by Cris Beam
It’s the parents who are the real “healing agents,” as Francine called them; they’re the soil into which the kids can root. But really, she said, anyone a child attaches to can do the trick; it’s a matter of them “seeing in you the capacity to become something good.” It could be a teacher, a mentor, a therapist, a nun. It could even be an employee at a group home.
When I talked with Tolightha Smalls, she lamented the change in tide and the city’s decision to close more of its group homes. Tolightha watched kids who lived with individual foster families struggle with all manner of psychological troubles, and she thought about service implementation. If the kids lived together in more cohesive groups, she thought, it might be easier to provide them with more consistent psychiatric care. And keep them under closer supervision.
“If we had better service delivery in the group homes, we wouldn’t have all these kids running away, running out to prostitute, because they’d be in these therapeutic settings,” Tolightha said. Her concern about prostitution was especially serious. Domestic trafficking of minors for sex work is on the rise, and pimps—in New York they’re often gang leaders—target girls in homeless shelters or group homes where the adults in charge often have no training about these types of predators who run brothels out of apartments. The number of teenage prostitutes in New York is hard to gauge (a recent estimate gathered by various state agencies was three thousand, but many experts claim that’s too low), but the district attorney’s office in Brooklyn recently created a Sex Trafficking Unit to target people who sexually exploit women and girls. I knew one foster girl in Brooklyn whose story was fairly typical. She wanted to keep her identity a secret, but she told me that she was approached one day by another girl about her age who promised to take her somewhere for a job interview. The girl I know was locked in an apartment with several other kids and forced, via beatings and rape, to take Ecstasy and sleeping pills and have sex several times a day for no pay. She escaped six months later and ran from the foster care system entirely.
Tolightha believed that well-staffed group homes could counter all this. Behind her head a brightly colored poster advertised the “Five top reasons to foster parent a teen.” It promised a teen could teach you the latest trends and help you program your cell phone. “But we can’t make the group homes look like storage. We have to implement services where kids can see they’re being assisted—give them group therapy, family therapy, tutoring. A kid could go back to his family from one of these places.”
Unlike Francine and her sister, Francine’s brother was placed in a group home, and he did fairly well there, Francine said to me during our talk. He found an employee with whom he could connect but wasn’t expected to love on command, the way she was expected to love her new mother. But while services can be better consolidated and coordinated from a central location, Francine cautioned that the central service for a traumatized child will always be a primary, human attachment. In group homes, workers would have to be trained to offer this—and step up as family figures, with all the loyalty and consistency that implies.
From her experience, Kecia was skeptical that group homes could provide such a thing. “There are just too many kids in there, and group home staff changes every eight hours,” she said simply. OK, I pressed, but if they were to work, what would have to change?
Like Francine and Tolightha, and like the recommendations in the report on ACS, Kecia thought the solution depended on people more than place. “Why do we get away from the humanness of things? How do we get away from it and then expect it to work?” Kecia said, playing with a crease in her state-issued jeans. The trouble with group homes, or with any institutionalized care, she said, is that kids feel they’re being thrown away. But a person, she believed, inside that institution could change that perception. “I do believe love conquers all. But that means you’ve gotta rock with the kid—whether it’s a little baby or an older child—rock with whatever they get into, no matter how bad they get.”
It was dark outside the room where Kecia and I sat talking; we could hear the evening guard ordering takeout chicken just outside our door. Kecia said that if she passed the parole board in the coming spring, she would go back to live with her mom, who was failing in health. Probably sign up for some computer classes, try to get a job in tech support. She looked forward to the little things—like her skin clearing up, and her hair softening again; the dry air and state-issued soaps in prison were driving her crazy. She looked at the bare walls, the barred windows, at me. Healing could happen anyplace, she said: a group home, a foster home, a bio home. “It’s very simple—it’s just the way life is. You don’t leave people,” she said. “You stay.”
9
Taking Agency
BRUCE AND ALLYSON GREEN don’t use Kecia’s terminology, but they basically embody the mission of “rocking with kids, all the way.” Dominique, the curfew-skipping, trash-talking, angry teenager straight from a psychiatric hospital, was by far the toughest to rock with, but they were managing. Allyson had agreed to let Dominique enroll in some fashion design classes after school, and once, when I stopped by, Dominique confessed to regularly hanging out with Fatimah, who loved SpongeBob and sports and was undoubtedly a good influence. Things seemed to be settling.
But then, just after Dominique hit her seven-month mark at the Greens’, the agency called. There had been a mistake. The Greens were supposed to be a temporary placement, since Bruce and Allyson weren’t authorized to care for a child with documented therapeutic needs like Dominique. She would have to move.
Apparently it wasn’t the first time Edwin Gould had tried to take Dominique away. “The first time we spoke up for Dominique, it was because we were out of compliance,” Bruce said. He was with Allyson and Dominique in the kitchen on a Saturday morning, wearing his customary baggy jeans and T-shirt. He pulled some orange juice from the refrigerator and poured himself a tall glass; Dominique watched him closely. “State rules say we can only have six [foster] children but we had seven, so they had to move her. This went on for weeks.”
“Dad, can I please have some juice?” Dominique asked from the kitchen barstool, tipping up her face. She was still in her pajamas. She looked pretty and soft, her almond-shaped eyes fluttering in a sleepy way.
“No,” Bruce answered. “You’re watching your weight.” He turned back to me and explained that Tonya’s sister had been living with them for a bit, but once her biological dad regained custody, he thought they were in the clear with Dominique.
“Can I please have some in a cup?” Dominique whined.
“No,” Bruce said. “At this point, Dominique was arguing with everybody in the house. I mean everybody. Even Russell. Even Allen. She’d argue with that spider crawling on the ceiling.”
Dominique was pouting. “I’m just thirsty.”
“She found a reason to dislike something about everybody. Turn up the TV, turn down the TV, turn the channel.” Bruce paused. “Drink some water if you’re thirsty.”
Dominique slumped on the stool, but she stayed quiet. Bruce said a few more months passed, and slowly, quietly, a transformation began. Dominique’s storms softened; she stopped reacting quite so bitterly; everybody went to bed a little earlier, slept a little better. And that’s when the agency called: Dominique had to move not only to a different family, but to a different agency—one that had licensed therapeutic homes on its roster. It should have happened long ago, they said, but like all things in child welfare, the clocks are set in months, not minutes.
Bruce was angry. “Bad as Dominique may be—hardheaded, stubborn—she’s gone through all her trials and tribulations here and become acclimated to this household and all its rules and regulations,” he said, setting his empty juice glass on the counter with a soft thud. “How can they just play with the emotions of a child?”
Allyson thought this hurdle would be a good time for Dominique to learn to advocate for herself. The agency was recommending her removal, but a judge would decide Dominique’s fate. Allyson
believed if Dominique spoke to the judge herself, she would have a good shot at staying.
“I told her, ‘Your lawyer is getting paid to represent you. The court is getting paid to sit on that bench. But you have your life in your hands. These people won’t know what’s going on if you don’t tell them,’” Allyson said. Even this early in the morning, Allyson was dressed up in a silky blouse and boots. “I would have been right there with you and together we could have let them know. But I can’t do it on my own because it’s not my life at hand, it’s hers.”
I watched Dominique track Allyson’s brisk moves around the kitchen, warming a bottle for the baby, stirring some fruit and cereal for herself, and wondered: Can a child whose whole life has been commandeered by a string of faceless lawyers and judges and social workers, a child who has been driven to strangers’ homes in strangers’ vans for unseen motives, have any faith in self-advocacy? At seventeen years old?
Dominique didn’t show up at her court date, and the judge ordered her out of her agency and into the therapeutic home. Allyson drove her to the woman’s house, in what was supposed to be a series of longer and longer visits, until Dominique felt acclimated enough to pack her Hefty bags and move in. But Dominique shut down. Normally alert and ready to fight with anyone, Dominique simply visited her new foster mom and refused to say a word.
Dominique did, however, talk to Allyson. She told her if she had to relocate, she would run away. This is the kind of self-advocacy she knew: like many foster kids who have little experience getting, or even imagining, what they really want, their only power lies in saying no.
“To hear her speak like that, I was like, wait a minute. I have a conscience. This is my daughter, and this is going to rest on me,” Allyson said, her rising voice echoing around the kitchen. “When I got into this, I got into this fully. I came in here fully committed. I thought, ‘Something has to happen.’ And I told Dominique not to worry, something is going to work out.”
Allyson called ACS and asked if there was any way they could get the training to be a therapeutic home. They told her no. Their agency didn’t offer the training, and they couldn’t just switch agencies because all their other children were with Edwin Gould. Allyson said they would adopt Dominique.
“The woman on the phone said, ‘Are you sure?’” In the retelling, Allyson’s eyes blazed. “I said, ‘Lemme tell you something. When I say something out of my mouth, I am sure. Because regardless of how this turns out, it ain’t gonna be nobody’s problem but mine.’”
On the eighteenth of that month, Allyson said, she, Bruce, and Dominique were scheduled to go to the agency and sign paperwork. “And that’s it. They can’t move her from here. This is Dominique’s home.”
I asked Dominique, who hadn’t stopped staring at Allyson throughout her entire speech, how she felt. She looked shyly down at the countertop. “I can’t stop smiling because I feel loved. And it never happened before. They’re so passionate about keeping me here and welcoming me. It’s kinda weird. It’s scary. I don’t know.” Dominique trailed off, but then picked up again, louder than before. “Honestly, when I first came here, I was like, what kinda Cosby thing is this? I’d never been in a house with two parents before. I didn’t ask them to adopt me—I had always asked for people to adopt me, but I never had no one volunteer. I’m about to be signed out of foster care, and someone’s going to adopt me? It’s really strange.”
To hear Dominique tell it, her path to assimilation at the Greens’ was smoother, and speedier, than Bruce or Allyson claimed. Dominique had been with the Greens for only two days, in fact, when she did something that would cut her off from her past life and would, if only in her own mind, lock her securely into the house on DeKalb. She called her biological father.
“I was kind of getting comfortable here, so I called him,” Dominique said. At this point, she and I were the only ones in the kitchen, unusual for a late Saturday morning. “I said, ‘Why you put me in foster care? I know you! Most kids don’t know their fathers. Most kids don’t have the chance to go back. Why can’t you get me out of this situation?’”
She was trying to see if she had options. If she didn’t, she wanted to commit to where she was. In her entire life, Dominique had lived with her father for only one month; he had eleven other kids, with various women, and two other kids with her mom. Dominique ran away from her dad’s place because she couldn’t abide some of his behavior. She didn’t want to discuss it.
“I asked him if he loved me and he said no,” Dominique said, describing the phone call, her eyes boring into the countertop. “He said he can’t love me because I remind him of my mom too much. And he loves his stepkids more. So I cursed him out and told him I hope he goes to hell. And that I hope someone murders him. Then I hung up the phone, and I haven’t called him since.”
After a moment, Dominique gave away her last little lie. “A week later, his phone got turned off.”
The notion that foster parents would pull through for Dominique in a way her own father hadn’t was vital for Dominique’s fragile and burgeoning trust. That they had stood up to the agency was even more radical; every important connection Dominique had ever made, she felt, had been destroyed by ACS.
First, ACS took her from her mother when she was five years old. This may have been reasonable; her mother was using cocaine, her older brother was violent with her, and Dominique was too young to remember much else. Dominique moved in with a woman who, Dominique said, would have adopted her if she could. She was loving and kind, and Dominique called her Grandmother. But Dominique’s mom got better, and after living with Grandmother for five years, Dominique went back home. It lasted only three months. ACS decided the kids weren’t safe and rolled them into a different agency—likely whichever one had space on its roster. Grandmother didn’t know Dominique was back in care, and Dominique didn’t know how to find her. Dominique’s next placement wasn’t as good; she missed Grandmother, she missed her mom, and, as adolescence hit, her bitterness became quick bursts of rebellion—the “devil’s advocate” as Bruce would say later—against anyone who got too close. When she was told her mother died, Dominique felt entirely alone; she rarely talked to her brother, who was living in another borough, and ACS and its agencies had betrayed her. When she was fifteen, she looked up Grandmother on her own.
But it was too late. In Dominique’s absence, Grandmother had fostered another little girl and adopted her. Still, she let Dominique move in. Dominique switched agencies yet again to do it, but once she got there, Dominique felt displaced. Dominique picked fights with the girl, who was about her age, and then in a particularly jealous fit, she threatened to kill her. Dominique was sent to a psychiatric hospital, and then later to the Greens.
Dr. Francine Cournos has written and spoken extensively about child welfare since she was a foster child herself in the late fifties, and she says that still, workers focus too much on rules and protocol rather than on kids’ emotional attachments. I told her about Dominique, and she sighed; she’d heard it all before. Foster parents, like Dominique’s “Grandmother” or even Bruce and Allyson Green, are often viewed as “interchangeable parts,” she said. She volleyed with a story of her own, about a foster mom whose child was sent back to his biological parents. When the parents were deemed unfit a number of months later, the foster mom wanted him back. Unfortunately, the agency said no: she had since fostered another child, and there wasn’t enough bed space. “It’s such a remarkable thing that people think about furniture and square feet instead of attachment—when there are children all over New York City who live in crowded places,” Francine said. “If the system was following the child’s attachments, the child’s continuity . . .” She trailed off. “The day somebody asks a foster child, ‘Where were you living before your biological mother’s? How long were you there? How did that work out?’—that will be a very good day.”
It’s partly because the system treats foster parents as “interchangeable parts” that they don’t d
o the critical work of attaching to their children. Or they do it and then they stop. They’re just like the foster kids: they get burned out on the system’s entrenched disregard for their love.
This disregard, while deeply felt, isn’t intentional. It’s just that agency workers have so many rules to follow. To get their money from the state and the federal government, they have to make sure the kids are in secure placements with the proper square footage and so on—not that they’re with someone who loves them. And this money, skeptics say, is the real reason agencies don’t follow ASFA guidelines or work harder to reunite kids like Dominique with their biological families or with foster parents who might eventually adopt them. Money is the elephant in the room; money keeps the kids in limbo year after year after year, with family after family. And here’s why: every day that a child is in care, the agency makes an income. When the child goes home, the cash flow goes with him. Foster care agencies—the private and independent businesses that contract with the state—need the foster kids to stay foster kids so they can stay in business.
All across the country, foster care payments are issued on a per diem basis: the federal government provides money to cover each day a child lives away from his parents. Take New York as an example, where there are more than thirty agencies contracting with ACS. To get their funding, each agency has to track each child, garnering a different type of payment depending on his age, disability, special needs, and so on. The agency then tracks which type of “bed” he’s in: a foster home yields one payment, a psychiatric foster home yields another, a group home gets another, and so on. And they have to do this every day, for every kid, if they want their money from ACS. And ACS has to check all this accounting and reenact a similar process themselves if they want their money from the government.
In one way, cumbersome as it is, this makes sense. This is public money, and there has to be accountability for the way it’s spent. And matching each child with each dollar ensures, in theory, that there will always be enough. If more kids come into care, because of a drug epidemic or a media blitz, the laws are designed to flow more money in from the government to cover them. But it also means a lot of paperwork, and audits, and child welfare personnel pulling at their hair because they’re spending more time on forms than on people.
