Sunday, January 31, 1999
Foster children need help becoming independent adults
BY MARK CURNUTTE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Many foster children fall hard and fall fast after leaving the child-care system at age 18.
A recent University of Wisconsin study found that by 19, about half of former foster children were unemployed, 33 percent were receiving public assistance, 25 percent of the males were incarcerated and 20 percent of females had given birth. Another study found that four in 10 of the nation's homeless are former foster children.
With the nation's foster care population rising sharply, an increase also seen in the Tristate, welfare reformers are scrambling to help those children to become independent.
One of the top national independent-living programs is run by Walnut Hills-based Lighthouse Youth Services for the Hamilton County Department of Human Services.
Lighthouse Independent Living director Mark Kroner was at the White House on Friday when first lady Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore unveiled President Clinton's budget proposal to increase funding to assist foster children through independent living programs and other initiatives.
“Most American youths don't live independently until their mid-20s,” Mr. Kroner said. “There are more 18- to 24-year-olds living at home now than at any time since the Depression. But we expect foster children to be OK on their own at 18 without any help.”
He and his staff monitor 50 foster children between 16 and 19. The teens live alone in apartments, and Lighthouse Independent Living pays the rent, utilities and pays a weekly allowance of $60, $15 of which goes into a savings account. The average foster child, studies show, has only $250 in savings at age 18.
If a landlord complains about a Lighthouse client, the teen is placed in a foster or group home.
The Lighthouse foster children also receive training that ranges from anger management to budget management.
At any one time, Mr. Kroner said, about 20 of the 50 do well, another 20 are borderline and 10 “just don't understand” the opportunity.
The logic behind independent living programs is that spending some money now can help children and save future expenditures.
And the numbers of foster children continues to grow, The Cincinnati Enquirer's Tristate Child Index has found.
The point-in-time measure of the number of foster children in eight-county Greater Cincinnati was 1,506 in 1994.
By 1996, that number was 3,171. Last year's total was 2,956, and that was without the number for Dearborn County, which had 59 foster children in 1996. The 1997 data are unavailable because of computer problems with the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration.
The number of foster children nationally has climbed from 375,000 in 1994 to 520,000 in 1998, the index shows.
Barbara Manuel, director of client services for the Hamilton County Department of Human Services, expects to see an increase in independent living programs in the next few years. State and local governments, she says, are developing rules to keep up with the Adoption and Safe Family Act of 1997.
“It says children should not languish in foster care,” Ms. Manuel said. “Independent living is part of a continuum that includes foster-to-adopt initiatives.”
Foster care experts, Mr. Kroner said, “have realized that some families can't be fixed.”
That goes for the family of James Dodson, 18, of Marathon. The Clermont County man is a senior at Live Oaks Career and Development Campus near Milford and has lived on his own for two years as part of the Lighthouse program.
A native of Norfolk, Va., Mr. Dodson was 3 when he and two sisters were abandoned by their mother and father. They were cared for, off-and-on, by grandparents who lived in the Tristate. Between the ages of 3 and 16, Mr. Dodson lived in the homes of 13 foster parents and relatives in seven states.
“I'm determined to make something of my life because my family hasn't made anything of theirs,” he said last week during a lunch break. He works full time as a salesman in the automotive section of the Eastgate Mall Sears store.
Mr. Dodson owns a used pickup and pays his own insurance on the truck. He plans on attending the University of Cincinnati's Clermont County branch before transferring to Ohio University.
He will study business and plans to earn advanced degrees. He speaks matter of factly about his future. And his past.
“I never have met my dad, or one of my brothers and a sister, so, yeah, I'm angry,” Mr. Dodson said. “I'll drive by the park and see a boy playing ball with his dad, and I never had that.
“I'm going to have two boys when I get married. I just know it. And I'm going to give them everything I never had.”
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