Fostering Life Skills

Every year 20,000 foster children in the United States turn 18 and are “emancipated.” It’s a cheerful euphemism for loss--of shelter, health care and their foster parents.

Federal Health and Human Services statistics show that many former foster children lack the resources and training to make much of their abrupt freedom. In Los Angeles County, for instance, fully half of the 1,000 foster children who are “aged out” of the system every year end up homeless within six months.

Legislation now pending in the Senate Finance Committee, by Sens. John Chafee (R-R.I.) and John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), gives Congress a chance to recognize what any parent raising an adolescent already knows: Yanking the whole safety net at age 18 can be a recipe for disaster.

Since 1992, Washington has allocated $70 million a year to states that want to help foster children ages 16 to 18 prepare for independent living by teaching them how to budget money, prepare for college and find a job. The modest Chafee/Rockefeller bill would double funding to $140 million a year, allow that money to be spent helping those over 18 and extend Medicaid eligibility to those ages 18 to 21.

This is not extending a welfare crutch; it’s building a bridge to independence. “Bridges to Independence” is in fact the name of a nonprofit program in Los Angeles that has successfully given older foster children the tools they need--from a sympathetic ear to job-interview counseling and apartment-hunting skills--to lead productive lives.

Chafee and Rockefeller have asked Congress to approve their bill by voice vote and send it to President Clinton this week.

Congress is scrambling to approve several higher-profile, multibillion-dollar spending bills before recessing next week. And fast-tracking the bill, which largely mirrors President Clinton’s fiscal year 2000 budget requests for foster care, means getting the approval of fervent anti-Clinton Republicans like House Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Texas). However, the bill is gaining broad support in Congress and was championed in Senate testimony last week/19 by none other than Delay. Delay explained that, as the foster father of two adolescents himself, he understands the problems of the foster children who testified before him. One “emancipated” foster child told legislators how she ended up sleeping behind McDonald’s, in laundry rooms and hospitals “because they were safe and they were warm.”

The United States can surely do better by its most vulnerable youth than a “safe, warm” laundry room to call home.