By Tunisia Nelson, Colleen McDuffie, Eleanor Reid, Amanda Hernandez, Belinda Williams
While the intended effects of the AB 12 policy is addressing some of the issues that transitional age youth encounter to become independent adults: allowing youth to remain a dependent until 21, allowing the youth to re-enter the system as a dependent before their 20th birthday, allowing youth to attend school, including postsecondary education, preventing homelessness, preventing incarceration, ensuring mental and physical health issues are addressed, and ensuring youth are employed or looking for work, however, it is not the fail proof solution.
Unfortunately, it appears that the policy did not, or could not, take into account all the unintended effects despite the multiple amendments. For example, there have been an influx of youth returning to or attempting to return to dependent care, there have been youth attempting to falsify documents to meet the age requirements to return to dependent care, youth also continue to receive welfare benefits, there are problems with verifying school and work participation due to confidentiality laws, youth have minimal compliance to maintain eligibility, youth are not wanting jurisdiction to terminate, youth are not using funding appropriately and may develop a reliance on government funds which inherently creates a cycle of dependent youth turned adults.
There have also been some concerns that the funding resources may be depleted, however, it is yet to be seen. Nonetheless, if there is an excessive amount of transitional youth entering into the system that was not predicted, the funding will have to most likely come from other programs (Delgado, 2013, p. ES-7), such as THP-Plus-FC, which will affect transitional age youth directly.
Although Assembly Bill 12 took a step in the right direction by increasing the age limit to age twenty-one as well as including a myriad of additional, there is still much work to be done to equip transitional age youth in becoming independent and self-sufficient.
Reference:
Delgado, M. (2013, December). California fostering connections: Ensuring that the AB 12 bridge leads to success for transition age foster youth. Children’s Advocacy Institute, University of San Diego School of Law, ES-1-B16. Retrieved from www.caichildlaw.org/Misc/AB12_Report_Final.pdf.
