Fostering Independence in Wards of the State : Services: Program teaches youths skills they will need when their aid is cut off at 18. Being alone adds to the challenges.

Gently slipping one of the glasses out of their box, Chris traced her finger along the tiny pink flowers decorating its rim, the same design as on the new silverware and plates stacked nearby.

“See?” the 17-year-old said. “They match.”

Chris plans to build a life with this tableware.

Although she has been in foster care since she was 6 years old, shuttled among more than 20 homes and institutions around Ventura County, Chris will be thrust out of the system in less than three months when she turns 18.

Nationwide, the outlook for former foster children is grim, studies show. More than one-fourth become homeless. Many go on welfare. And some turn to crime. A survey found that in California, one-third of prison inmates had been in foster care.

But Chris, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy, has had some preparation to help her forge a different fate--a county-sponsored training course on independent-living skills that state officials say is one of the best in California.

The program, run for the county by the nonprofit agency Interface Children, Family Services, teaches older foster children survival skills such as how to budget money, find an apartment and prevent pregnancy.

It also matches the teen-agers with adult mentors who stay in contact with the youths even after they are on their own.

Some foster children say this relationship with a caring adult is what they need most.

“What worries me is not having contact with people anymore,” Chris said. “It’s been really scary, the idea of not having anybody to protect you.”

Chris has been in foster care since her mother kicked her out of the house rather than believe her daughter’s account of having been raped by a friend of the family, Chris said.

She has run away from most of the 23 foster homes or institutions in which she has lived. “I’d run on impulse, just wanted to be out of the system.”

She will be out of the system for good on March 9, the date of her last court appearance as a ward of the state and three days before her 18th birthday.

Like most states, California cuts off support for foster children when they turn 18, although those still working toward their high school diploma may remain in foster care until they are 19. Some states, such as New York, allow former foster children who become homeless to re-enter the system until they are 21.

Despite the certainty of eventually being cast out of the system, many foster children are not ready to live on their own by the time their 18th birthday arrives, officials said.

So one of the independent living course’s main goals is to help the teen-agers prepare.

“One day they’re in foster care and one day they’re not,” said course director Terry Sisemore. “Our whole program is to prepare them so that when they’re cut off, it’s not like a total slap in the face and a total shock. They’re ready for it.”

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The federal government began paying states to provide independent-living programs in the late 1980s after a citizen advocacy group successfully sued the state of New York for not helping foster children prepare for life on their own. Many youths were left to drift into homelessness.

Ventura County launched its program in 1987, and two years later began paying Interface to operate it.

Only a handful of other California counties contract with outside agencies to offer the training, said Martha Mantecon, operations consultant for the state Department of Social Services. Interface’s involvement may help account for the program’s success, she said.

Interface helps pay for the program with $47,000 of its own funds each year, in addition to $122,000 in state money. And because the agency already provides similar social services, it can operate the independent-living program with a lower overhead than the county could achieve, county officials said.

In 1987, nearly two-thirds of the young people who left foster care in Ventura County became homeless upon their release, Interface officials said. By 1992, when there were about 650 children in foster care countywide, only one of the 22 teen-agers leaving the system had nowhere to go.

The course is offered to all 16- and 17-year-old foster children on a voluntary basis, and most of them choose to participate, county officials said. The children’s interest is boosted by the $10 they receive for each of the eight training sessions they attend and by the footlocker of matching tableware and other household goods they receive once they have both completed the course and graduated from high school.

As in other counties, the Ventura County independent-living program focuses on basic skills such as how to read a bus schedule and how to choose a roommate.

But the local course is unusual in the amount of attention paid to each youth, Mantecon said.

After completing the eight-week course, each young person meets weekly with a volunteer adult mentor or an Interface social worker who acts as the child’s guide and support.

Even with that support, the teen-agers face challenges.

To make it on their own, they have to start out with some money. And to get money, they have to work.

So at the same time that foster children are working to finish high school, they are encouraged to get jobs and save. “They have to save money,” Sisemore said. “If they don’t save money, then there’s very little we can do for them.”

Although most foster children in the county manage to avoid homelessness in the months immediately following their release from foster care, many face hard times.

Claudia Mena, 19, has been out of foster care for almost two years, but she is only now tasting independence.

Pregnant at the time that she left the foster care system, she moved first to a maternity home. After the baby was born, she and her boyfriend and their baby lived for nine months with her boyfriend’s parents.

Last month the couple and their infant daughter moved into a small apartment above a grocery store in downtown Ventura, for which they pay $625 a month.

Mena attends Ventura College, and she and her boyfriend both work. But, she said, “we’re, like, barely scraping by.”

Besides financial difficulties, the biggest problem facing former foster children is loneliness, Sisemore said. “The thing they’re most afraid of is being alone in the world. We have kids who go back to live with their parents, even though they’ve been abused.”

The county’s independent-living program officially arranges for mentors or social workers to meet with former foster children for six months after the young adults leave the system. But some of the mentors and social workers unofficially continue the relationship beyond that.

Sisemore served as Mena’s labor coach when the teen-ager gave birth, and the two still meet every few weeks.

“She knows everything about me,” Mena said. “I can tell her what’s going on.”

For some foster children, the transition to living independently is easier than for others.

Gregg, a 17-year-old who lives in a group home in Simi Valley and attends Simi Valley High School, was put in foster care when he was 15, after he and friends got into trouble stealing cars for joy rides.

Although he said the strict atmosphere in the group home has helped him straighten out, Gregg is anticipating rather than dreading his release from foster care when he turns 18 in September.

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And he said he has gained confidence from the independent-living program, where he learned about the many resources--from unemployment agencies to counselors--that he can approach for help when he is out of the foster care system.

“It’s just time for me to go on my own,” he said. “All my life I’ve been under someone else’s authority--someone else telling me where to go or what to do or how to do it. I finally get to make my own decisions and see if I can do it.”

Michelle Franck was also in foster care for a relatively short period, from age 15 to 18.

Taken away from her family after she was repeatedly abused physically by her father and brother, Franck said she never had any desire to go home again.

Now 19, she works part time as an accounting clerk for a Moorpark company and attends Moorpark College, where she is studying child psychology.

Like Mena, Franck keeps in touch with Sisemore for support.

Becoming independent and surviving on one’s own is not easy, even for a young people who grow up in families rather than in the foster care system, Franck said.

“The transition’s going to be hard for anyone,” she said. “It’s going to be harder for us because we’re alone, really. Instead of foster care, we’re alone.”