultant testing Ventura kindergartners for school readiness.

But Hammetter still believed that something was missing.

“I always loved having children in the house--except when they were teen-agers--and I’d always wanted to have some girls, too,” she said. “So even though I knew I was too old to adopt a child, that’s when I thought that maybe I could be a foster parent.”

Last month, only a few weeks after she completed her application and a county course required of all prospective foster parents, Hammetter’s phone rang. A 10-year-old boy had been taken from his single mother after social workers learned that he had been home alone during the day and had been seriously neglected.

Even though Hammetter had said she would prefer having girls, the social worker on the phone asked if she would be willing to take the boy for a while. Hammetter didn’t have to think long. She said she would give it a try.

When the boy arrived at her door, there was not instant bonding between them. “He was angry and didn’t want to be here, and he made that very clear. For a little boy, he was very distrustful,” she said. “But I just looked at him and said, ‘Look, I’m a friend, and you need a friend and a home right now. So let’s just make the best of it.’ ”

During the next few weeks, Hammetter said she realized how many adjustments she would have to make with a young child in her home again. Preparing meals at regular times, finding time to read stories to him and seeing to it that little things got done--such as making certain he had a bath at night--all took some getting used to. But slowly, she said, the two formed a friendship.

“He loved to read, and he made me explain who Shakespeare was. He went out in the garden and collected all the snails and made a snail farm. And when I talked to him about the water shortage,” she recalled, “he said to me, ‘What you need is a well.’ When I told him he was right, he went outside with a shovel and dug and dug and dug. It was during one of the worst times for him, and so it helped him get a lot of frustration out.”

Two weeks ago, the boy was allowed to return to his mother. But signs of his presence remain throughout Hammetter’s home. There is the heart-shaped card he made for her the day he left, the large hole in the lawn that Hammetter says may never be filled, the surprising absence of snails when she tends to her flowers.

And now there is a 7-year-old boy who arrived last week, who Hammetter hopes will give her more of the same.

“He needed a place to go and there was nowhere else to send him, so what could I say?” she asked, laughing once again. “I’m beginning to think that maybe I should just face facts about having little girls around because it doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

“One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to have to just break down and buy some boys’ toys.”

The LaRosa Family: 11 Children, and One More

After raising 11 children between them, the last thing that Pat and Victor LaRosa thought they would do when they retired was take care of an infant.

“When Pat saw a newspaper ad and got the idea about foster kids, I said, ‘Haven’t we done enough already? This will take away from you and me,’ ” Victor said. Nine years ago, Victor, a retired salesman with four grown children, married Pat, a housewife with seven grown children.

“I wanted us to love each other and be able to do things,” he said. “Having a child live with us didn’t seem like that would be possible.”

Adding to Victor’s hesitation about caring for a foster child was his disability; he is a survivor of polio contracted as an infant. Victor’s mobility has decreased in recent years and he is confined to a wheelchair.

Pat, however, didn’t let the subject drop. She brought it up again, suggesting that they limit their search to infants. “I just felt like I wanted to matter,” she said. “I wanted to make a difference.”

After Victor became more comfortable with the idea and had convinced himself that an infant would not require him to be as mobile as for an older child, he changed his mind.

“Part of it was that I didn’t do as good a job with my own children as I probably could have, and so maybe it was a bit selfish on my part,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can do it right this time.’ ”

The LaRosas’ first foster child was a 3-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his mother and had been living with his grandmother. When the grandmother died, Pat said, it was discovered that the child had been sexually abused by the grandmother’s boyfriend.

“I felt so sorry for that kid. But it really was terrible,” she said. “He used to kick me and bite me and just tear up the house. And at night, he’d just stand there and scream so loud that once our neighbors reported it as child abuse.”

After two months, the LaRosas gave up and called the Department of Children’s Services. They requested that the child be taken somewhere else.

Despite the experience, the couple wasn’t soured on the idea of having another foster child stay in their two-bedroom, government-sponsored apartment in Ventura.

They had another 2-year-old boy stay with them overnight when his mother was arrested for drunk driving, and then, eight months ago, they received a call about a 5-month-old baby in need of immediate placement.

The baby had been born addicted to cocaine, social workers told them, and a few months after birth had been taken away from the mother when she refused to comply with a court-ordered drug treatment program. The LaRosas agreed to take the child.

“We really love him. And except for some respiratory problems that we understand are common in cocaine babies, he doesn’t have anything wrong with him that we can see,” Victor said, lifting the child onto his lap. The child dangled a set of keys in the air and then broke into a wide smile. “It’s going to be really hard to give him up.”

The child’s room, furnished with a crib and dresser, is decorated with bright pictures, posters and a stuffed clown that dangles from one wall. In one corner is a stack of new toys, which Pat said the infant finds less fascinating than such items as spoons and car keys.

Both Victor and Pat say they have been changed by having the child in their home. Victor, who spent most of his childhood in an orphanage, is reminded of a part of his life that he believed he had shut the door on.

Until the foster child “came here, I had completely shoved out of my head how miserable and unhappy I was in that orphanage,” Victor said.

“There were 60 kids to a dormitory, and we were like so many heads of cattle. You wanted someone to come in so much and just hug you and kiss you, to show you some affection.”

Victor glanced at the child on his lap and placed his hand on the baby’s head. “I really forgot about that. You wanted so much for someone to just care about you.”