Monday, November 01, 2004
Growing out of Foster Care
In her South Seattle neighborhood, the facts of Tamelia's life are so common they can seem a cliché. A mother battling drug addiction. A father living most of his life in jail. A child separated from her siblings and living in foster care, in a house that never became home. Sometimes Tamelia makes a joke of it, calling herself a crack baby. Sometimes she pushes her pain into poetry, trying to make it sound pretty. Most of the time, she uses the past as fuel, turning the anger to power, dead-set on being the first in her family to graduate from college. But trying so hard takes energy. And one day last spring, Tamelia got tired.
...
"Normal kids from well-functioning, upper-middle-class families aren't ready to be on their own at 18, let alone kids with this kind of baggage," says state social worker Karen Rall.
The state Department of Social and Health Services reported this summer that only half of foster-care youths had completed high school or earned a GED within a year of leaving the system. Only a quarter had started some college classes. Fewer than half were employed; of those, about 47 percent were making poverty-level wages or less.
Recent studies identify teenagers in foster care as especially vulnerable to depression, substance abuse and pregnancy. Without intensive support, advocates say, teenagers leaving foster care will simply transition from one state agency to another. About one-third of former foster youths were enrolled in at least one public-assistance program within a year, the state's study found.
...
So Tamelia took it on herself to make mentors of her teachers and coaches at Franklin High. She earned herself an MLK Jr. Scholarship, one of 25 granted to students in the Mount Baker neighborhood. She got a job at McDonald's.
And as she neared the critical age of 18, she signed up for a YMCA program that helps foster children move into housing and on to college. It took calls to three caseworkers, but she got her name on that list.
"She was the one who said, 'I'm going to be turning 18 and I need help,' " says YMCA caseworker Karlie Keller. "Kids never advocate for themselves like that — ever."
Through it all, Tamelia has stayed stable, living in the same house with relatives for more than a decade. In foster-care terms, that makes her lucky.
But a peek inside her life shows how hard it can be to help teenagers in foster care, and how tangled life can be for those children, how easy it is to trip and fall.
In her South Seattle neighborhood, the facts of Tamelia's life are so common they can seem a cliché. A mother battling drug addiction. A father living most of his life in jail. A child separated from her siblings and living in foster care, in a house that never became home. Sometimes Tamelia makes a joke of it, calling herself a crack baby. Sometimes she pushes her pain into poetry, trying to make it sound pretty. Most of the time, she uses the past as fuel, turning the anger to power, dead-set on being the first in her family to graduate from college. But trying so hard takes energy. And one day last spring, Tamelia got tired.
...
"Normal kids from well-functioning, upper-middle-class families aren't ready to be on their own at 18, let alone kids with this kind of baggage," says state social worker Karen Rall.
The state Department of Social and Health Services reported this summer that only half of foster-care youths had completed high school or earned a GED within a year of leaving the system. Only a quarter had started some college classes. Fewer than half were employed; of those, about 47 percent were making poverty-level wages or less.
Recent studies identify teenagers in foster care as especially vulnerable to depression, substance abuse and pregnancy. Without intensive support, advocates say, teenagers leaving foster care will simply transition from one state agency to another. About one-third of former foster youths were enrolled in at least one public-assistance program within a year, the state's study found.
...
So Tamelia took it on herself to make mentors of her teachers and coaches at Franklin High. She earned herself an MLK Jr. Scholarship, one of 25 granted to students in the Mount Baker neighborhood. She got a job at McDonald's.
And as she neared the critical age of 18, she signed up for a YMCA program that helps foster children move into housing and on to college. It took calls to three caseworkers, but she got her name on that list.
"She was the one who said, 'I'm going to be turning 18 and I need help,' " says YMCA caseworker Karlie Keller. "Kids never advocate for themselves like that — ever."
Through it all, Tamelia has stayed stable, living in the same house with relatives for more than a decade. In foster-care terms, that makes her lucky.
But a peek inside her life shows how hard it can be to help teenagers in foster care, and how tangled life can be for those children, how easy it is to trip and fall.
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