To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (2 page)

To become a licensed foster parent, I'd have to take a ten-week course—Christina said she wouldn't wait that long. So while Christina donned her fiercest makeup and bided her time at the sex offender home, I found a licensed foster parent who would take her in on the condition that I would keep her most weekends and many weekdays. This was off the books, and under the radar of the Department of Child and Family Services. Within a week, Christina was again living mainly with me. I called her my foster daughter; she called me her foster mom. Technically, we were lying, but to do the right thing by a child who'd been wronged by a system designed to protect her, we had to trick the system and go off on our own.

 

Before I started research for this book, most of my knowledge of child welfare came from working around it. But what I didn't know was why this particularly American institution was so particularly troubled. I didn't know how we could be spending billions on foster children in the United States and yet see half of them with chronic medical conditions, 80 percent with serious emotional problems,
and then abandon nearly a quarter of them to homelessness by their twenty-first birthdays.
I didn't know how we could be failing them so spectacularly.

Federal investigators recently spent three years looking into seven fundamental criteria for successful foster care in all fifty states. They examined the basics: things like kids being protected from abuse and neglect, being safely maintained at home whenever possible, and receiving adequate services for educational and physical health needs. No state met more than two of the seven criteria.

 

I spent five years looking at these questions for this book, primarily by looking at foster families who are deeply invested in the system's success—families who love their children and believe they can help—to more easily discover the flaws that foil anyone's best intentions. I live in New York, as do most of the families in this book; I've found it has neither the best, nor the worst, foster care system, so it provides one view into urban child welfare that can be projected onto other places.

And yet. Part of the problem with child welfare is that New York City is not like Chicago or Miami or Los Angeles or suburban Detroit in its child welfare designs or administration; they all grew from local cobbled-together religious and charity organizations, and they all now operate under different financial and philosophical restraints. Part of the problem with child welfare is that we're searching for a singular model that will meet all of the divergent needs of abused or neglected kids in all of their divergent places. Perhaps the only universal truth about each foster care program is this: every child within it is different.

No book could cover foster care, the institution, in this country—it's too varied, from place to place and theory to theory; any book that tried would be too shallow. So I have gone deep rather than broad, following a few families intensely for years. I was glad to discover some real hope in this work, in the form of both human resilience and creative new ideas crackling through child welfare, but by no means is this a comprehensive study or a litany of answers. I don't address several key branches of foster care—for instance, rural child welfare or the Indian Child Welfare Act and tribal laws—because they couldn't fit within the scope of one book. Certainly, there are thousands more narratives. This is an American story, and so I have an American's optimism: I believe we can do better.

***

Note:
Every story in this book is true, culled from recorded interviews conducted from 2007 to 2012. I've used actual names except in the few cases where I've changed identifying characteristics to protect a source's privacy. These changes are indicated in the endnotes.

 

 

 

 

ONE

Being a problem is a strange experience—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else.

—W.E.B. DuBois,
The Souls of Black Folk

1

I
T WAS AN UNUSUALLY WARM
October in Brooklyn; the men had switched their puffy coats for crisp white tank tops, and the young mothers pried back the plastic casings on their strollers. All two thousand people from the Roosevelt housing projects seemed to be tumbling outdoors, leaning on cars or gathering at the bodegas, slanting their faces toward the sun to soak in the last bits of warmth before winter. You couldn't tell, on a clear morning like this, that the Roosevelt Houses still tipped the scales in the 81st Precinct with their homicide rates, that by nightfall the bodegas would fill with toothless addicts buying loosies for a quarter. A bright morning like this could make anybody grateful.

Slicing through the center of these projects is DeKalb Avenue, with its run of single-family homes and middle-class aspirations. But that fall, one of these houses stayed locked up tight against the sunshine. The ten kids, most of them teenagers, weren't allowed to go outdoors. In that house, in that family, outside spelled temptation, and besides, it was the Sabbath. So the kids, sequestered in their jewel-colored Nikes and their tight jeans, had to swallow their frustration and excess energy like a belly full of bees.

The house on DeKalb had a history. One hundred and twenty years before any Nike sneakers thumped up its three long staircases, and sixty years before the projects rose across the street, the place had been an evangelical “House of Rest.” Such houses dotted the East Coast at the turn of the century to provide divine healing along with rest, teaching, and “spiritual quickening” for the sick or the wayward. In a way, the essence of the place had reemerged. In a way, beyond the stone lions that flanked the stoop and behind the beveled glass front door, a kind of holy crusade was revving up.

Bruce Green, a tall black man of forty with round cheeks and a quick smile, had bought the house on DeKalb in 1999. He grew up in the Roosevelt projects on his block, and most of his children are foster kids, raised on the same rough street diet he was—in Brooklyn, or Queens, or the Bronx. His wife, Allyson, is from Belize, and, although she may be more stridently religious than he is, they both wanted a large home to raise a large family, to protect their children against the many dangers of their city through the power of their God and their unwavering attention. What they didn't expect was that their children would come directly from the city itself, and that they'd be embroiled in several battles that would test their faith in just about everything.

The latest and largest battle was over a baby, born to a mother addicted to drugs and delivered to the Green family, after placements with a few other foster parents, when he was just over a year old. When I met baby Allen that Sunday some years ago, he was two and a half, and his biological father, also a former addict, was working with the courts to win him back. And at the core of this battle spun the core questions of foster care itself: Who decides the
correct
way to raise a child? Who makes the moves on the moral chessboard where a family's right to privacy opposes a child's right to protection from harm? And who should get to keep a child: the parents who nurse and tend him, or the parents who brought him into the world?

At the beginning, Allyson put the quandary in biblical terms. She told me the story of King Solomon.

In the story, two mothers are arguing over a single baby; both women believe the child to be hers. King Solomon procures a sword and offers to cut the baby in half so they can share.
One mother agrees to the deal, but the second pleads: she'd rather have the baby alive and with the other woman than dead. Allyson is this second mother—she knows that if Allen were remanded to his birth father, destructive as this father may be, she'd rather have Allen physically and spiritually alive than eventually feeling imprisoned with her. Plus, she knows all of her foster children understand that if they leave, they can always come back. Allyson will always be “Mom.” She hopes, in fact, that some of the other birth parents orbiting the Green household can make bigger strides and do right by their kids.

“I was blessed to have four children of my own, that I gave birth to,” Allyson said, her thick Belizean accent pounding her harder consonants. Allyson is four years older than Bruce, and she's pretty; makeup rarely graces her chocolate skin, but her hair is straightened and highlighted and it falls in loose waves down the fitted blazers and silky blouses she wears, even on warm days. Next to Bruce's baggy jeans and T-shirts, Allyson's leather boots and stockings render her the sophisticate at first glance. But she's the one doing the dirty work: changing diapers and making dinner, wiping up the endless spills. “Then you have this other parent, who's been through hell and back—the dad, the mom, any one of them—say they want to turn their lives around. It would be very inappropriate of me when I have the right to raise my own children to not give him that fair chance. Why would I want to take away his one little thing when I've got four of my own?”

But that was at the beginning. That was back in the fall, when the case with Allen's dad was still theoretical and it looked as if the courts would lean in Allyson's favor.

 

Bruce and Allyson fell into foster care the way anyone falls into the traumas or miracles of their lives: by a mix of happenstance and hope. The year was 2000, and they already had three kids of their own at home—two little boys, Jaleel and Bruce Junior, and a daughter named Sekina who was just becoming a teenager. (Allyson's other son, born to a different father, was back in Belize.) Then one night, they got a phone call from the Administration for Children's Services (ACS)—the organization that handles child welfare for the five boroughs of New York. Bruce's sister's kids, then two and four, were being removed from their home; it wasn't safe for them to even stay the night. Could Bruce and Allyson take them? Of course, they said. Anyone would.

Bruce, who looks a little like Jay-Z with his bald head and soft jaw, stayed pretty private about the exact circumstances surrounding his sister's ordeal, but typically, this is the way a child is removed:

First, anyone who suspects abuse (by seeing marks, hearing shouts, noticing absence from school, and so on) can call a hotline. There are certain “mandated reporters”—doctors, police officers, teachers, daycare workers, and social workers, mainly—who are legally obligated to make these calls, but really, anyone can do it. The local city or county agency sends an investigator to the house to interview the parents and the kids, and to look around the rooms. A child abuse investigator can enter anyone's home at any time without a warrant.

Usually, the investigator just opens a file on the family and follows up on anything that seems suspicious or untoward on that first visit, but if the parents pose an immediate danger, he can take the kids then and there. This is what happened with Bruce's nephews.

Then the investigator has to find a place for the kids to go. He brings them back to the office, where a social worker starts making calls—usually to family members. In child welfare–speak, this is called “kinship care,” and New York State law requires it as the first line of outreach, though this law is often ignored.
Still, it's why the boys were placed with the Greens. If the child is older, say, a teenager, he might be able to indicate some adults with whom he could stay,
if
they're willing to foster him. This works in only some places, however; several states require that all foster parents be licensed via weeks of state-approved parenting classes before they can take in kids, even if they're related.
Luckily for the Greens, ACS provides emergency licensing; Bruce and Allyson could shelter the boys first and take parenting classes later.

Once a child is settled for the night, his case gets passed from ACS to one of the roughly thirty foster care agencies
that ACS contracts with, each with its own mission, style, budget, possibly a religious affiliation, and so on. At this point, ACS pretty much gets out of the way, and the foster agency handles the licensing, any troubles with the kid, connections with his birth parents, and so on. Which agency the child is assigned to is usually a matter of sheer luck, as they vary in aptitude as much as they do in approach. The kids too are subject to this roulette; if the ACS worker can't find a kinship match, the child is shuttled to whichever agency has an available family on its roster.

After Bruce and Allyson took the call and accepted the nephews, they were sent to an agency near their home for their licensing. Because Bruce's sister terminated her parental rights without a fight, they were able to adopt the older child. But the process took six years. The younger boy, who was severely autistic, ultimately had to be institutionalized. With four other kids in the house, Bruce and Allyson just didn't have the extra reserves to take care of him.

But still, they wanted more kids. Or rather, their daughter, Sekina, wanted a sister; the house was full of boys. When I first met Sekina, she was a bubbly and outgoing sixteen-year-old. She looked like a girl version of Bruce: same round cheeks and full lips, same large dark eyes that could spark with mischief or anger in turn. But Sekina's hair was what got her attention. When I met her, it was shoulder-length and streaked through with pink and neon purple, but I would see it red, blue, platinum, short, shaved, and razored through with her name curled around her skull.

Sekina started pestering Bruce and Allyson for a sister; now that they were licensed with an agency, she reasoned, they could just go back and ask for a baby girl. But Allyson was tired. She started longing for her life before motherhood, when she could go out with her friends on Friday nights, or take some space to herself. But with these desires, Allyson said, came illness.

The doctor called it depression. She called it her “mental battle”: between what she
wanted
to do and what she was
supposed
to do. “I didn't want to be tied down with no children. I was crying all the time; I wanted to be free. So I get down on my knees and I pray, saying Lord help me. And after that is when the dreams come to me.”