To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (32 page)

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 was 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.

This can be helpful, but it's not enough. The assistance checks are notoriously months late and far too low for New York rents; the figure was set in the eighties and never increased. And, while there aren't sufficient public housing units to go around, there also isn't proper coordination between ACS and the New York City Housing Authority. Applications are frequently lost or misprocessed.
Still, if kids don't go to their independent living classes, they might not know what's out there upon discharge. They might, like Tonya at the Greens', think they're getting a laptop.

One of Mary's kids, a girl named Fannie (she's one of the lesbians; Mary calls her the “chosen one”), decided not to go for formal adoption because she too had heard about all the bounty she'd inherit if she aged out of foster care independently. She had lived with Mary since 2004 and had been “morally adopted,” but she didn't tell the agency; she was nineteen and was waiting out the last two years. Why, she reasoned, had she endured the nightmare of foster care if there wasn't going to be some reward at the finish line? Fannie expected her reward to be college tuition.

Arelis Rosario-Keane was in college, and she told Fannie not to bet on it. Arelis was home on spring break; she'd just trekked in the night before on the Chinatown bus from Boston to New York, and her fleshy face was rumpled with sleep. The girls were sitting at the kitchen table; the snow outside was piled in heaps.

Fannie had heard about the $5,000 voucher program that foster kids can access for college or vocational school expenses, as long as they're in care after their sixteenth birthday. But like so many foster kids who have heard rumors of their aging-out entitlements but never had them fully explained, Fannie was misinformed. And like the rent stipend and other entitlements, the voucher program is inadequate.

In truth, Fannie could access the $5,000 whether she got adopted or not, since she passed her sixteenth birthday in care. But she'd have to choose a school with expenses that topped out at $5,000, since that's the maximum grant—and a school that could wait until November for payment since, as of 2011, that's when the checks were cut.
And she'd have to enroll before her twenty-first birthday and finish before her twenty-third—a time frame that renders most foster kids, who age out without high school diplomas, ineligible.

Arelis scoffed, “Wait 'til you have your exit meeting. Then you'll see. There's no security for you.”

The exit meeting is the last formal step for a child in foster care, and it signifies her legal discharge from care. In the meeting, the kid, the case manager from her agency, and someone at ACS discuss the child's future. The child is supposed to have somewhere to live, a safe adult she can call upon, and a written plan for income and stability. She then signs papers, and her file is officially closed.

Arelis remembered signing herself out of care at her exit meeting; she was twenty-one and hadn't yet been officially adopted by Mary. “They make you sign this yellow paper that basically says Forget This Address. Once you sign it, it says you can't ask them for nothing,” she explained. “But the thing is, I like to read what I sign. And on this paper, they check off everything they
say
they've given you. I'm like, ‘This is a lie!' Like they say they gave me money for vocational training. When did that happen?”

The ACS pamphlet
Preparing Youth for Adulthood
claims that, prior to discharge, youth should have the opportunity to participate in internships, career fairs, and vocational training. Their agencies should train them in money management and in strategies for obtaining documents—like birth certificates and immunization records. Youth ideally should know about the educational resources available to them—where they can go on to get a GED, say, or a mentor referral.

“I kept reading and I was like, ‘I didn't get this, and I didn't get that'—and they were all sitting there, claiming I had gotten these things and I hadn't,” Arelis said, the memory making her voice rise again. “And, of course, those are all the things that are supposed to make you successfully age out of foster care and know that there are other resources out there. I never heard any of that stuff before.”

Fannie was outgoing, with close-cropped hair and defined muscles, with a kind of happy, coiled energy that seemed ready to spring. She was wearing a baseball cap and a tank top, like the boys in the house. As she stared at Arelis, her strong will started to wither. Maybe college tuition was out but, she said meekly, “I heard they give you Medicaid?”

“They lied!” Arelis shouted. “They lied!”

Arelis softened her tone. “They say they give you Medicaid, but it doesn't work,” she said, shaking her head at Fannie. Before the New York State Assembly in late 2007, Legal Aid lawyers testified that far too often, foster kids' Medicaid coverage is simply dropped as soon as they leave care—even if they are still poor enough to qualify. ACS is supposed to help kids transition from foster-based Medicaid to community-based Medicaid, but as Legal Aid testified, “ACS and foster agency staff are woefully untrained on this vital issue.” Kids don't realize their coverage has been terminated until they receive bills in the mail.
Arelis didn't know about any of this, but she told Fannie, “I have bills from going to get my eye checked out, and I have to pay them.”

The only preparation for adulthood and independence that Arelis received was her independent living classes, which, Arelis said, were a joke. “I had to go all the way from Yonkers to lower Manhattan to find out they just really waste your time,” Arelis said. “They just put all these kids in a room, and what do we talk about? About how long it took us to get there, and why isn't the pizza there yet.”

Arelis made the trek primarily for the $35 stipend, but that too wasn't worth it, because it was distributed in installments: $10 here, $17 there, along with a Metro card for her ride home. In class, the kids watched movies that felt irrelevant and obscure. “They showed us videos about how to buy an apartment—like how to knock on the walls to make sure you couldn't hear through the other side. It was like, ‘How am I going to buy an apartment? I don't have any money,'” Arelis said. “They set you up for failure. They really do.”

Mary's house, and Mary herself, are antidotes to that setup. Mary doesn't push her kids into adulthood with prescribed sets of expectations; she lets them live with her as long as it takes to grow into a kind of faith in themselves and family again. There are a few rules: no overnight guests; everybody has to go to school and do their chores. If the kids want jobs on top of that, they can save the money for themselves. When there are arguments, people talk it out. Nobody ever, under any circumstances, gets kicked out.

Jonathan, the young man with the golden eyes who lived for five years in the Graham Windham RTC, never imagined he'd wind up with someone like Mary. He didn't think he'd want to.

“I already had my run with families, and I was like, ‘Nah, I ain't doing that no more.' I just wanted to get out on my own and be free,” Jonathan said to me. Like most other foster kids nearing their discharge dates, Jonathan had chosen independent living as his permanency goal.

 

Jonathan was placed in a SILP apartment, after five years at Graham Windham. And even though he didn't have to pay his own rent or buy his own food, he couldn't take it. “I thought I had already tried it with families and it didn't work. But it wasn't until I resided in a SILP that I realized I didn't want to do that. I was already twenty,” Jonathan said. He knew that by his twenty-first birthday he'd be put out, and he started to panic. “I didn't graduate from high school and I didn't have enough money to be stable. My agency was pushing me to save money, but I was being rushed. I really felt like I wasn't going to do well when I got discharged—like I was going to keep falling behind and struggling and struggling. I got so frustrated, I called Mary.”

Mary had talked with Jonathan several times, when he had lived at Graham Windham. “She wanted to recruit kids who were free for adoption and connect them with adults who were interested. She was always trying to introduce me to that concept,” Jonathan said. Back then, he always said no; he was rooting for the free apartment. But once he had it, he wished he'd planned differently. “I asked Mary if she could set me up with a family, just until I could get myself together. Two weeks later, she came to the apartment and said, ‘Would you like to come and live with me?'”

Four years after this talk, Jonathan was still living with Mary. He didn't know, when he was younger, to fight for a family, he said, because he had never been in a good one. “I live in a different world now, that I didn't expect. I didn't expect to be at peace,” he said. The straight line of his haircut looked like a lid on the top of his head. “It's no longer a matter of run to this place, run to that place, so I can get my mind together. There's no more discharge states for me, no more computer life—where I'm just a name and a number with an expiration date.”

And Jonathan was making up for lost time. He was twenty-four years old, taking high school classes and working nights at a Dunkin' Donuts. “Before, mostly, I didn't go nowhere for Christmas, didn't go nowhere for my birthday. Actually, everything I didn't have before—it's the opposite. The house, my mother, my family—now I have it,” Jonathan said. “Eventually, I'll get my own place, but now I like this.”

When kids are sixteen or eighteen, they don't know they have other needs than the practical. And foster care has always favored safe housing over psychological stability, so kids follow this model into adulthood too. But what Mary has found, and what the kids discover once they've been out of the system for a while, is that they all need to regress.

“When they get here may be the first time they're able to go back and relive some of what they've lost,” Mary said. “These kids will sit on your lap, have to sleep in your bed; one of my kids had to have a baby bottle for a while. She was fourteen.”

 

Mary thinks the group home orthodoxy of rules and consequences doesn't work for foster kids; it's too standardized, and as Kecia intimated, kids are often emotionally stranded in a life stage when they were first traumatized. Said Mary, “We say an eighteen-year-old should be doing such-and-such, but you can't have milestone expectations like that. They can't all go at the same pace, and they're stuck in different places. They might be twenty, but emotionally fourteen.”