by Beam, Cris
David had responded to Russell’s admission with an “Awww.” (Russell did an imitation of David’s reaction—he looked as if he were wincing at a kitten or a baby.) But Russell wasn’t discouraged; he had a host of new prospects since Allyson and Bruce had started allowing him to visit the gay and lesbian center in Manhattan, on the advice of his caseworker. “I go to a young men’s group; we play some games there, have community discussion, and everybody goes into a circle and you take turns to answer questions,” Russell explained. He was allowed to go as often as he wanted, and although it was fun, it was also sometimes uncomfortable. “This past Friday, they had an open mike and there was a guy who had a blond wig on and a short dress and he was dancing in front of everybody! I was so embarrassed. You may see that in the Village but not in this neighborhood.”
At the center, Russell told me, he learned the term entrepreneur, and he thought he might like to be one. He’d somehow managed to pay off his library fines and could now check out “twenty-nine books” at multiple branches, so he was planning to read up on famous entrepreneurs. He also was thinking about joining the YMCA around the corner from the center, so he could lift weights and play basketball. Russell had been losing some of his paunch by cutting down on the Taco Bell, and he wanted to continue the positive trajectory. Also, he said with a grin, “at the YMCA they have a locker room where I can watch the guys get naked and change. And when that happens I get so nervous and crazy.”
Sometimes even when kids aren’t delusional or saddled with disabilities, fantasies can help them face an encroaching discharge date. I saw this a lot with Dominique, who had been transferred to yet another foster home. (The foster mom who “called twenty times a day” took in a second girl, with whom Dominique battled, and Dominique had to leave.) Dominique’s plan for aging out was to move to New Haven, Connecticut. “Oh, my God, it’s so quiet, so beautiful there,” she said. “I can just see myself living there—the beaches are wonderful, and the sand is so golden.”
She imagined living with a cat and a fish, and having a wedding on the beach, but after that, the fantasy faltered. “I mean, I want someone I would be with for the rest of my life, but I don’t think I want to be married,” she said. I must have looked confused because she continued: “I would love a wedding, but I don’t think I would want a husband. There’s a difference. I could see myself on the beach with that white little nice dress just flowing and my hair so beautiful.”
In the meantime, Dominique had been placed with a single parent; I talked with Dominique’s caseworker, who thought placing her with a grandmotherly type, who could fuss over Dominique alone, might be a good solution. But while the kids over at the Greens’ were still running away and rebelling against parental control, Dominique found herself in an odd role reversal, and she wasn’t too happy about it.
“I feel like I’ve been hired to be a home health care aide,” Dominique complained to me about her new placement. “She’s eighty-three and I’m always taking care of her because she has a lot of health problems. Honestly, she can’t do too much for me.”
Without anyone pushing her to go to college, Dominique had decided to take a break from school. She picked up a full-time job at a Walk Shop, which was “fine,” she said, and she was interested in learning about the bones of the feet and good posture. She took off a shoe to show me her latest purchase. “See?” she said. “I have orthotics in my moccasins.”
Beyond the Walk Shop and her loose ideas about Connecticut, Dominique was considering becoming a flight attendant. There was only one hitch: she was scared of flying. She had been polling Facebook to see if her 1,298 friends thought she could overcome this fear.
Dominique’s plans may have sprung primarily from her own imagination, but as foster kids get closer to aging out, they’re often promised things they couldn’t possibly attain on their own. Like Russell’s independent apartment. Agency workers may overpromise out of guilt or a desire to overcompensate; they know what these kids have been through. Rudy Estrada has seen this a lot. One teenager he used to mentor just knew he was going to be on America’s Next Top Model, and his case manager told him he had a good shot. But the kid was overweight and unattractive; Rudy was encouraging him to fill out a job application at Starbucks. Rudy’s mentee was offended; selling coffee was beneath his supermodel status, and he wouldn’t consider any job offer unless it came from a big-name producer. I had a similar experience with Christina. She got her first job when she came to live with me, at seventeen, at a tourist shop in Hollywood. She was scandalized when the manager upbraided her for taking extra-long breaks and ogling boys on the street. She quit a few days later. At her next job, stocking shelves in a vitamin store, she argued with her boss in the first hour and was let go within the week. In foster care, Christina had been told she was responsible only for getting a job; she had neither the training, nor the emotional resilience, to actually keep one.
Part of the problem is that so many foster kids grow up in a kind of alternative reality, especially in the group homes—with too much structure, and too little love. When they’re discharged, they’re shocked to discover that the world of employers and landlords doesn’t operate with the same uniform predictability that their group homes once had. Christina was appalled, despite the extreme injustice of her early life, that the people at her jobs “just weren’t being fair.” And she didn’t have the softness inside her, the plasticity and adaptability that come from being cherished, to bear it.
The reason these kids are pushed so hard into independent living comes from a national effort to help them. In 1999, a Republican senator named Chafee noticed that it was the aging-out teenagers who were getting short shrift, and he put through a bill to allocate more funding for them. Probably the biggest change to federal foster care since ASFA, the John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program, or “Chafee laws,” essentially doubled the federal funding allocated to kids who are likely to age out of foster care without families, providing them with housing, training, and health care.
But the legislation—or its implementation—is flawed. Despite a mandate to collect data on Chafee spending and programs, states didn’t report much so nobody knew how well, or even if, the programs were working. Nine years after Chafee was signed, the federal government published a “Final Rule,” requiring states to present their programs’ outcomes by 2011 (or else face a financial penalty), which would result in a national report later that year. As of mid-2012, that report still hadn’t materialized.
Still, there have been a few independent studies, and the results don’t look good. One organization did a Web-based survey in 2008 to see how states were using their Chafee funding, and nearly a third of the respondents didn’t know how many of their kids had aged out in the past year. The largest longitudinal study is called the Midwest Study, and it has followed a sample of 673 former foster kids who received Chafee-funded independent living services from Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, comparing them to nonfostered adults. At last count, these kids were twenty-four, and more than half weren’t employed—and half of those who did work had earned less than $8,000 in the past year; nearly 40 percent had been homeless. Five percent of the men and 7 percent of the women had earned an associate’s degree—a tiny fraction of the general population their age who had graduated from college.
Looking at these numbers, it’s easy to say that independent living training and services don’t work, that we’re giving these kids too little, too late. Or it may be that the agencies just aren’t good at it yet. One researcher conducted interviews with child services experts in Massachusetts and found that they commonly described not being able to serve transition-age youth because that wasn’t the mission of their agency. Foster care was designed to serve children, they said, and its purpose was to protect them—not prepare them for adulthood.
But just as ASFA forced child welfare workers deeper into the adoption business, Chafee pushed them into the world of young adults. Rudy Estrada has worked in ado
lescent foster care for more than fifteen years and has a bird’s-eye view of the change.
“Several years after ASFA, there was such a reduction in caseloads—like in New York we went from thirty-five thousand kids to seventeen thousand, and what happened was it skewed the demographics. We moved the little kids out,” he said, explaining that, as always, the youngest children were the easiest to connect with adoptive parents. This left the teenagers filling out the caseloads, and administrators wondering what to do with them. “Chafee’s had a dramatic effect—where it’s pitted independent living against permanency,” he said. “Suddenly, caseworkers had a beautiful carrot to offer their kids: like, ‘You can have an apartment! And college! Or, would you rather get adopted?’”
For many caseworkers, who have to monitor their kids only until their final exit meeting, the new Chafee subsidies must have felt like a welcome relief, as suddenly they had real benefits to offer their kids all the way up to their twenty-first birthday. (In 2008, more legislation was passed that allowed kids to stay in care, at states’ discretion, until they turned twenty-one. ) If the kids in their caseloads chose to sign themselves out, the laborious hunt for adoptive families could end. And after these kids turned twenty-one, they wouldn’t be their problem anymore.
“As a lawyer for these kids, you want to say, ‘Give a family a chance.’ You want to say, ‘It might sound nice to get your own apartment now, but this family represents a lifetime of connection, a place to live, a place to go home to. This apartment’s only for three years,’” Rudy explained. “But to a kid who’s eighteen, three years sounds like a long time. They think, ‘I get an apartment for three years? By then I’ll be a recording star.’”
12
There’s Something About Mary
MARY KEANE, THE WOMAN WHO adopted the Rosario clan and ran the parenting classes, didn’t know about the Chafee laws when she set about adopting teenagers. When we first talked about the trend toward giving teenagers apartments, she only rolled her eyes. “They say they’ve eliminated the homeless problem—because they can say we’ve placed a thousand kids in apartments,” she said. This is, some claim, the grand delusion of the Chafee funding; it provides some help up front, but former foster kids don’t have the skills, or the safety nets, to weather young adulthood. “They’re not following the kids nine months later to see if they can keep it up.”
Mary provided what the city would later say the kids had needed all along: a stable family to stick around long past the discharge date. When I talked to the new commissioner of ACS, the agency had shuttered all its contracts with SILPs: foster kids would no longer live in supervised apartments. The commissioner said ACS would still be providing independent living services, meaning the classes and the training that would help kids get jobs and housing on their own. After all, some of them would still be aging out of group homes. And parents like Mary were hard to find.
Mary is an understated person with a wry laugh and sparkling blue eyes; she wears a sweatshirt that reads “Nouveau Poor,” and despite housing eleven kids who always need rides someplace, she drives an old Miata two-seater. Irony is one element that sustains Mary; the other is imagination. Politics aren’t a big part of her impressive fortitude.
Mary’s imagination was first sparked more than ten years ago, when she saw the twelve-bedroom Victorian house in Yonkers and decided to pour her life savings into what everybody now calls “the mansion.” Mary was fifty-two at the time. She had just broken up with a longtime partner and retired early from her job as a health care consultant. Call it a midlife crisis or an inspired vision; it was the start of a new millennium, and Mary wanted a family.
To get there, Mary planned to open a group home, of sorts, for lesbians in foster care. She had heard that these girls had it worst, that foster parents didn’t want them, that they were especially singled out for harassment in institutionalized care. Mary was a lesbian; she figured she could provide a haven.
When I first visited Mary in her cream-colored mansion across the street from a park, I felt a pleasant shiver of recognition: there was the rainbow flag in the dining room (which Mary uses as an office), loads of tea and mismatched mugs in the kitchen, a chore wheel taped to the refrigerator door, and a cat mewing underfoot. A pot of rice boiled on the stove. I went to college in Santa Cruz and have lived in several lesbian households; this could have been a transplant from any lesbian collective I’ve seen. But in this house, big men in baseball caps lumbered about, and in a collective of thirteen members, only three—including Mary—were gay.
In this house, Mary parented eleven kids from the system, all over the age of eighteen, save for one who was just under. Many were from the Rosario family, the kids whose mom had called them names like “Daughter of Satan” and “Fucking Idiot” and left them in an abandoned apartment for months. Mary had adopted several of the Rosarios, along with other kids who still lived in the house and even more who had moved on. Sometimes she practiced what’s known as “moral adoption,” meaning she committed to a child for life, without the formal documentation. She did all of this because she had the house and the means (Mary worked for an agency that trained foster parents, and she got a little money from the state for the kids who were still under twenty-one). Mostly she did it because she saw the privation: early adulthood is when system kids most need, but so rarely receive, a family. But she never got the houseful of lesbians.
“I first went to Westchester County and said I wanted lesbian teens. They said, ‘We don’t have any. But we’ve got pregnant teens!’” Mary said. She had completed her ten-week class to become a foster parent and filled the rooms with beds and linens, ready for her girls. We sat at the big wooden kitchen table, bathed in white winter light from the window, drinking tea. Mary was sixty then, though she looked ten years younger with short gray hair and only light smile wrinkles. “So I went to an agency in the city. They loved the idea of me taking lesbians. But they didn’t have any either.”
Just as the Greens wanted a baby and got a teenager, Mary wanted a lesbian and got a “little fourteen-year-old straight out of Children’s Village crisis unit.” Still, Mary didn’t want to sit and wait in an empty house for lesbians to materialize when there were other kids in need, so she changed her criterion to girls only. Soon, she said, “they were sending the most challenging, the most runaways.”
To Mary’s dismay, the girls would run away from her house too, and a handful never came back. “And the agency was basically no support. When I would call to say so-and-so ran away, what do I do, they’d just say we’ll send you another kid.”
It was Mary’s first child, Jennifer, who helped her understand why all the kids ran. “They didn’t think it was going to last anyway,” Mary said that Jennifer explained. “They thought this was too good to be true, and they wanted to be the ones to leave before they were thrown out.”
While the mansion didn’t look like a group home—there was art on the walls, and a bird in the master bedroom, and Mary lived there all the time—it was still a big house, with a lot of kids. It would take a while for everyone to adjust to the idea that Mary was offering something radically different. When the first big fight broke out, between two girls, in the front yard and in full view of the neighbors, those two girls both responded the way they had in homes past.
Mary can’t remember who started the argument, or what it was even about, but two of her earliest foster kids, Amy and Anni, politely went outdoors when they came to blows.
“A crowd gathered and was shouting, ‘Kill her! Kill her!’” Mary remembered. “I called the police to break it up because I didn’t know if they were really going to hurt each other.”
Both girls went to their rooms, and Mary called their agency, as parents are required to report any serious trouble. “The agency just said, ‘Who should we pick up?’ Amy and Anni thought the same thing. They were upstairs, packing up their things, ready to go.”
But Mary wasn’t running a standard group home; she w
as creating a family. Both girls were shocked when she told them to unpack their bags and stay. And then she signed up everyone, herself included, for weekly family therapy. A fight that big never broke out again.
Looking around Mary’s home, I could see why a kid accustomed to harsh conditions would panic—for the same reasons Tonya and her brother tore up the first nice place they landed in Mount Vernon. Mary’s house feels like a song on an old acoustic guitar—comfy, settled, and soothing—but entirely too peaceful if you’re used to the noise and chaos of thrash metal. Even the kids who have lived with Mary for years still call the house “the mansion.” Although the original tin tiles on the ceiling are falling in places and all the walls need a coat of paint, there’s a big bowl of fruit on the kitchen table and pictures and notes from the kids scattered around. Once I visited near Christmas, and Mary had hauled up a big box from the basement filled with glass ornaments that the kids had decorated in years past, and she’d brought out permanent paint markers for them to do it again. Everything in Mary’s house seemed to say, “You belong here.”
Through the Chafee funding, some ACS agencies provide classes in independent living, often held in downtown offices, once a month. Kids over sixteen get a small stipend if they attend, and in these classrooms they learn how to write checks, pay the rent, and balance budgets. For kids accustomed to institutions, this information can seem pretty obscure (or too hard to get to; subway travel to and from the classes can take several hours ), and many choose not to go. If they do attend, however, they learn that they’re entitled to a few things: they can get a $300 monthly rent subsidy for up to three years, and they can receive priority status on the waiting list for public housing.
