To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (37 page)

Unfortunately for Oneida, she didn't like any of her next placements better. After Staten Island, Oneida was moved to a home where, Oneida claimed, the foster mother hit her children with spatulas and her foster sister stole her sneakers.

Oneida was removed and sent to “a Trinidadian lady who was cool.” But she lived in the neighborhood where Oneida had been raped, and Oneida didn't want to leave the house to go to school. “The guys in that neighborhood is all on top of me, on top of me, and the lady is calling me lazy. I kind of messed it up for myself; I got in an altercation,” she said. “Horrible.”

In the next house, Oneida was alone—too alone. There were no other foster kids, and the mother made Oneida stay home by herself whenever she left. “It was horrible. There was no phone reception there; I had to go to the bathroom and talk through the window, that's how bad the connection was. And there was no cable!”

The next place had kids, but the mom was stingy, Oneida said. She wouldn't give Oneida her allowance money, and she never did the laundry. “She was an elderly lady and all she do is talk about you to the other foster girl. Horrible.”

The long string of horrible seemed to have hit pause recently, Oneida said. She liked her new foster family, just a few blocks away from the Chinese restaurant. There was a mom and a dad, and a few foster kids, and the parents had even let Oneida's ex-boyfriend sleep over, on the couch. She had her own room with a queen-size bed, and the family watched movies together, on cable.

Oneida had lived with her latest family for only two weeks, and she knew all about the deceptive promise of a honeymoon period. Still, this short reprieve from upheavals had allowed her to think again about her long-term plans. Oneida was almost eighteen and figured she had about one year of high school left to graduate. She'd attended three different high schools in the past academic year alone, and all of those infrequently, so it was hard to tell where her credits really lined up. She knew she wasn't prepared to take the Regents exams, and the new high school she was thinking of attending didn't even offer a Regents diploma, which was a requisite for college.

“With the diploma that I'll get, I'll be better off with a GED. I can only go to a vocational school, like a cooking school. Or dancing, I love dancing,” Oneida said, tapping at her cell phone. “I want to do something professional, where you get up in the morning and wear a suit. Like a lawyer, or a security guard. I want to have high income, but I don't know how to do that with my diploma.”

Oneida's real dream, she said, was to move into her own apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, near Knickerbocker and DeKalb, where she was born. Ideally, she'd work for the Special Victims Unit. “I want to be a detective, like on
Law and Order
,” she added, finally putting down her phone and widening her small brown eyes. “The only thing is it may not be possible because I'm too emotional. I'm emotional when I see dead people, or kids getting raped.”

 

Bruce Green ended up hitting the same psychological wall that Glenn did after Oneida left. While Bruce had once believed he could contain any teenager's chaos in his strict and loving household, Bruce had reached the limits of his faith. Three years after I met Bruce, he and Allyson had accepted their eighth teenager, and they had just called the agency with a ten-day notice to send him back.

“David was on a gay crusade,” Bruce said, referring to the boy who had moved in and promptly sparked a crush from their autistic son, Russell. Bruce was standing on the stoop, drinking a beer and sanding the door frame, preparing it for a new coat of varnish. Over the past year or so, Bruce had rarely been around when I came over after school let out to see the kids or Allyson; he had taken to working the swing shift as well as most weekends. But a recent knee injury had landed Bruce some comp time, and he was using the spare hours to make repairs around the house. Allyson was down at the carport with Allen and baby Anthony, where the cement had been broken down for some repaving. “We did a ten-day notice on David because he wanted to show out. He was arguing with everybody about being gay—he said we isolated him in the house, said Allyson pushed religion on him.”

Rather than working to mold David into the Green ideology, Bruce sent him back; it was easier that way, and besides, Bruce's ideas about foster care had shifted over the past three years. He sanded more slowly and looked at me. “I used to think that any child that came to us, we could help, but . . .” Bruce paused to take a drink from his beer. “We won't be taking any more teenagers. They already have too much damage.”

Bruce's tone was sad, with a bitter edge. Allyson was often stressing the ways the system failed the kids, but in Bruce's eyes, the foster parents were a primary casualty. He reminded me of the way he'd suggested that Edwin Gould merely provide photo vouchers for foster families whenever they took in a new child. The agency had loved the idea, he said, but it had been three years, and nothing had come of it.

Still, Bruce said, even without the benefits, and even with all the hard times, he would stick it out with the kids he had left. They may try his patience, they may disobey and run away, but, he said, “Most foster parents would just give up, they'd say, ‘You're grown.' But we don't do that—we're family, and we're in it for the long haul.”

I asked about Dominique and Bruce flinched. He was squatting to sand the lower part of the door frame. “Dominique was supposed to be a favor,” he said, defensive. “She was supposed to be an emergency placement and she stayed seven months.”

I reminded him that he was going to adopt her. I was there.

Bruce stood up to look me square in the face. He had a good twelve inches on me. “Yes, we were going to adopt her. But even Dominique, in her most honest moment, will say she pushed. And that was her mistake. She fought with everybody—she fought with Fatimah, she fought with Tonya, she even fought with Charles, and he doesn't fight with anybody.” Bruce sighed and wiped his hands on his jeans, which had elaborate crosses stitched into the back pockets. “I used to think I could save any child who walked through my door, but I can't. Dominique just wasn't a fit.”

Bruce moved on to varnishing. He worked in silence for a while until Russell suddenly emerged from around the corner.

“Why aren't you downtown?” Bruce and Allyson said, almost in perfect unison. Bruce put down his paintbrush to cross his arms. “What time is it?” Bruce asked.

Russell looked confused. “A little after two?”

“And where should you be?”

Russell turned to leave again. “Downtown.”

Both Bruce and Allyson still knew where all the kids should be at every hour of the day, and everyone's schedules were still full of extra classes and tutoring and enrichment programs and counseling. But with the teenagers, Bruce had recently surrendered the strict curfew rules. Everybody was over eighteen, save for Tonya's younger brother, William, who had moved in and was always home by eight anyway. Technically, Bruce knew he couldn't enforce anything anymore.

“They know when they're supposed to be in, that you've got to get to bed for a school night,” he said, patiently stroking on varnish. He figured they were old enough now to experience their own consequences. “If you're getting home at midnight, how are you going to do school? If you start failing classes, everything spirals out from there.”

And this led us to talking about what had happened to the Green family dream of difficult teenagers settling, and then excelling, within the walls of the house on DeKalb. According to Bruce, it was the Internet that “started everything downhill,” with the foster girls variously breaking rules—moving out, running away, getting arrested. He wished he'd never bought the kids their laptops; he traced all the troubles back to his one big splurge at the computer store. “Did they do their homework on there?” he asked me, rhetorically. “No. It was all MySpace, YourSpace, TheySpace, EverybodySpace. As a father, you don't want to
see
the kinds of things these kids look at.”

Bruce could control, to some extent, where his kids went and how late they stayed out, as long as he held the keys to the front door. But with the Internet, his authority faded; the outside world permeated his heavily guarded walls, and his kids latched on to the temptations available to them. He had once preached that his kids didn't need friends because the family was enough. With the Internet, the girls could stay up all night, friending hundreds of strangers, creating flimsy, flashy personas, and hatching virtual plans for new and impossible lives.

Fatimah took some personal responsibility for her part in the partial dissolution of the Green family. “Before I got adopted, I felt like I had something to fight for,” she said. For as long as she could remember, Fatimah had wanted to break free from the hell of foster care; it's why she did well in school, why she tried to please her foster parents, why she kept herself healthy and fit—as though she were a prize someone would want if only she were perfect enough. “Getting adopted messed up everything. It messed up my train of thought. It messed up my goal. It was like, ‘This is it? This is what I got adopted for?' This is not the dream I thought I had.”

But Fatimah also said it was the Greens' particular style—their strictness—that made her and the other teenagers want to get out of there. “What made the family fall apart is that everyone was waiting to get to the age to be able to run. I mean, if you cage a bird up it's gonna come out crazy,” she said. “Like, for instance, our dog. Before we got the dog, it was caged up for eight months. So now, even when you tell her to come out of the cage, she'll stay in there 'cause that's what she's used to. But when she does come out, she's vicious.”

Allyson placed the blame somewhere else. “When they have contact with their birth parents—that's where the problems start,” she told me, even though she had once strongly advocated for these connections. She listed a few examples: Fatimah didn't go to school when she lived with her mom in Queens. Tonya had spiraled downhill by first running to her mom's place in the Bronx, and then hooking up with old friends who led her to that shoplifting charge in Pennsylvania. “When they have contact with their birth parents, they start believing they have options. Chanel never behaved that kind of way, because her mother passed when she was five years old.”

Just like people discussing the problems in foster care as a whole, everyone at the Greens' was touching a different part of the elephant. And just like their counterparts in the bigger picture, everybody's intentions were perfectly good.

This is why child welfare experts try to fix the myriad problems in child welfare and fail: the problems are rooted in a society that cares little for its children, for its poor, its mentally ill, undereducated, incarcerated, addicted, and isolated. Child welfare is but a thimbleful of water on a raging social fire; the house on DeKalb couldn't begin to contain its flames.

 

Bruce watched Russell walk away until he turned the corner. He was finished painting and suggested we go inside to heat up the leftover king crab legs from dinner the night before. Bruce knew that the problems he'd experienced stemmed from something much deeper than the Internet, his family dynamics, or even foster care at large. “You know who's responsible for this?” he asked, slathering butter on the crab. “The government.”

Bruce went back outside to eat and gestured toward the public elementary school on the corner of their block. It's a brick bunker of a place that had been put on the state's list of failing schools in 2004.
Most of the enrolled students came from the Eleanor Roosevelt projects across the street or from nearby homeless shelters, and none of the Green children had ever attended. “Who's teaching our kids? Did they go to the best teaching colleges? Or did they go to some rinky-dink school?” Bruce asked. “And then you've got children having children. Children who went to these schools, who aren't prepared beyond the fifth grade. They're not prepared to have children, so they get their children taken away and the government pays $7,000 a year to someone else to raise that child, and even more to an agency.” Bruce paused to watch Anthony trying to climb a plastic chair. He was walking already, and his brother, baby Allen, was almost ready to start kindergarten. “What if they gave that money to the parents directly and didn't take away the child—or to the schools so you wouldn't have this process to begin with? It's a business.”

For Bruce, the financial motivations in this business were rooted in historical racism. “What was one of the biggest crimes during slavery?” he asked, wiping his hands on a napkin, not waiting for an answer. “Teaching a slave to read. It pays to keep people stupid.”

The pattern looked like this: The government created failing schools, which created failing child-parents whose children were taken away. These children were then failed again in foster care, so they could end up in jail, or else feeding the system with more kids. “Jails are a business too,” Bruce said sadly. “You've got women in prison making Victoria's Secret bras.
You've got to keep people stupid, so you can put them in jail and get them to do your work.”

In 2010, New York's public advocate proposed legislation to track, for the first time, what happens to foster kids once they leave the system.
If it passes, the bill will require ACS to coordinate with the Department of Housing and provide public quarterly reports about the kids who receive Medicaid, public housing, food stamps, and welfare within six months of emancipation. It calls for collaboration with the police and Department of Homeless Services to calculate how many end up homeless or in jail. The bill does not require collaboration with local colleges or employment programs to track enrollment, maybe because these figures are too small to matter, or because the main concern is with the youth who continue to drag on public resources. But the bill does not require any direct follow-up with the eight hundred foster kids who leave care each year at all. If the bill passes as it's designed, it will provide only a more precise picture of the worst-case results—indicating the city's expectation from the start.