Giving foster kids tools for when they ‘age out’

Program aims to provide options
The initiative is recruiting 100 16-year-olds this year and another 100 in 2008. The hope is that participants will be more likely to have a high school diploma, to make use of education training vouchers, to be able to secure steady jobs and housing.

While there are already resources available in Missouri to children aging out of foster care, the new program is set up to feel less like a class. It allows foster children to decide what they need more information on and gets that assistance to them, Trotter said.

She lets teens in the program know she can relate.

When Trotter was 8 weeks old, her mother was found wandering in St. Louis traffic, with young Annica wrapped in a receiving blanket and nothing else. Trotter began living with her grandmother.

At age 13, with her grandmother in failing health, the two moved in with another relative. They had about a year of stability before the adults stopped being able to provide for basic needs.

"We lived for a year without gas. The electricity was never on all the time. And, uh, we didn't have any food," Trotter said. "...I was so jealous of other kids, not because they had cool clothes or cell phones, but because they had food."

Jeff Roberson / AP Annica Trotter lets teens in the program know she can relate to what they're going through.

At age 15, she became pregnant, left school and worked at a fast-food restaurant.

When her grandmother died, Trotter essentially turned herself over to the state, realizing she needed a better living situation. Trotter didn't get prenatal care until she entered foster care, she said.

But stays in her first foster homes were problematic. In one, a woman falsely accused her of trying to sleep with another foster child. In another, a mother wanted Trotter to do basic tasks for the woman's adopted teen.

Her son, Michael, had multiple health problems and required hospital stays, once for four months.

‘Nothing like what I'd ever experienced’
In 2002, Trotter and her son were placed in a foster home that changed their lives. The foster parents were George and Linda Brother. "They were very welcoming. It was nothing like what I'd ever really experienced," she said.

Linda Brother found a program that accepted special-needs children, to help Trotter care for her son. Trotter began taking classes to earn her GED. "Before I came into foster care, I never thought I'd go to college," Trotter said.

The couple consoled and supported her when Michael died of breathing-related problems in 2004.

Trotter requested to stay in state care until she was 21. The skills she needed when she got her own place are among those she helps current foster children learn in the Aging Out Initiative.

Participants also create "life books" that include their Social Security card, birth certificate, family health history and immunization records. They can include family photos, so they don't get misplaced if children change homes.

Organizations working on the program believes it will give foster children support to succeed. And Trotter has some additional support on her side, too. Last year, on her birthday, her foster parents adopted her.

"It meant the world," Trotter said. "It was the first time I felt what family is supposed to be."

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