Will Foster Care Cuts Drive More Runaways to the Streets?

Will Foster Care Cuts Drive More Runaways to the Streets?
By Adam Hyla • on February 23, 2010


Gregoire’s proposed budget hits at two programs aimed at getting troubled kids to gain independence

Seventeen-year-old Mikhail Stewart has never ridden a horse. Or pushed a lawnmower. Driving a car? Forget it. But she recently got on a quad– a four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle. And of course she had a good time: the kind of time she hopes to have more of when she turns 18.

Then, free at last, “I can get my own place, sit back, have a cup of coffee,” she says.

Stewart’s got more reason than most teens to be excited. She’s a foster child. There’s neither a father nor a mother in charge, but only the state Children’s Administration. And it can be a little overbearing.

Children are always surveying the landscape of authority to see what they might claim for themselves. For children in foster care, whose foster parents are assigned by the state, rebellion against parental authority can also become a direct rebellion against perceived failures of the state as a care provider.

In Stewart and many other children’s experiences, the state doesn’t manage its foster care responsibilities very well. “Look, I don’t want to bag on the state,” she says, “but they’re just hiring people off the street.”

Among the 19 places she’s lived since she was 5, “I’ve been in extensively abusive homes.” She lived in places where caregivers met the state requirement that there be food — but where the fridge door was padlocked. Where the adults were drunk. Where she had bruises all over her legs. Where she suffered much worse.

Finally, the state said there were no more homes in which to put her. So what she’s getting now is a little bit of freedom.

Stewart lives with an in-home manager who is not a foster parent, but “more of a person who I turn to if I’m in trouble,” she says. “I’m staying with her while CYS (the Olympia-area nonprofit Community Youth Services) teaches me everything I need to know.”

The program “is my family. Not necessarily the home or the person, but the structure around it. I know I’m going to be OK so long as I do the right thing and I’m responsible.”

The 1999 Homeless, Youth Prevention/Protection and Engagement (HOPE) Act set up a shelter system runaway kids could voluntarily enter without the intervention of a social worker: a 30-day respite from the streets while a social worker comes up with some alternatives. The state law also created the Responsible Living Skills Program (RLSP), Stewart’s program, designed for adolescents who haven’t successfully bonded in a state-arranged home. It offers kids help in navigating their independence: tasks that wards of the state may never have been taught to do, like applying for work or school, buying groceries and cooking meals, or reading a bus schedule.

Though Stewart has never run away, many of the participants in her program’s 32-bed network have. At age 15 and up, their chances of being adopted are fading. And their 18th birthdays, when the Children’s Administration no longer holds a claim on them, are drawing near.

Children’s advocate Jim Theofelis says he wrote the HOPE Act in response to the processes he saw kids endure when he was a social worker. They would seek a bed late at night, and “I would say dumb things like ‘Meet me here tomorrow at 9 a.m.,’” he says. “Of course the next morning the kid’s not there.”

As director of the statewide child advocacy group The Mockingbird Society, Theofelis is wondering how the governor’s proposed cut to HOPE Act programs will work out — and how the state could still fulfill its legal obligation to discourage runaways.

The governor’s December budget proposal eliminated the shelter program from the General Fund, reducing its $972,000 budget by 33 percent, and reduced the $1.1 million Responsible Living Skills Program by $765,000, or 44 percent. The five non-profits contracted by the state to run the RLSP are at 80-100 percent of capacity. On average, 64 percent of the shelter beds are being utilized, according to the Children’s Administration.

Both the voluntary shelter and the life-readiness training program let troubled kids know that they can “reinvest in the hope for their own lives, believe in the system and the adult folks around them,” says Theofelis.

And if you enter the RLSP, you can stay until age 18: no more shuffling off to another foster home.

“If you come back to the table and participate in pro-social activities, you don’t have to look at moving elsewhere before you age out,” he continues.

“I fear we’re on the cusp of breaking that promise to those people.”

Stewart’s social worker, Bernadette Irish, says the life-skills program allows some “very sheltered kids” the chance to dispel the mythic nature of life after foster care. It’s a daunting world of great freedom and practical responsibilities. And if, after they’ve gotten a taste, the outside world feels a little overwhelming, they can sign up for optional state-funded services that last until age 21.

The bottom-line message that her program sends adolescents: “You don’t have to run.”

Of the four youths on Irish’s caseload, three are going to college this fall, and one is postponing it a year.

Stewart is spending two years at a local community college before she heads to the University of Washington. She will study anesthesiology and then, because anesthesiologists make good money, she wants to be a philanthropist. Right now, she feels a spiritual calling to speak for other foster children: those who did run, those who may have decided to drop out, get high, drunk or pregnant, and who could use some more help.

“They can get the same thing I expect, which is life,” she says. “All this is doing is ensuring that we have the same advantages that every other kid has.”

http://www.olympianews.org/2010/02/23/will-foster-care-cuts-drive-more-runaways-to-the-streets/