Foster teens ready to tell city council how to fix system

Foster teens ready to tell city council how to fix system


By Petula Dvorak
Friday, January 22, 2010

The room the other night was full of teenagers and their teenage habits. There was the eye-roller, the wise-cracker, the slouch-in-the-seater.

They had colorful markers and a dry-erase board for the meeting, and they talked about college applications and jobs and dorms.

And they also talked about the friend who killed someone in self-defense in a group home. And what it's like to pass by your mom on the street when she's homeless and barely recognizes you. And to wonder about your brothers and sisters and whether they even know about you. And how, if you have extra-curricular activities or an after-school job, chances are the kitchen is locked up when you get home late and there is no food for you. The teens are foster kids. Their parents are basically the District's taxpayers.

Most of them grew up in "the system" as they call it, and any hope for adoption or a long-term foster home or reunification with their families is minuscule, so they wait until they age out.

Finding permanent solutions for foster kids has long been difficult across the country and particularly in the District, where 47 percent of the kids in foster care are between 15 and 21 years old.

Many bounce from foster home to foster home, awkward, combative or withdrawn. And often, by the time they are 13, they get put into a group home run by the government.

Between 150 to 200 kids age out of foster care in the District every year. According to a 2008 study. by Child and Family Services, only 14 percent have the resources to support themselves, about 66 percent suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, 34 percent are pregnant or parents, 40 percent have a high school diploma and about 10 percent are enrolled in college.


Nadia Gold-Moritz, executive director of the Young Women's Project, which is working with foster teens, said too many of these youths end up homeless, in jail, hurt or dead.

Trey Jones, who lives in a District group home, doesn't want to be one of them. "I've been in the system since I was 5," the 19-year-old told me. "And I've got family everywhere, in New Jersey, Atlanta, Colorado. I never understood why nobody worked harder to get me with my family."

Trey, who wears a tie, an argyle sweater and a shirt with cuff links, plans on starting classes this fall for computer science. He will get some help from the government because the District is one of the nation's pioneers in changing the age for leaving the system from 18 to 21. It means that Trey will get financial help after high school with housing and tuition.

He and a few other foster teens are planning for a D.C. Council hearing Friday on what they've gone through and how they think the foster-care system can be fixed.

They have been practicing their testimonies at night at the Young Women's Project. With their highlighters and charts, they are breaking down the problems they've experienced and the solutions they propose.

In a rare twist, the kids and advocates don't want more money. The programs for older foster kids are well-funded, they say. But they think the money can be spent better. Life skills training should begin at 15 for these kids, not 20.

Trey's got his cuff links and his composure. He's got descriptions of long court battles and lawyers in his case, and his legal quest to meet the little brother who doesn't know he exists. He is totally together.

It's going to be a little harder for Derek Reid, who's on his third social worker. "When I need a permission slip signed for school or something, I'm calling and calling, and my social worker doesn't answer," he said. "It's like she's supposed to be my mom, she's my guardian, and how you supposed to feel with the one adult who takes care of you never answers the phone?"

Derek, 18, hears from friends about his mentally ill mom, who is haunting their old neighborhood in her dirty robes. He saw her last month just as he was getting on the bus. He tried to tell her that he got a $50,000 scholarship to go to art school. She looked right past him.

He wonders what he's going to do after he graduates. He wants a job in graphic arts, but he knows it's going to tough to be independent once he turns 21.

"I just want to be with someone I trust," he said. Who does he trust? A high school counselor who took an interest in him and helped him get that scholarship.

"There's no one in your life you trust besides a counselor at school?" I asked him.

"Not really," he tells me.

Princess Clayborne interrupts, as she does many times. She is 17, and a strong, confident, smart young woman who was adopted when she was 5 years old. She recently learned about the status of her little brother because he was featured as a child of the week on television. Occasionally, people who look like her stop her on the street and introduce themselves. They are cousins she had never met.


"These are not sob stories. This is real life. We're not crying about it, and we're not asking you to cry about it," she said. "We just want people to know what we're going through."

E-mail me at dvorakp@washpost.com.

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