Foster teens ready to tell city council how to fix system

The room the other night was full of teenagers and their teenage habits. There was the eye-roller, the wise-cracker, the slouch-in-the-seater.

They had colorful markers and a dry-erase board for the meeting, and they talked about college applications and jobs and dorms.

And they also talked about the friend who killed someone in self-defense in a group home. And what it's like to pass by your mom on the street when she's homeless and barely recognizes you. And to wonder about your brothers and sisters and whether they even know about you. And how, if you have extra-curricular activities or an after-school job, chances are the kitchen is locked up when you get home late and there is no food for you. The teens are foster kids. Their parents are basically the District's taxpayers.

Most of them grew up in "the system" as they call it, and any hope for adoption or a long-term foster home or reunification with their families is minuscule, so they wait until they age out.

Finding permanent solutions for foster kids has long been difficult across the country and particularly in the District, where 47 percent of the kids in foster care are between 15 and 21 years old.

Many bounce from foster home to foster home, awkward, combative or withdrawn. And often, by the time they are 13, they get put into a group home run by the government.

Between 150 to 200 kids age out of foster care in the District every year. According to a 2008 study. by Child and Family Services, only 14 percent have the resources to support themselves, about 66 percent suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, 34 percent are pregnant or parents, 40 percent have a high school diploma and about 10 percent are enrolled in college.

Nadia Gold-Moritz, executive director of the Young Women's Project, which is working with foster teens, said too many of these youths end up homeless, in jail, hurt or dead.

Trey Jones, who lives in a District group home, doesn't want to be one of them. "I've been in the system since I was 5," the 19-year-old told me. "And I've got family everywhere, in New Jersey, Atlanta, Colorado. I never understood why nobody worked harder to get me with my family."

Trey, who wears a tie, an argyle sweater and a shirt with cuff links, plans on starting classes this fall for computer science. He will get some help from the government because the District is one of the nation's pioneers in changing the age for leaving the system from 18 to 21. It means that Trey will get financial help after high school with housing and tuition.

He and a few other foster teens are planning for a D.C. Council hearing Friday on what they've gone through and how they think the foster-care system can be fixed.

They have been practicing their testimonies at night at the Young Women's Project. With their highlighters and charts, they are breaking down the problems they've experienced and the solutions they propose.