FOSTER CARE IS NO PICNIC

FOSTER CARE IS NO PICNIC
Wednesday, June 09, 2010 By Josh Wood E. L. Hickey High School

I’m a resident in a level 12 group foster care home in Sacramento, and living here is no picnic.
There has been a lot of criticism of the foster care program lately, but it has basically come from the outside. Let me tell you, it doesn’t look so good from the inside either.

Folks who run the program think that all of the kids are manipulating, lying, being sneaky and never doing anything right. Knowing this, I’m not doing anything that could get me in trouble, but they still think I am.

This attitude not only has a bad effect on the kids. It affects the staff that works with them too.

Some of the staffers who work closest with the kids and do the best they can to help them can’t do anything about some of the abusive, low down stuff that goes and doesn’t get noticed by the general public.They are punished for trying to do the right thing.

One staffer who played basketball with the kids and has bought them nice shoes and clothes has already been suspended twice, because the people in charge don’t like staff to get that close. There are now 80 percent fewer residents in this placement than when I got here – not enough to get a basketball game going. So the staffer started playing with us, and his boss suspended him because he said it was a rule and he should have known better.He got in trouble for trying to do the right thing.

The only people that could help us with our problems is Community Care Licensing, which we’re supposed to be allowed to call. But whenever one of us tries, we are ignored and face retribution.

One of the results of the stuff I have been talking about is the suicide on March 12 of my roommate for the past 11 months. He was like a brother to me.

Certain situations in his life brought him to the group home. The stress of everything going on in his life was too much, and I know he didn’t get the help he needed from foster care.

http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/articleid/365983/newspaperid/3408/Foster_care_is_no_picnic.aspx