Jennifer Rodriguez left her paranoid schizophrenic mother, became homeless at 10 years old and managed to skirt the child welfare system for two years. At 12, after being robbed at gunpoint, she called her social worker and spent the next six years in various group homes. By the time she was 18, she'd had it with the system. She packed all of her things into a plastic garbage bag, left her last placement and set up camp behind a 7-Eleven dumpster for the next two months.

I visited Rodriguez last week in the downtown offices of the Youth Law Center, where she's now an attorney, working to improve California's foster care system. But with AB 12 (legislation that would extend foster care services to age 21) finally sitting on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk awaiting an autograph, the last thing Rodriguez wants is for people to think that her professional outcome is typical for foster kids.

"I'm still in disbelief about where I landed," she said. "There are services out there, but all those services are impacted. I got here by luck."

Sadly, luck is a key for thousands of California foster kids. When it comes to building public support for policy and resources for children, the issues of foster youth tend not to grab the kind of headlines we see whenever a child is abducted by a random stranger and murdered.

Rodriguez told me that she only got off the street after applying to Job Corps, an education and training program for young people. The program, she said, never should have accepted her, based on factors related to her record, but she'd been through so many placements while coming up in the system that the program's administrators simply gave up checking her background and let her in.

She also said the supply of job and housing programs for foster youth falls well short of the demand and that not all are designed to accommodate the very specific needs and circumstances of individual kids. AB 12, she believes, could help change that.

"Job Corps, for example, is an institutional setting," she said. "AB 12 allows young people to make choices about living with roommates, transitional housing, with a relative. And if the relationship with that relative is tenuous, they still have back-up support."

AB 12 takes advantage of federal matching funds that would drastically reduce state spending on California's Kinship Guardianship Assistance Program (KinGAP), which provides financial support to families who assume legal guardianship for their related foster children. Under AB 12, the KinGAP savings would then be reinvested in transitional support, such as housing and education, for the 4,500 foster youth who age out of the system annually. Equally important, it would extend case management services to kids who have grown up in institutions or foster homes, many of whom strike out on their own at 18 and struggle with drugs, violence, homelessness, mental health issues and unemployment. For those kids, AB 12 would provide a support system to which they could return.

AB 12 addresses the kind of issues that generate a lot of concern and action from foster youth and those who work to help them, but not much public profile or citizen outrage. And while the bill has enjoyed strong bi-partisan support, it's made its way to the governor's desk largely on the backs of activists and child welfare professionals--and foster kids willing to self-advocate.

"Foster kids are a group that few seem to care about," Rodriguez told me. "Not until a kid dies in foster care."

The day after my chat with Rodriguez, Schwarzenegger signed Chelsea's Law, a bill named for 17-year-old Chelsea King, who, along with 14-year-old Amber Dubois, was murdered by registered sex offender John Gardner. The new law allows the state's "worst" sex offenders to be, in some cases, incarcerated for life.

News of the signing seemed to highlight Rodriguez's point that most people don't get up in arms and force pro-child/anti-crime legislation unless it's attached to the photograph of a dead child.

While the governor has not publically taken a position on AB 12, we can be certain about one thing: random child murders have led to heaps of legislation over the years: Megan's Law, Jessica's Law, Amber Alerts and the like. When Richard Allen Davis (a wanted parole violator) kidnapped and strangled 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993, the Petaluma victim's suddenly ubiquitous likeness provided the juice that helped put three-strikes sentencing into California law books.

After the governor signed the Chelsea King bill Thursday, I received messages from friends and colleagues, asking if I was thrilled about the new law.

"Mixed feelings," I told them. I have more confidence in the incarceration component than the sex offender treatment options that were added to the bill along the way. But had anyone asked, I would have added that locking up dangerous predators for life is a good thing, and that the bill, in that regard, is a step in the right direction; incarceration provides undeniable prevention value. Another way to promote child safety and wellbeing, however, is to protect and nurture our kids so ruthlessly that they never become the kinds of adults we need to keep in cages, like the one who killed Chelsea King. That we do by giving abused and neglected kids the tools and support they need to heal.

AB 12 is predicated on the idea that older foster youth are not yet fully formed adults, but kids still healing from various traumas. They're at a crossroads, and it behooves us to meet them there. The bill wasn't born out of a single heinous crime, but it could help prevent others and give foster kids the chance for a better life.

We'll know by September 30 whether the governor sees that, too.