Independent City

How one district is preparing foster youth for success

Within the boundaries of Antelope Valley Union High School District (AVUHSD), an area with one of the largest populations of foster youth in the state, lies the Independent City (IC) — a one-day mock city where foster and homeless youth can safely simulate emancipation and living on their own, learn to balance a budget, fill out government forms and find out what resources are available to help them live independently.

“You’ve probably heard some of the grim statistics and data regarding foster youth,” said AVUHSD Director of Behavior Interventions Matt Case. “About 50 percent don’t graduate high school, only about 3 percent complete college, 25 percent will end up unemployed within the first couple of years of emancipation and 30 percent are incarcerated.”

In the last nine years, more than 1,000 youth have successfully navigated IC, positively changing their trajectory in the process and increasing their odds of successfully pivoting toward adulthood despite the outsized challenges they face.

How the city works

Each year, students from 15 schools begin the day at Eastside High School, where they are served breakfast and hear from a keynote speaker, usually a former foster youth who has experienced success in life. Following the inspirational keynote, students are provided a randomly selected “adult profile.” Similar to Hasbro’s classic The Game of Life, the adult profiles include a level of education ranging from high school dropout to college graduate with various levels of degree, a career and one month’s salary.

One student may, according to their adult profile, be a high school dropout who is married with two children, is employed as a groundskeeper and makes $2,000 a month. They must navigate the city and stay within their budget just as a student who is a college graduate — a single, childless engineer who makes $5,000 a month — does.

With these adult profiles in hand, students navigate 13 different stations around the multipurpose room, including one where students must open a bank account.

“They have to open a checking account, which costs them $25. And if they open a savings account as well, that’s another $25. But what they don’t know is that we give them back the $50 just to impress upon them the importance of saving,” Case said.

They also need to find housing, with options including a studio apartment, a two-bedroom apartment or a small house.

Students also receive a fake Social Security number so they can fill out all the applications in the city. They can apply for CalFresh if they qualify, register to vote and apply for a state identification card or a driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles office if they intend to buy a car. Whenever possible, Case said the district uses real forms from agencies so students can get realistic practice navigating paperwork.

They also go to the general store, where they choose between packages of food, clothing and entertainment, with options varying in expense. Groceries that require more preparation at home will cost less than eating out all of the time, for example, with a third option in the middle.

“They all have to apply for Medi-Cal. If they don’t do that, we also have somebody we call the Grim Reaper who walks around and gives people illnesses or diseases,” Case said. “If the Grim Reaper comes and says, ‘You have strep throat, that’s going to cost you $75,’ you have to go to the clinic and take care of that. But if the kid has already applied for insurance, then it doesn’t cost them anything.”

AVUHSD also receives hundreds of dollars worth of donations to give directly to the youth at the event.

Collaboration is key

The district uses proprietors from local businesses to work as staff to make the city as realistic as it can be — something made possible through a decade of relationship-building.

“Before we started this program about 10 years ago, I was working with some county kids in a program called the Independent Living Program,” Case recalled. Students would go to Antelope Valley College for a 30-hour program where they’d learn about banking from a local credit union representative, receive a crockpot and take a cooking class, learn about how to navigate the local transit system and more.

“I started working in the district office here in a position where I was overseeing all of the counseling departments in the district, and I was thinking, how can we replicate that and try to get more kids involved?” Case said. It was those connections, as well as relationships developed since, that has allowed IC to thrive. Community partners continue to participate “because it gives them such a thrill to see the impact that it’s having,” he continued.

Case remembers one student who needed a lot of support to beat the odds. “By the time she was a senior, she had applied for a four-year school. I think she ended up going to Northridge.” This student, who was able to participate in the IC all four years of high school — a luxury many foster youth do not have as one of the most transient student populations — “really benefited from all of the resources and support that she had gotten throughout the years,” Case said.

“It shows how committed we are to that population,” he continued. “And honestly, we couldn’t have done this without all of the support that we get from the superintendent and from the deputy superintendent. And the board always has to approve the budget — the first year we started we had a $10,000 budget. And then over time, little by little, people started to buy in and started to get involved. And now we have it written into the Local Control and Accountability Plan with a pretty substantial budget.”