Throwaway kids

Throwaway kids

Thousands of area foster children leave county care for a dangerous
and desperate life on the streets

By Joe Piasecki

Photo by Joe Piasecki

Except for the tape holding his ripped black boots together and a
needle wound on his right arm that looks red and infected, you
wouldn’t know Brian Chytka is in deep trouble.

The 22-year-old is surrounded by those he calls family. There’s a
street-smart skater, a young punk-rocker in jeans who laughs like
all of this is somehow funny, and a girl with military-short hair and
a lip ring who looks healthy but knows she will die a heroin addict.
She won’t eat the food I offer her because she feels sick from going a
day without a fix. Heroin is also Chytka’s drug of choice. It was
his dad’s, too.

Like thousands of former Los Angeles County foster youth who have left
state care homeless, penniless, ready-made targets for drug
dealers and sexual predators, Chytka lives wild on the streets.
Anonymous victims of broken homes and of tragic neglect as wards
of our overtaxed and impersonal foster care bureaucracy, they have
become LA’s throwaway kids.

Every day in Hollywood, youth who have recently become homeless visit
My Friend’s Place, one of only a few charities offering drug
and psychological counseling, showers, food, even haircuts to people
under 25. It was near here that I found Chytka, one of only a
few young people actually willing to tell their stories, and his
friends carrying their food around in a plastic bag one afternoon in
May.

Half of the kids who go to My Friend’s Place have been in foster care
— more than 700, according to David Brinkman, the center’s
executive director. All too commonly, he said, “Foster parents drop
their kids off at our door into homelessness.”

Brinkman’s figures for those troubled youth who find their way to
Hollywood are actually deceivingly low when it comes to telling the
fates of former youth countywide, according to the Children’s Law
Center of Los Angeles. The group says nearly one-third of foster
youth — and there are more than 25,000 of them right now, according to
the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) —
become homeless within two years of leaving the system. Another group,
the Covenant House of California, guesses that as many
as half of local foster youth become homeless in six months.

LA is not alone in failing to keep its children from a life on the
streets at 18. Nationwide, according to foster youth advocates Casey
Family Programs, as many as half of former foster youth will become
homeless sometime after leaving care. If nothing changes,
75,000 American kids will become homeless after leaving foster care
over the next 15 years, Casey President William Bell warned
members of the state Assembly last month.

Those now living on the streets and others who, thanks to a few
dedicated people inside and outside the system working on their
behalf, are beating the odds and putting their once-broken lives back
together have troubling stories to share. Many were abused at
home, bounced in and out of foster homes, struggled in school, made
few if any lasting relationships and learned little about caring
for themselves.

JJ, who turns 21 in June, spent the past three years sleeping under
freeway bridges, in abandoned homes and in Pasadena’s
Central Park. She became homeless at 18 when, tired of being moved
from group home to group home, she successfully fought to
be emancipated from the system.

“Being out on the street, not knowing what I was going to see on the
next corner, having people literally push a crack pipe in my face —
I couldn’t handle it,” said JJ, who entered foster care after using
drugs and suffering sexual abuse at home.

JJ and the other youth in this story are identified only by their
first names because they are either under 18 or fear that people
knowing
their pasts would affect their ability to find mainstream jobs and
housing. Chytka demanded that his name be used.

Twenty-year-old Jonathan isn’t homeless, but his eligibility for free
county-sponsored housing in Burbank runs out in a month, and so
far he’s got nowhere to go. In and out of 15 different foster homes
since he was 5, including one in which his foster parent didn’t speak
English, Jonathan says no one noticed he couldn’t read until high
school.

According to Casey Family Programs, 46 percent of American foster
children leave the system without a high school diploma.

“The state has a long way to go before it can be declared a good
parent to kids in our foster care system,” said Assemblywoman
Karen Bass, a Los Angeles Democrat who chairs the Assembly’s Select
Committee on Foster Care. Pushing a package of
legislation that would extend housing, health care and other benefits
to foster youth until they are as old as 24, the committee is
hoping to go a long way very quickly.
800 down — 9,200 to go

That society has somehow failed the kids in its care who grow up to be
homeless is clear. Finding out why this is happening and,
more importantly, how to fix it takes some commitment.

Money trickles down from Washington, but comes with restrictions.
States make rules, too, and also disburse funds to counties.
Counties, in order to deliver housing, health, education and other
services to current and former foster youth and administrate these
funds, have set up complex bureaucracies of departments within
departments. They, in turn, subcontract to social services nonprofits,
which, of course, have to meet government requirements.

And then there are the kids themselves — 90,000 in California alone,
each one with a different story and a different set of needs.

LA County’s foster care program is not only the largest in the United
States, it’s larger than the programs managed by many states.
But here there are fewer than 800 beds available for kids leaving
foster care with nowhere to go, and all but 244 of those are operated
by local nonprofits that receive some of these funds, according to
DCFS Emancipation Services Director Rhelda Shabazz.

“We probably need about 10,000 beds. That would guarantee every youth
who wanted it could have one,” said Shabazz.

The problem? Not enough money, she said.

Of the $18 million in federal funds her department received this year,
only 30 percent, roughly $5.4 million, can be spent on temporary
“transitional” housing and rental assistance for kids growing up and
leaving the system.

The rest goes toward education grants and programs that teach kids to
drive, cook for themselves or understand credit and banking
practices. County social services workers called independent living
coordinators work with foster youth to plan services delivery
several years before emancipation, and services remain available to
kids until they turn 21, even when they leave the system
voluntarily and come back later for help, said Shabazz.

But when it comes to housing, there are other resources available.

This year, said state Department of Social Services spokesman Michael
Westin, $8.1 million in state funding is available to counties
that will provide matching funds to expand transitional housing
programs. Like most other counties, LA has not put up matching funds.

Removing that requirement is just one of several goals of the Assembly
Select Committee on Foster Care. A package of legislation
currently wending its way through the Legislature specifically targets
keeping foster youth off the streets when they leave the system.
The bills have found support from both parties and Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger.

The bills would make independent living services programs mandatory
for all foster youth and give them the option to stay in the
system until they turn 21. Other services, like transitional housing
and education grants, would remain an option to emancipated foster
youth for an additional three years, until they turn 24. To better
supervise services delivery, the bills would establish a state Child
Welfare Council and Undersecretary of Foster Care.

“We definitely need to make some improvements with the population of
youth emancipating out of care,” said Bass. “The reality is
kids in all areas of the world are not ready to be financially
independent at 18.”

For Pasadena Democratic Assemblywoman Carol Liu, also a member of the
task force, the time to act is now.

“It’s important we try to resolve these problems upfront while we
still have control over these kids. It’s a no-brainer to try to
provide for
these kids. Otherwise they wind up in our system being incarcerated or
homeless,” said Liu, who several years ago authored the
Foster Care Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all foster youth the
right to obtain services, file complaints and have access to attorneys
and the courts.

According to the Children’s Law Center, 20 percent of ex-foster youth
in the United States will serve time behind bars within two years
of leaving care.

“It’s a system that does need looking at, because if we don’t put the
money upfront, you’re going to pay for it someplace down the
line. We don’t want to waste more lives with something we certainly
can fix,” she said. Big plans

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, a push to create more transitional housing
and other services for youth is underway as part of the Bring
LA Home campaign, the $100-million plan to end homelessness in the
county that was designed by a blue-ribbon panel of
community leaders.

Released in April, the plan calls for specific services and new
housing for homeless youth, and has convened a task force to deliver
that plan in July.

“We need a comprehensive, countywide approach for service planning and
delivery for youth,” reads the report, which cites a study
in the late 1990s that found more than 60 percent of Hollywood street
youth had a history of foster care.

Housing these kids, said Brinkman, is the essential first step in
really helping them and should be a starting point for services.

“When you have a youth you’ve been working with for eight hours … and
put them on the streets at night full of pedophiles and
gang-bangers and pimps looking to take advantage of this population,
the next time you see them they’re back in crisis again,” he
said.

Natalie Profant Komuro, director of policy and planning for the Los
Angeles Homeless Services Authority, helped craft the Bring LA
Home report and is optimistic that change is coming — despite facing a
lack of funding handicapping her understaffed department.

“What I think is very exciting about the timing of this is the
unprecedented resources available to help,” she said.

Much of those resources come from nonprofits. Last year in Pasadena,
the Hillsides center for troubled youth used grant money to
purchase an apartment building that now houses 28 emancipated foster
youth who have entered the system as victims of abuse.

The Hillsides Youth Moving On facility is the first affordable housing
project of its kind in LA County and is unique in that it’s not just
for
youth. Many of the apartments in the complex are rented at market rate
in order to fund the down payment for a second building.

Jeanette Mann, a member of the Pasadena City College Board of Trustees
and a parishioner at All Saints Church in Pasadena, runs
a program out of the church that sends donations and volunteers to
organizations including My Friend’s Place, Hillsides and the Old
Pasadena-based Sycamores, which helps foster youth get adopted or find
permanent and loving foster homes that are monitored
by the agency. They also take in foster youth who, for whatever
reason, run away or get kicked out of group homes for aggressive or
criminal behavior and would otherwise end up in juvenile detention.

“Lots of groups and agencies are doing good work, but they need
volunteers, so we recruit volunteers,” said Mann of All Saints’
Foster Care Project, which boasts a database of some 380 volunteers.
Many donate to the project’s Birthday Club, which sends
cards and presents to hundreds of foster kids whose birthdays would
otherwise go unmarked.

But it wasn’t too long ago that nonprofit resources weren’t as
plentiful, and federal funding restrictions were so tight that local
governments had their hands tied when it came to spending on youth
aging out of foster care. That’s when Patricia Curry, who runs a
Pasadena insurance business and has served on the Los Angeles County
Commission for Children and Families for more than a
decade, started her youth advocacy. In the early ‘90s, foster youth
weren’t on anybody’s radar, she explained.

“People just really weren’t aware, the amount of [independent living
services] dollars was very small, and there was no transitional
housing. The kids would emancipate with a big old sack on their back,
pick up a Hefty bag and just walk out onto the streets,” she
said.

Since that time, awareness has increased, so much that a group from
the nonprofit community has formed Pasadena Transitional
Partners to discuss foster care issues and untangle the web of
government resources for kids who come into their care.

One of the group’s members, Susan Abignale of Casey Family Programs,
helps run a drop-in resource center on Green Street, one
of nine such centers that have opened in the county over the past
decade.

Casey’s Alumni Center in Pasadena focuses on finding housing,
education and employment for kids, and often helps them reconnect
with the foster care system to receive any benefits for which they
might be eligible.

Meanwhile, the Mental Health Services Act (2004’s Proposition 63) has
allowed county officials to allocate some $14 million to foster
care and transitional housing programs, money that Curry said will
soon allow service workers to treat and house more street youth
with mental health needs.

While kids fall to the street for a variety of reasons, many are
traumatized by horrific acts of abuse and are forced to deal with
untreated medical problems.

As for the homeless plan, “it is what it is,” said Komura, “but there
isn’t any money now saying we can launch this campaign.”

What’s needed, she said, is a locally driven plan not just to house
kids, but to use those resources to bring more stability into their
lives to allow them to find their feet. ‘A failure of the state’

Jonathan, the 20-year-old whose time in transitional housing is about
to run out, said instability is the biggest hurdle he’s faced as a
foster child.

“Right after my high school graduation was pretty much the day I got
kicked out of my foster home. The guy I was living with didn’t
want me there since they were going to stop paying him. Luckily the
social worker was able to find me a place after a couple of days,”
he said.

Now an intern at the Casey Alumni Center in Pasadena, Jonathan counts
himself lucky to have a job and a high school diploma,
though he’s had to put college on hold to sort out the basics of his
life, like paying for food, transportation and a new place to stay.

Casey Community Programs Supervisor Marvin Carter has found that
finding stability, more so than more resources, is the key to
success after foster care.

“When you get that first apartment, that first job, the challenge is
not getting it, it’s keeping it,” said Carter of those he works with.
“If I had
to generalize, the problem when you talk about transition-age youth is
keeping things. It runs parallel to their overall life, moving from
place to place. Going to work on time, calling in when you’re not
feeling well, the things that show we’re taking responsibility we take
for granted because we’ve had it ingrained in us since we were kids. I
don’t know if they didn’t have it, but it’s the stability and
consistency of [the message], having a consistent person giving that
message.”

And even if there were enough of it for everybody in Jonathan’s shoes,
transitional housing is still only an option for two years, and
you can only learn so much about caring for yourself in a
county-funded independent living classroom.

For whatever reason, many foster youth aren’t benefiting from the
federally funded life-skills independent living programs that go
along with it, according to Human Rights Watch’s Los Angeles Office,
which recently conducted a study of homeless foster children in
San Francisco and Hollywood.

“What they’re telling me is that they aren’t getting the preparation
and support they need to enter into adulthood, regardless of what
part of the state they’re from or when they left the system,” said
Human Rights Watch Children’s Advocate Elizabeth Calvin, who
presented a preliminary report to the Assembly Select Committee of
Foster Care on May 8.

In her report, Calvin details complaints by several youth that group
homes ironically went too far in treating them like a child before
they were forced to leave. One said he wasn’t allowed to ride the bus
or get a job. Another said she had to wait to take a class on
how to do such normal things. Others told Calvin they had no idea
medical coverage, school tuition assistance and transitional
housing were even available, or that they left transitional housing to
become homeless.

“They’re really describing experiences of not having been given basic
tools on how to be an adult, very basic things like how to
cook, budget money, rent an apartment, protect themselves from people
trying to take advantage of them,” said Calvin. “From the
perspective of Human Rights Watch, this is a failure of the state
because these children are dependent on the state for more than just
food and shelter; they’re dependent for their development.” ‘And you
can quote me’

Actually, said Shabazz, the state is doing much to make sure kids
don’t fall through the cracks. Sometimes the hard part is getting the
kids on board.

“Unfortunately, it seems there are youth that have not received
services, but I believe that’s the exception, not the rule. Again,
it’s
voluntary. Youth are offered services and many of them choose to take
them,” she said. “We’re doing a lot of outreach.”

County officials are currently sponsoring a survey of foster youth and
are holding discussion-based forums to see what kids really
think about what’s available to them. In order to encourage more
foster youth to participate, they’re offering a $50 gift card to those
who fill one out.

And some foster youth really excel in these programs. More than 100
gathered downtown last week at the Walt Disney Concert Hall
to celebrate not only their high school graduation but also their
scholarships for college.

“Sometimes people have the wrong impression about who foster kids are
and what it means to be in the foster care system. People
think the kids have done something, but they’re there by circumstance
and can achieve as much as any other kid,” said Polly
Williams, president of United Friends of the Children.

United Friends, founded in 1979 by Nancy Riordan, wife of former LA
Mayor Dick Riordan, finds scholarships for foster youth in its
program, offers an array of life-skills training and operates its own
transitional housing program.

Fewer than one in five foster youth will go to college, and many don’t
graduate, said Williams. Patrice, a former foster child who
worked with United Friends and graduated from UC Berkeley earlier this
year, is one of those proud few. Separated from her siblings
at a young age, she hopes to find them some day to offer support.

“Mentors in my life were guiding me and pushing me along,” said
Patrice. “Counselors, about anything about life … that’s one of the
things foster kids need and what helped me get through this.”

All of this, however, seems terribly unimportant to a group of a
half-dozen African-American current and former foster youth who
visited My Friend’s Place just a few weeks ago. In that group were
sisters Danielle, 17, and Chan’tell, 15, who said they resent being
placed in foster care and just want to be left alone.

“Right now I’m kind of AWOL,” said Danielle, originally from Baldwin
Hills. “I ran away because they made me mad. They took me to
some old lady’s house. I didn’t know her.

“If a 17-year-old girl says she wants to be free, you should let her
go, because if you keep trying to take her back to a foster care
she’s gonna leave. If I can’t be with my family, I’d rather be alone.
I don’t want to be with somebody else trying to tell me what to do,
and they’re not my family,” said Danielle, who plans to get a job when
she turns 18 so she can adopt her younger sister.

Taking a cue from Danielle, Chan’tell explains that she’s all about
family and the system is not; that the freedom of the streets is more
appealing than foster care because the people she cares about are
here.

“They just need to leave us be because we’re all family and we don’t
want to be split up, and there’s no way you can split up family,
anyway,” she said. “Honestly, out here we take care of each other
better than any foster parent could take care of us.”

Brinkman explained that three out of five kids My Friend’s Place
serves have what the social services community has come to call
street families. These six boys and girls as well as Chytka’s group
are street families, made up of youth in similar circumstances who
tend to trust only each other.

And why not be wary, especially about a system as complex as each
child is unique?

“It’s hard to know how much of it is normal adolescent rebellion
compounded with a complicated history and issues of abuse and
neglect. It’s never just one reason,” said Lesley Heimov, policy
director for the Monterey Park-based Children’s Law Center, a
nonprofit legal advocacy group appointed by the Los Angeles Superior
Court to represent most youth in the foster care system.

Some, like Danielle, ditch the system because they no longer trust it,
most likely from having bad experiences or inadequate care,
said Heimov.

“I distinctly remember a foster home where the people in the house did
more drugs than the people in the house that I came from, and
that’s including the foster kids,” said Pasadena’s JJ of her Tarzana
foster home five years ago.

Others, like Chytka, just haven’t been given the tools to keep
themselves out of trouble. And despite the positive changes that have
occurred in preparing foster youth for adulthood, change has been so
recent that the generation leaving care now hasn’t been
entirely caught up.

“The biggest challenge is establishing rapport as adults,” said
Brinkman of working with street youth at My Friend’s Place.
“Constantly they have been failed by the adults in their lives, and
they are very wary of adults, period.”

As if to illustrate his point, Danielle asked me to send a message to
the Department of Children and Family Services: “Let the foster
care system know that they can kiss my black ass — and you can quote
me on that.”
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