For Foster Care Teens, Graduation is No Celebration

When kids 'age out' of foster care, they often have nowhere to go
By: Trey Bundy

It’s emancipation season for California’s foster kids. While most 18-year-olds are rejoicing over their high school graduation, many kids “aging out” of the child welfare system hardly get a moment to celebrate before facing tough choices about how and where they’re going to live.

Every year more than 100 San Francisco foster kids are released from care when they turn 18 or finish school, and the numbers have been especially high recently as the large wave of kids who entered the system during the crack epidemic of the late 1980s ages out.

These kids lose much of their support system just in time to face the daunting challenges of the adult world. At best, their lives to this point have been turbulent. On average they’ve bounced through five or so different placements before leaving the system, and we can bet they don’t wake up on their 18th birthdays to a singing telegram and a gift-wrapped set of independent living skills. It’s no secret that foster youth have high rates of homelessness, substance abuse, unwanted pregnancy and criminal activity.

Emancipation fever is all over Sacramento, where lawmakers are deciding whether to buy more time for older foster youth on a permanent basis. The state Senate judiciary committee this week passed AB 12, which is designed to extend foster care services through age 21. The bill still has to go through appropriations and a vote on the Senate floor.

It seemed like wherever I turned last week, emancipation was on someone’s lips.

I called Maya Durrett, program director at the San Francisco CASA Program, just to find out what her shop is up to lately. CASAs (court-appointed special advocates) mentor foster children and advocate for them in court.

“Well, it’s emancipation season,” she said.

Durrett told me housing is a huge issue for transitioning foster youth (“A lot of our kids go and live with relatives the court has forbidden them to live with for the last 10 or 15 years”), as is accessing employment opportunities, mental health services, school, substance abuse treatment and medical care.

“Bureaucracy is hard to navigate,” Durrett said, “especially when you might have some animosity toward it because it’s always been in your life and probably didn’t do a very good job raising you.”

Some foster youth can’t wait to be emancipated when they turn 18, and they start rejecting services, which Durrett said is natural at that age.

“They feel like they’ve been bossed around and they want people to stop telling them what to do,” she said.

The problem is that many of them come back six to 24 months later, asking for help. Durrett’s colleague Erika Dirkse gave an example.

A year ago, she said, one of her clients (we’ll call him Michael) was emancipated on his 18th birthday and wanted nothing more to do with the system, including therapy for mental health issues. He soon became homeless, used drugs to self-medicate and had a run-in with police. Over the winter he got back in touch with his CASA, who has helped him start a new paper trail and re-engage with community-based services. Michael is currently earning credits toward his high school diploma, has made mental health appointments, is living temporarily with a relative and is working to get into transitional housing.

While Michael is showing measurable improvement, Dirkse said his emancipation status means there’s no coordinated case-management strategy to support him. In essence, there’s no coming back to the system.

“We’re not receiving any funding or help with these kids,” she said. “We just do it because they need help.”

Both Durrett and Dirkse told me that a lack of resources at the San Francisco Human Services Agency means too many kids are squeezed out of the system before they’re ready to be on their own.

Next, I got a call back from Trent Rhorer, executive director of the Human Services Agency. He acknowledged the prevalence of unwanted outcomes for foster youth, and said he supports a move that's happening system-wide toward family reunification instead of emancipation. Still, he said, kids in San Francisco don’t leave foster care without plans for housing, education, employment and health care. He also said that money doesn't determine which kids are ready to leave the system.

“Our child welfare workers don’t have, nor should they have, an intricate understanding of our $700 million budget,” he said. “We shouldn’t have fiscal factors driving social-work decisions.”

Still, Dirkse doesn’t believe it works that way, particularly for kids who might not think they need help until they’ve been out in the world for a while.

“If a kid says, ‘leave me alone,’ are you going to keep them on the books?” she said. “To say that financial considerations aren’t a part of the issue of emancipating youth writ large is a fallacy.”

Advocates and agencies around the state have been organizing to make sure AB 12 becomes law. Funding and implementation will be tough issues, but Dirkse said the bill holds crucial potential for young people like Michael.

“It could allow them to test the waters of independent living, for which most of them are woefully unprepared,” she said, adding that foster youth need an opportunity to strike out on their own, and possibly fail, but still have a safety net available to them. “If the state is their parent, it’s the least the state can do for them.”