The San Francisco Chronicle had a sobering piece this week about kids who turn 18 in foster care and "age out" of the system:
"The minute they turn 18, the funding ends," said Maj. George Rocheleau of the Salvation Army. "Unless the foster family has personal funds, the child has to leave."
The numbers for those turned-away kids are staggering. A 2007 study by the Pew Charitable Trust found that the number of kids aging out each year kids has grown by 41 percent since 1998 - to roughly 20,000 annually across the country. One in 5 will become homeless, a third have no high school diploma, and nearly half of the young women who had been in foster care become pregnant at least once by age 19.
When I started working for CPS in the early 1990's, the emphasis was all on family preservation - keep the kids with their parents, even when things are clearly falling apart. And that's still the best answer, when it works. When the parents can be found, when they're able to provide a minimal level of care, with the kids eating regularly and getting medical treatment.
When family preservation doesn't work, we have to put the kids through the trauma of being removed. This is on top of whatever trauma they've been exposed to in the home: neglect, domestic violence, parental substance abuse. (And more substance abuse. The overwhelming majority of my cases have involved substance abuse.) When a parent dumps a toddler at the park with a stranger and disappears, inevitably there's the question: at what point before this should we have stepped in?
Over the last few years, the pendulum has swung away from family preservation, and the new watchword is "permanency." Here in California, when a child is removed, the parents have from six to eighteen months to show progress on regaining custody, depending on the parent's efforts and the age of the child. If the parents had other kids removed previously, the latest child may be placed directly on a permanency track (a law designed to address, for instance, the woman who has one drug-exposed baby after another and doesn't seek treatment). If a parent can't get the child back, the next-best option is adoption, or permanent guardianship with a relative.
The ones caught in the middle are the older children. They know their parents, and usually they want to go home no matter how bad it was. They may be dealing with a variety of problems, including health issues from prenatal drug exposure, attachment disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The longer they lived with abuse and neglect, the more likely they are to be displaying uncontrollable anger, sexual acting out, etc. This can lead to a spiral where extreme behavior leads to the foster parent giving up on them, so there's another rejection and removal, which leads to more depression and anger, you see where this is going.
Until they're 18 (19, if they're on track to graduate), we can at least guarantee them a roof overhead and three meals a day. When it becomes tough to find foster placements, they may wind up in group homes. The Chronicle story is right about the staff turnover in group homes, but wrong about the reason: the pay and working conditions are terrible, and it's emotionally exhausting to have angry teenagers in your face all day. So group home workers move on to an easier job. I did. (The fact that being a CPS worker qualifies as an "easier job" is a bit alarming.)
I wish this was one of those diaries where I could point you to a wonderful bill or program that would make a big dent in the problem. But I'm just letting you know what's out there. There's a patchwork of programs that help foster teens find jobs and housing. There are a few scholarship programs for college, but as noted above, a third don't finish high school (and some of them simply run away before they age out). There are classes that teach them basics that most of us learned from our parents (how to open a checking account and so forth).
Here in California, we also do "case mining," meaning we go back through a child's records, and question the child, to see if there are important adults we can reconnect them with: a favorite teacher, a family friend, a cousin. The fathers of foster kids are often nowhere to be found (not always, of course), but sometimes the father's relatives are out there. Sometimes this search leads to a teenager getting adopted, which is the kind of small miracle that can keep you going.
We have a long way to go.