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Attempting to prove to a Santa Clara County court late last year that she had earned her monthly foster care check, a South Bay teenager couldn’t quite remember all the places she had applied for work.

On a recent weeknight on the suburban streets of Silicon Valley, a 20-year-old former foster youth offered a weary and frank assessment of his latest struggles to survive. Peter had recently scrounged up $600 to buy a barely functional “classic old hippie van” he planned to live in — that was until he got pulled over at midnight for driving without a registration.

Just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools and businesses and isolated millions of people in their homes, a California senator introduced groundbreaking legislation to reimagine how the state supports some of its most vulnerable, yet hopeful, residents: Young adults raised in foster care. 

California legislation that would have permanently extended foster care payments and housing benefits to young adults through age 25 has now been scaled back to a short-term support plan triggered by a state of emergency such as the current coronavirus pandemic.

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced the state would prevent foster youth from aging out of the system during the pandemic. This week, the administration laid out the specifics of his order. 

California foster youth who remain in extended foster care after they turn 18 have more savings and are more educated than their peers who exit foster care at 18, according to a report released late last year by the University of Chicago-based research group Chapin Hall.

Three decades ago, a group of foster youth who wanted to drive like average teenagers came together to fight for the right to obtain driver’s licenses.  When these teens founded California Youth Connection in 1988, it was the only foster care advocacy organization led by youth themselves. 

Sometimes I feel like the “Tortoise and the Hare” fable is the story of my college career. I entered foster care at the age of 2 when my parents became incarcerated.

The Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago recently released a brief highlighting factors that lead to high school completion and college enrollment for foster youth. “Each month in extended foster care past age 18, increased the expected odds of completing high school by about 8 percent,” the Chapin Hall brief said.