Excerpted from Bakersfield.com
By Robert Price
Mar 14 2009

Damien Salmon had been an adult, legally speaking, for only a matter of days when he came to another one of those "what now?" moments he'd been experiencing in increasing number.

How does one cook a chicken?

Damien Salmon had not just beamed down to earth from a distant galaxy, uninitiated in the ways of humans. Something along those lines, though.

He had just "aged out" of the foster care system. He thought he'd been prepared, but planning the first few days of emancipation and actually living them turned out to be two different things.

Salmon, a 2007 Highland High School graduate, quickly came to the same conclusion that some state legislators had already reached: The state's foster care system needs to keep an eye on "graduates" well beyond their 18th birthdays.

Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, and Assemblyman Jim Beall, D-San Jose, aim to do just that. Not by extending the age of eligibility for actual foster care, but by drawing on newly available federal funds for transitional living programs through age 21. AB 12 has support among Republicans as well.

Salmon, 20, became aware of the legislators' effort to ease the transition of former foster youth — and position them to become taxpaying members of society, rather than drains — through his involvement in California Youth Connection, a nonprofit, foster advocacy organization.

Beall and Bass have been supportive of the CYC over the past few years, Salmon said, as has state Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, who has been sympathetic to foster youths' challenges particularly when it comes to higher education.

Salmon had been in foster care, including group homes, since the age of 5, when he and his siblings were taken away from their parents over alleged drug issues.

Like many foster kids, he left his group home shortly after graduating from high school with a bag of clothes and little else.

"I was set up to move into a transitional housing program, but I couldn't get in because they were in the middle of renovating," Salmons said. "So, on my very first night out on my own, I was basically homeless. No job, no home."

He couch-surfed at friends' houses for a while, then went to live with his older sister in Bodfish. The fact that such an option was available to him means he was better off than many.

Even so, said Jennifer Mason, who works with emancipated foster youth through the county's Independent Living Program, "Damien has really run the gamut of different placements. But he's lucky. Others don't have family, or their relationship with family has been damaged."

AB 12 would tap the federal government for $13,000 per year, and the state and counties for another $25,000, per emancipated foster youth who chooses to participate — potentially as many as 5,000 annually. Not cheap, especially in this most disastrous of economic years. But, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office, it would be money well spent.

The federal funds would offset state money already spent on services for foster youth. Perhaps more important, it would save money down the road, if Illinois' experience is a fair indication.

Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Chicago found that former foster kids in Illinois, where programs go till age 21, are three times more likely to go to college and much less likely to get pregnant or be arrested than those in Wisconsin and Iowa.

Compare that to California, where 25 percent of former foster youth end up in jail within two years and 20 percent end up homeless.

Do we spend now, and give foster kids a chance to contribute, or spend later, after we've allowed them to fail? Not much of a choice in my mind.

"I don't want the taxpayers taking care of me," said Salmon, who intends on becoming a registered nurse. "I'd rather take care of them."