Kicking kids out of foster care: a federal program to help young people falls short.(TO THE POINT)

EACH YEAR APPROXIMATELY 20,000 teenagers leave the child welfare system. They do so via emancipation, which simply means that they have reached the state's age of adulthood and are being cut off from foster care with no further aid. Most teenagers in this situation have spent an average of two and a half years in foster care living with relatives or foster parents or in group homes. Since half of all foster children are kids of color, they are also overrepresented among those who are kicked out of the system. Overnight, they are expected to support themselves and live as adults, covering their own costs for housing, food, transportation and other basic necessities.

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Eighteen-year-old Domonica is one of these young people. She was placed in foster care at birth because of her mother's drug addiction, and over the course of her short life, she has lived in 12 foster homes and two group homes in Schenectady County, New York. At the age of 15, while living in a group home, Domonica gave birth to a little girl who is now 3 years old. Unlike most foster youth, Domonica will be staying in foster care until she turns 21. In New York state, foster youth can remain in care until this age, but in most states, young people are forced out of foster care when they graduate from high school or turn 18. By the age of 18, many foster youth are also weary of the system, and they sign themselves out, often times at their own peril. Very few foster kids leave the child welfare system with a high school diploma, and even fewer attend college. Applying to college, meeting scholarship deadlines, writing essays and getting a resume in order are all stressful enough for high school students living in their own homes.

Domonica knows this firsthand. "How are foster youth supposed to stay on top of this when in the back of their head, they know they'll be discharged at age 18?" she wonders. She will be attending college this fall and attributes this to her own determination--her caseworkers didn't offer much encouragement. "They just ignored it," she says. "They didn't even ask me what I wanted. It was all my decision." Domonica and her daughter live today with a foster mother who is supportive, but she fears that when she turns 21 and is discharged from foster care, she won't be able to make ends meet.

The federal government makes an effort to prepare young people for leaving foster care. The program, Independent Living Skills, is intended to provide foster youth with adult living skills beginning at the age of 16 until the age of 18 (21 in some states). The program, which was started in 1985 and is currently funded at $140 million annually, looks workable on the surface, but there are two major problems.

First, the vast majority of foster children are cut off from government aid at the age of 18 and are suddenly expected to furnish themselves with housing, employment, transportation and job skills--vital training that the program does not always address. The program allows states to extend Medicaid eligibility until the age of 21 and has made some increases in housing resources. These have not been clearly defined and so implementation falls short. And it does ...