Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Two Cape Cods: Hidden Poverty on the Cape and Islands - Part 4

State homeless advocates report seeing more and more former foster children on the streets and in shelters, including those on Cape Cod. Each year, some six-hundred youth 'age out' and leave the state's foster care program when they turn eighteen, and services such as healthcare and counseling end. When Aaron Malloy was twelve years old, he fled his Yarmouth home, and ran as fast as he could to the fire station at the end of the block, away from his rampaging mother.

Aaron Malloy: "This is where I went to elementary school for a little bit, Ezra Baker, and that's the playground, and this is a place I lived with my mother when I was taken away into foster care. And that's the fire station I was telling you about right down there. ... This is where we lived. It looked more junky when we were living there, though."

Twelve years later, the house is weathered and broken. A basketball hoop, with just a makeshift piece of plywood for a backboard, hangs crooked near the back door. The place looks deserted.

Aaron Malloy: "I remember I was the poorest kid when I went to school. I was the poorest kid, and you know, there's a lot of wealthy people in this town, and I was definately the poorest. And my crappy, junky house with my mom's twenty-year-old beat up car out on the lawn. So when I was out at all the kids would be like, oh, there's Aaron Maloy's house, you know. Poor white trash, you know. Not all the kids, but the more upper crust kids at the school. They'd look at that and say, oh, Aaron lives in a dump."

Today, thirty-five percent of the students at Ezra Baker are considered by the state to be low income, so it's likely many of the children in the school yard had families that were struggling, too. Aaron just happened to be living out his troubled childhood across the street. Until the day he burst through the firehouse door.

Aaron Malloy: "I said, I really don't want to live this life. This is not the way I want to live. I just basically escaped, and for me, foster care was a better life than living with an abusive mother who was mentally ill."

Aaron doesn't remember exactly how many different foster homes and shelters he lived in from age twelve to eighteen. It's likely more than twenty, he says. He knows how many high schools he shuffled through, though. Six.

On any given day, between 250 and 300 children from the Cape and Islands are living in state custody. Some eventually make their way back to their families before they turn eighteen, but for others -- like Aaron -- the state is the only caregiver they have. Fran McAuliff and his wife Beverly were foster parents to Aaron and several other teenage boys during the 1990s. Fran says, Aaron is the only one they hear from anymore.

Fran McAuliff : "I've read about them in the papers. They are in the news all the time. It's 'Oh, I've had this one and I've had that one.' and "Remember this one, remember that one.' ...Aaron seems to be the exception to the rule. He looks like he is doing OK. And I am happy for him, very pleased."

Aaron Malloy is a success story. In the spring of 2004, he was one of only two former foster children kids from Southeastern Mass. to graduate from college. But he almost didn't make it.

When Aaron turned eighteen, he did what more than half of the eighteen-year-old foster kids do each year-- he signed himself out of the custody of the Department of Social Services. He left as soon as he was allowed, and he found himself in a predictable dilemma -- unable to sustain himself on the wages he made working in retail on Cape Cod.

Aaron Malloy: "I basically started my freshman year in college homeless. I went there off the street. I was living in a tent on Cape Cod. I was living in a tent. I was sharing a pop-up tent with a relative of mine in somebody's backyard. And I was broke."

MaryLou Sutters is the president of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which has taken on the aging out issue. As she told participants at a recent legislative breakfast, she's also a former foster child.

MaryLou Sutters: "Unfortunately, the kids who hit the streets have very bad outcomes. They either end up in homeless shelters, or they engage in petty crimes and end up in the criminal justice system. It is a terrible lack of investment in kids we have taken care of up until their eighteenth birthday."

The way the system is set up now, when a foster child turns eighteen, he or she can opt to stay in state custody, but there are a number of strings attached. The Department of Social Services will help a student through school and provide healthcare and assistance, but these things are not guaranteed. They are not, in government speak, entitlements. Not making the grade, getting in trouble with the law or violating any of the agency's behavior guidelines can lead to termination. More kids leave than not, and Aaron left, too. But when he found himself unable to make it, he asked DSS if he could come back.

Aaron Malloy: "I'd always wanted to go to college. I always wanted to make something of myself. I always wanted to pull myself out of poverty. I spent eighteen years living in poverty and I was sick of it. I wanted something better for myself."

Hyannis homeless shelters report seeing more and more college-age foster children who either do not or cannot go back to DSS for help. Sutters calls them, "The Commonwealth's forgotten children". The MSPCC says healthcare, mental health counseling, food -- these things should be guaranteed to foster kids into their early twenties, not stripped away when a nineteen year old gets a court summons or an 'F' on a report card.