Agency Gives Foster Youths Lessons on Surviving : Education: When they reach 18, these youngsters are on their own. Interface Children, Family Services is teaching them how to fend for themselves.

Kicked out of foster homes by law on their 18th birthdays, Ventura County’s former foster children will soon get more help in facing instant adulthood.

Until recently, foster children were thrust out on their own at 18 with no training or support beyond what they had learned in a county-funded living skills class taught by staff at Interface Children, Family Services.

By mid-August, though, Interface plans to convert McAvoy House, its Camarillo shelter for abused children, into a transitional group home to teach foster boys age 17 and 18 how to fend for themselves.

“We’ll be getting older youngsters who have almost no chance of reunification with their families,” said Terry Miller, executive director of Interface. “They’re looking at being virtually on their own” once they leave the six-bed home, which will augment privately run transition homes already serving foster girls, she said.

McAvoy House is just one of a series of projects and plans that the agency hopes will smooth out the traditionally rough ride foster children face going into adulthood.

Others include:

* A fledgling, county-run scholarship program for foster children called Project TEACH (Training and Education for the Achievement of CHildren).

* First apartments for foster youths. In coming weeks, Interface hopes that the state Department of Social Services will choose it to run a pilot project offering free transitional apartments to foster youths who are about to “age out” of the system.

* Rent subsidies. Interface has applied for federal grant money that would pay the security deposits and first three months of rent on first apartments for former foster youths age 18 to 21.

Emancipation is a sudden, merciless challenge for the two to three dozen foster children in Ventura County who turn 18 each year.

It falls hard on the barely matured backs of youths who are already fighting personal demons--memories of the physical abuse, incest or drug abuse that ripped them from their families in the first place.

Good jobs that pay the rent await many foster youths who learn quickly how to play the tricky game of adulthood. But without support and encouragement, others fumble the heavy demands of independence and land in low-paying jobs, homeless shelters--even jail.

Foster children and parents say they need all the help they can get.

“It’s such a fast-paced learning process because most of these kids don’t have the luxury of slowly weaning themselves from their parents,” said Randy Ellis, a foster father.

His foster daughter, Cecilia, will be going to Cal State Northridge this fall on a $1,500 scholarship from Project TEACH.

Cecilia said she is glad for the help, but as for growing up on her own, “it sucks.”

“I have to pay for my own insurance. I have to pay for my own clothes, whereas I see other kids out there, and Mommy and Daddy do everything for them,” said Cecilia, identified only by first name because she is a dependent of the county. “And I think, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ ”

She vowed to make the most of her scholarship.

“I know what it’s like not to have money,” Cecilia said. “I’m going to make something of myself because I don’t want to live like this ever again.”

Chris Matthews, 19, said he thought that independence would be easy once he was emancipated and employed.

But the Oxnard youth ran up against the staggering cost of rent and security deposits for a first apartment.

Then he lost his eight-month busboy gig at a local eatery last winter after one backbreaking solo shift left him so frustrated that he punched a restroom door, broke his hand and missed two days of work.

And his grandmother--who raised him, but had to turn him over to foster care four years ago because of a heart condition--is demanding rent now that he is home again.

His summer job search has been long, hot, hard and fruitless. And he wishes that he had paid more attention in the independent living skills classes.

“I knew it was coming and I had a little bit of time to prepare, but I really wasn’t trying to listen to what people were telling me,” he said. “Before I knew it, I was out.”

Living on disability benefits, his grandmother, Gennell Smith, said she and her husband need Chris to pull his weight. He is working hard at job-hunting, she said, and she is proud that he has made it this far.

“But one day I’ll be dead and gone,” Smith said. “And he’ll have to get his own place, and he’ll have to pay his light bill. Mom taught (our family) that from the start.”

Struggling to fix a flat on a battered bicycle that is his only transportation for job interviews, Chris echoed Cecilia’s sentiments.

“The best thing I’ve learned is to endure,” he said. “You’re going to be struggling, but that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Michelle Franck said she believes that foster youths should rely on their own planning and strength to survive like she has--not on free apartments and subsidized rent.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea, don’t get me wrong,” she said of Interface’s housing plans. “But that’s still like welfare. There’s so many problems with the system that they need to fix, like getting better foster parents to help them prepare (for adulthood). . . . If anything, they need to focus the kids more on the long-term, with plans for college.”

Franck had something of a head start on self-sufficiency, having worked since age 12 or 13 to bolster her family’s income. She was physically abused by her father, she said, but it was a beating by her older brother when she was 16 that finally turned neighbors’ complaints into a court order for foster care.

Then came a dizzying succession of nine foster homes in two years, she said--including one with an alcoholic foster father--that persuaded her to concentrate on her own future and graduate in 1992 from Royal High School in Simi Valley.

Now 20, Franck has a bookkeeping job and her own rented room in a Moorpark condominium.

And she has every intention of starting her college studies in child psychology next month on a slew of scholarships--including $2,500 from Project TEACH--at Sonoma State University in Northern California.

Running her own life, Franck said, is “kind of in your face. You’re either going to save money, get an apartment, get insurance for yourself and go on to college, or you’re going to be working in a McDonald’s.”

Not everyone has as much grit as Franck, though, said Richard Shaw, who helps oversee court-ordered placement of foster children.

“I’d say it’s highly unusual for somebody to be as focused as she is,” said Shaw, administrative support coordinator at the county division of children’s protective services.

“Sometimes there are kids who come out of our system who are survivors and do well regardless,” he said, but some have been left damaged by their personal trauma and are not prepared to do it alone.

“There’s a greater chance that they would succeed with those programs,” Shaw said of McAvoy House, Project TEACH, and the hoped-for rent subsidies and state-funded transition apartments.

“I think this little extra helping hand could really go a long way to help these kids start out with some feeling of success and not this (situation) where suddenly they’re out on the street with a ‘What am I gonna do now?’ kind of feeling.”