News

Woman proves college is possible for foster kids

She’ll offer help to others at conference

BY L.L. BRASIER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

More former foster children in the state are attending college or trade school, overcoming enormous obstacles such as homelessness and poverty — thanks, in part, to an aggressive push by universities, social service agencies and community leaders.

State records show that the number of foster youths attending college or trade school jumped from 127 in 2004 to 616 in 2009. That number is expected to climb even though the number of youths 18 and older still receiving foster care is declining.

Cherish Thomas, 22, born to a drug-addicted prostitute, was in 20 foster homes before attending the University of Michigan, where she earned a degree in sociology and African-American studies. Now a graduate student there, she plans to tell her story today to more than 100 foster care youths at “Rising Above the Odds Against Me,” a conference at Oakland University designed to help steer them toward college.

More of state’s foster youths are heading to college

Thomas seemed destined for a life of despair. Born in Lansing to a cocaine-addicted prostitute and a mentally unstable father, she was in foster care before age 1, bouncing from family to family.

She was adopted by a single mother at age 5, but was back in foster care by 11 when her adoptive mother was unable to care for her.

Her childhood was marred by sexual assaults and intermittent homelessness. She spent one summer as a young child living on a playground in Georgia, begging food from strangers.

By 17, she had been in 20 foster placements in a half-dozen states — a not-uncommon tale among the nation’s estimated 800,000 foster care kids.

“It wasn’t easy, but it made me who I am today,” she told the Free Press.

Sharing her story

Who she is today is a University of Michigan graduate student and motivational speaker.

Thomas, 22, plans to share her remarkable story at a conference she helped organize today at Oakland University. About 200 people, roughly half of them foster care kids, are expected to attend the 2010 Foster Care Leadership Conference “Rising Above the Odds Against Me” to learn about college opportunities.

The odds against Thomas were considerable.

When she was adopted, her new mother had emotional difficulties, suffered from serious health problems and moved Thomas from state to state. Thomas sometimes ran away.

Child care workers placed her back into the foster care system, where she was never in one place for more than a year or two.

While she struggled with the turmoil in her life, she held on to her love of learning and worked hard at school.

A counselor at East Lansing High School, where she was a student, saw promise in the determined girl and first introduced the idea of college to her.

“I had never even considered it,” Thomas recalls. “I was planning on going to cosmetology school. I didn’t think kids like me got to go to college.”

She was accepted at U-M, but worried how to pay for it. The family she was staying with declined to help. A scholarship created by a California businessman, himself once a foster child, gave her a free ride.

The rigorous academic requirements at the university seemed overwhelming at times and for a while, she was on academic probation.

“I was really lost, and I didn’t have the study skills I needed,” she recalled. By her junior year, she was suffering from insomnia and anxiety attacks. She turned to Dr. Gail Parker, a licensed psychologist in Bingham Farms.

“And I started to get better,” she said. “And she convinced me I had the strength to do whatever I wanted to do.”

Thomas graduated from U-M with majors in sociology and African-American studies, and promptly enrolled in graduate school.

Parker, who specializes in helping young people with self-esteem, is to be one of the lecturers at the conference. She said Thomas’ experiences will help other young people.

“It has to do with being able to envision a better future,” said Parker, who continues to mentor Thomas.

“When you’ve never had someone who supported you, you don’t even know it’s OK to dream.”

Scholarship help

Foster care children are dropped from the system by age 20 in Michigan, and are particularly vulnerable to homelessness, unemployment and poverty. In the last 10 years, universities have begun offering scholarships to foster care children.

Western Michigan University awards 50 John Seita Scholarships, paying full tuition for four-year degrees for students leaving foster care.

“It’s very challenging,” said professor Yvonne Unrau, who directs the program. “They may have been told that they won’t amount to much. … We help them put all the pieces together.”

This month, 14 education planners recently hired by the Michigan Department of Human Services are to begin training to help foster care workers and youths navigate the path to college or trade schools.

“It is very difficult for our youth if that dream of college has not been promoted,” said Sherie Bailey, youth service manager with DHS.

Community leaders are helping. Oakland County Circuit Judge Edward Sosnick is one of the organizers of today’s conference.

“We owe this to these kids,” he said. “If we can give them a chance for a better life, then we should.”

Contact L.L. BRASIER: 248-858-2262 or brasier@freepress.com

Wanted: More parents for foster kids to ease the state shortage

Not enough willing to care for siblings, teens, special needs

BY ROBIN ERB
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Michigan needs more foster homes — and fast.

In 2009, a shortage of foster parents resulted in 7,442 siblings being split up. Others were placed in institutional settings or with a family ill-equipped for them.

In the state’s five largest counties alone, the Michigan Department of Human Services needed an additional 2,160 foster homes last year. Yet the number of licensed homes has dropped — by about 650 homes, nearly 9% — in a five-year period.

It doesn’t make sense to foster parents such as Mansfield Dinkins, who fostered and later adopted De’Shawn, now 16. The two were practicing De’Shawn’s hurdling skills at Ecorse High School, where De’Shawn is a sophomore and his father is the track coach.

“It’s not always been easy,” the elder Dinkins said, shooting an inside-joke grin at his son. “But I don’t regret it one bit.”

DHS is rolling out a new campaign that features nationally produced TV ads in which a father singes his eyebrows while grilling his family’s dinner and a mother vacuums up her sons’ hamster. As the children look stunned, a voice-over says: You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent.

Loving adults are needed to get right parent-kid fit

The doorbell rang at 1:30 a.m., and Pauline Moore was ready.

The tiny bundle the caseworker handed her stirred, then wailed. One week old, the baby was hungry.

“They pulled away the blanket and I looked down, and that was it. I was locked,” the retired nurse said, laughing. That was years ago. Moore, 61, is now 4-year-old Samauri’s adoptive mom.

The problem is that there aren’t enough Pauline Moores.

At a time when Michigan is under a federal court order to improve its child welfare system, the state is losing foster homes. The supply shrank by nearly 9% between the close of the 2005 and 2009 fiscal years. Most critical is the need for parents willing to take in kids with special needs, older children or large sibling groups.

“This is about the right fit,” said Ismael Ahmed, director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, or DHS.

Wayne County Circuit Judge Mary Beth Kelly said she sees it routinely in her juvenile courtroom. On Wednesday, she said she had no choice but to send a “bright and promising” 14-year-old girl to an emergency shelter because none of the available foster homes were licensed to take teens. Her mother’s legal rights have been severed. Her father has been unable to care for her.

It was yet another temporary move for a child trapped in a system that took her in when she was just 10.

“We … struggle with finding foster homes for young people on a weekly basis,” Kelly said.

Numbers constantly in flux

It’s tough to nail down exact totals of homes and kids. On any given day, there are licenses approved and licenses canceled; children being taken into care, children leaving care. But on Sept. 30, 2009 — the close of its fiscal year — DHS had 6,833 licensed foster homes, down from 7,486 five years earlier.

DHS said last year that it needed 2,160 new homes in Wayne, Macomb, Oakland, Genesee and Kent counties, according to a recent report by the court-appointed monitor, Public Catalyst Group, based in Newark, N.J.

The firm is charged with overseeing the state’s multimillion-dollar child welfare overhaul after Michigan was sued by Children’s Rights. The New York-based advocacy group accused the state of having a “depleted and overburdened” system that moved children from home to home, rather than finding permanent placements.

The state is working through top-to-bottom changes under its settlement agreement with Children’s Rights.

Making good matches

Making sure children get the best care while they’re in the system means matching them with caring and properly trained parents, and that, in turn, means the supply of parents must greatly outnumber children needing homes, said Sara Bartos, the Children’s Rights attorney overseeing the Michigan case.

Mismatching can be devastating — for parents and children, she and others said.

“When you’re dealing with a deficit (of homes) like this, you have kids placed in the wrong homes. They will disrupt (or be removed from the home), and that starts that terrible sequence of placement moves and re-trauma,” Bartos said.

Ironically, the state might be a victim of its success. It eliminated the final hurdles on hundreds of backlogged adoption cases in 2009, many of them involving foster parents who had decided to adopt the children they had so long cared for. It provided those children with permanent homes, sure, but those foster parents might have taken themselves out of the mix of available homes for future foster children.

Moore, the Detroit nurse, was one of those foster parents who signed the papers to adopt, making Samurai one of 3,030 children adopted out of the system — a 12% increase over the previous year and the highest ever, according to DHS.

She’s fostering two additional children, too, despite the extra errands, extra bills and endless drills over letters of the alphabet and personal manners.

“It’s hard, very hard sometimes,” she said. “But you know, I’m never bored.”

Contact ROBIN ERB: 313-222-2708 or rerb@freepress.com

 

State struggles with foster home shortage

Economy, placement rules contribute to problem

Catherine Jun / The Detroit News

A shortage of foster homes in Michigan has forced agencies to institutionalize children and separate thousands of siblings, state officials and child advocates say.

This comes as the state prepares to launch a campaign to recruit new foster parents.

The economy and a reduction in the number of children allowed in foster homes, according to agencies, have contributed to the decline in foster homes in recent years.

“We used to have foster parents coming from everywhere,” said Jeanine Thornton, licensing and placement supervisor at the Children’s Center, a child welfare agency in Detroit. “Right now, people are barely able to take care of their own children.”

Each year since 2005, more foster homes have closed than have opened. What have resulted are 7,442 siblings in foster care placed in separate foster homes, and 1,312 children in institutions, according to a recent report from a court-appointed monitor overseeing the state’s child welfare reform.

“We still need thousands of foster homes each year,” said Gisgie Gendreau, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Human Services. “We need those homes at the ready.”

To become a foster parent, applicants must undergo a months-long approval process that includes income verification, criminal background checks and home inspections to verify child safety standards.

Foster homes can close for many reasons: Children return home, are adopted or find permanent guardians.

But job losses and foreclosures, too, are in many instances upending fostering plans, agencies say.

“The reality has changed,” said Cristina Peixoto, director of child welfare at the St. Francis Family Center in Southfield. The agency has 89 foster homes on its roster, down from more than 130 in 2006. After prospective foster parents attend orientation classes, some discover they don’t have the means to care for another child, she said. “Some folks screen themselves out.”

Licensing requirements have not eased, so some agencies are getting “creative” to prevent the removal of children from foster parents who have fallen on hard times, she said. For example, Peixoto now readily turns to a foster parent’s unemployment checks as verifiable income. But that is not enough in all cases.

“We are able to understand if there’s a temporary circumstance that is out of the person’s control,” Peixoto said. But “are they paying rent? Are they going to be evicted? If so, you’ve got the kid back in the system, and that doesn’t help us.”

Lolita Friar has cared for her niece, 15, and nephew, 14, since the pair was removed from their mother’s home three years ago.

Last year, Friar and the children were kicked out of their rental home in Oak Park when their landlord went into foreclosure. Without the home, the license to foster was gone. The only thing that prevented the children from being removed was an agency’s help to get temporary licensing while the family searched for a new house.

“I was scared to move because of the kids. I thought I would lose them,” said Friar, 37. “It’s not their fault they’re in this predicament.”

Payments not enough

Michigan’s foster care subsidies do not meet the rising costs of child care, especially for children recovering from the trauma of abuse or neglect, agencies and state officials acknowledge.

In Michigan, foster payment rates range from $14.24 to $17.59 a day to pay for a child’s expenses, depending on the child’s age. Families can request additional payments for children with special medical needs. About 14 states pay less than Michigan’s per-diem rate for a 9-year-old child, according to a 2008 study by the Hunter College School of Social Work.

“It does not adequately cover the care of kids,” said Addie Williams of Spaulding for Children.

At the Southfield agency, donations pay for things rarely afforded to foster children: college tours, band instruments, limousines on prom night.

Carole Kendall, 41, has fostered children for nearly two years. An administrative assistant for a Detroit charter school, Kendall saw teenagers getting into fights and going to jail. By fostering young children, she thought she could give them a better future.

Caring for 12 foster children required creative budgeting, she said.

“Sometimes you’d have to pick and choose what gets paid and what doesn’t,” said Kendall of Brownstown Township. “Maybe a cell phone bill will wait or a water bill will wait.

“You pay a babysitter more than you pay a foster parent.”

Ideally, foster care is a temporary solution for children removed from their home due to abuse or neglect. It is designed to provide care while a parent makes changes so the child can return, state officials said. If that does not happen, a court can terminate parental rights and foster parents can permanently adopt the children.

Since 2008, the state’s foster care system has been under court watch. Two years ago, the state settled a lawsuit with a New-York based agency, Children’s Rights, which charged that too many children’s lives were at risk for inadequate care.

As a result, the state had to reduce the maximum number of children assigned to each foster home from four to three, with exceptions made for multiple siblings. That has had the unintended result of reducing the number of available beds, agencies and state officials report.

In the state’s five largest counties, 2,160 additional foster homes are needed, according to state calculations documented in a progress report issued in March by a court-appointed monitor.

And for the most vulnerable in foster care — separated siblings as well as the disabled or institutionalized — the department needs 750 additional homes.

Next month, the state will kick off a yearlong campaign to recruit foster families. Its theme is, “Answering the call: You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent.”

The agency will team up with national efforts, including adoptuskids.org, write op-ed pieces in newspapers, and put out the call on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The state will spend $37,100, Gendreau said.

Adoptions may close homes

In recent years, the state has ramped up efforts to speed up adoptions and state officials say they have seen results. A record 3,030 children were adopted from foster care last year, up 12 percent from the previous year.

In some cases, that has created an inadvertent downside: closure of longtime foster homes.

Dana Hatch, 50, became a licensed foster parent in 2002. She has been a foster mom to more than 15 children — until this spring, when she adopted four.

“I had them put my license on hold for now,” Hatch said, saying she wanted to give her newly adopted children — ages 16, 6, and 18-month-old twins — time to adjust with their new family.

cjun@detnews.com (313) 222-2019

From The Detroit News: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100423/METRO/4230379/State-struggles-with-foster-home-shortage#ixzz0lxHUdnVa