“It could have been so much worse,” Kelsey says matter-of-factly, wrapping up her life story with a modest shrug. “I was lucky.”
Lucky is the last word that comes to mind after hearing the 20-year-old describe her short-yet-volatile life. From her mother’s sudden death right before her second birthday to the decade plus she spent under the care of abusive family members, Kelsey has endured trauma unimaginable to most.
There were beatings. And the times she was treated like a human ashtray. For sport, Kelsey says her father, a sociopath and her primary abuser, often pitted her against her twin brother, forcing the children to beat each other mercilessly for his own entertainment. One time, he smashed Kelsey’s pet turtle with his shoe just to get a reaction.
Kelsey (whose name has been changed for confidentiality) says teachers began to notice red flags when she was in first grade. She’d often fall asleep at her desk and show up to school with dark bruises. She was constantly nervous. Her stomach always hurt.
When a teacher called Texas Child Protective Services (CPS), a caseworker named Missy started coming around but — charmed by Kelsey’s father — she barely scratched beyond the surface.
For Kelsey, Missy turned out to be just another name on the long list of people in her life who had failed her. The system, designed to protect abused and neglected children, became just another source of disappointment.
According to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), which runs CPS, their mission “is to protect children, the elderly and people with disabilities from abuse, neglect and exploitation by involving clients, families and communities.”
Among their core values: “protect the unprotected.”
But no one protected Kelsey.
She fell through the cracks, overlooked by an overburdened system that struggled then and struggles now with ever-growing caseloads, high employee turnover and a shortage of caring foster families.
Even at age 9, when the state finally removed her from her father and placed her with her paternal grandmother in what’s called kinship care, Kelsey’s situation hardly improved.
Her grandmother, she says, also abused her. And her father, whom she describes as “cruel” and “abusive in every single way,” essentially got off scot-free, losing little more than his parental rights.
“I hate CPS,” Kelsey says. “They let me down. I feel like they didn’t do a good job in my case and don’t in many other kids’ cases. If CPS had done their job, I would have gotten out earlier and [my father] would have gone to jail.”
Between stints at her grandmother’s house, Kelsey spent the majority of her pre-teen and teen years heavily medicated for post-traumatic stress disorder, shuttling back and forth from detention centers, mental hospitals and group foster homes. For a while, she lived at My Friend’s House, an emergency shelter for area youth.
She’s attempted suicide twice, although she insists the attempts were half-hearted. “I never wanted to die,” she says. “I just wanted someone to listen.”
Still, Kelsey considers herself one of the lucky ones.
During the 2013 fiscal year, eight Texas children died in foster care from abuse or neglect. The deaths — a record high and fourfold increase over the previous year — shone a spotlight on the state of the system, prompting experts to question whether DFPS is failing at its mission to “protect the unprotected” and igniting conversation surrounding the welfare of children in protective custody as well as those, like Kelsey, who are desperate for the state’s intervention.
Wayne Carson, Ph.D., chief executive officer of ACH (All Church Home) Child and Family Services, a Fort Worth foster care child-placement agency, contends that 99 percent of children in state care today are safe.
But what about the other one percent?
CPS is anxious
Plagued by stereotypes and widely stigmatized, CPS is no stranger to scrutiny. But Andrea Lawrence, foster care and adoption program director at Buckner International in Dallas, insists the negative reputation is unfair. “People think CPS doesn’t care,” she allows. “CPS cares very much. It’s just trying to balance all the different cases that come to them.”
And the number of cases is staggering.
There are approximately 17,000 Texas children in foster care — more than 3,000 in the DFW area alone. Of those, 90 percent are placed and monitored by 200-plus privately contracted child-placement agencies (the other 10 percent are handled by the state).
One of the largest child welfare agencies in the country, CPS operates on a two-year, $2.5 billion budget and employs nearly 8,000 people. But according to a class-action lawsuit filed in 2011 by New York-based advocacy group Children’s Rights, it’s not enough, and children are being failed every single day by underpaid and overworked caseworkers employed by an inefficiently run agency.
The suit, which was given the green light to proceed by a federal judge last August, cites a myriad of problems within the system, leading to unsafe placements for children who are, generally speaking, already traumatized.
According to Children’s Rights, the state violates the rights of children in foster care by subjecting them to frequent moves between foster placements, routinely separating sibling groups in foster care and employing an insufficient number of caseworkers for the amount of cases requiring processing.
Case in point: Child Welfare League of America recommends social workers balance no more than 15 cases per month. But, due to the sheer volume of cases and a shortage of caseworkers, the average daily workload for a CPS worker is more than 30 cases, rendering it nearly impossible to adequately vet foster families, build a rapport with each placement and keep tabs on the well-being of each child.
CPS denies the allegations. But Marissa Gonzales, public information officer for DFPS, admits the agency struggles to keep caseworker positions filled. “Filling those positions and keeping them filled is always a challenge,” she says. “The job is a difficult and stressful one. Turnover is something CPS is always battling.”
Michele Gorman, Ph.D., cofounder and chief executive officer of Refuge House in Dallas and San Antonio, says a shortage of quality foster families doesn’t help. As children wait for homes, they’re lumped into crowded shelters or — like Kelsey — placed in improperly vetted kinship care.
In some cases, she says, they’re returned to dangerous homes, giving undeserving parents “continual redos.”
“They’re putting children back in abusive situations,” Gorman emphasizes. “A lot of times, caseworkers just want to get cases off their caseload, so they reunify [with parents] before it’s time. And you wonder why there’s so much negativity around CPS? This is why.”
Gonzales calls Gorman’s statement “incorrect and uninformed,” saying, “CPS would not place a child in harm’s way.”
“But there’s always a need for more foster families,” Gonzales adds. “We encourage and applaud the work that private agencies do to recruit capable and caring foster families.”
To combat the negativity surrounding CPS and work toward a more efficient system, DFPS recently approved a set of new safety-related rules and rolled out plans for a redesign intended to streamline the foster-care system. Late last year, ACH Child and Family Services partnered with DFPS to implement the new program, which originated in 2010.
“We’re trying to create a system where children are placed in homes where they’re going to be able to stick with them and provide services until they either go home to their family or are adopted,” Carson says of the program, which will welcome its first class of children in seven nearby counties starting July 1.
“CPS, like many others, is anxious,” Gonzales admits. “But it’s too early to know if it will work on a statewide basis.”
As part of the overhaul, CPS hopes to keep children and youth closer to home, improve the quality of care and reduce the number of times children are moved between foster homes by improving the vetting process of prospective foster families.
“I think sometimes decisions are made just because a child needs a bed,” Carson says. “The more families you have that apply to be foster parents, the more selective you can be about who actually becomes a foster parent.”
But critics argue it isn’t enough, calling the redesign “an added layer of bureaucracy” and arguing that the long-term solution lies with the decision makers who approve funding.
Gorman, who’s been on the frontline of foster care as a worker and foster parent for nearly a decade, is on the fence. “I see pros and cons on the horizon,” she predicts.
A life in limbo
While CPS strives to make improvements, thousands of children continue to unwittingly participate in a waiting game, wondering if they’ll go home, be placed with family or become eligible for adoption, an arduous process that requires the termination of parental rights (which can take years).
Thirteen-year-old Natalie’s been in limbo for a year. Until CPS showed up on her doorstep, Natalie (not her real name) had never heard of foster care. She didn’t know what a caseworker was until one loaded her into a car and removed her indefinitely.
It’s been a hard year ever since for the girl (CPS declined to share the reason for Natalie’s removal). Natalie’s first foster home wasn’t a good fit. “It felt like a prison,” she says, going on to explain that things got better when she came to stay with her current foster parent, Chantel (not her real name). “It was different. It didn’t feel like foster care.”
When Chantel picks her up from school, Natalie tells friends she’s leaving with her “aunt.” And when she leaves early each Friday for visitation with her biological mother, she finds creative excuses for her absence. “I just make up stuff,” she says. “Sometimes I ‘go to the doctor’ … and they believe it!”
For Natalie, keeping up the facade is easier than divulging the truth. She fears kids at school just wouldn’t understand.
She’s probably right.
“As soon as you tell someone you’re in foster care, they judge you,” 22-year-old Mantee Hyder of Lancaster affirms. Hyder, a former foster kid, hid the fact that she lived with a foster family for years, not even telling her best friend until late in high school.
“People think that foster care kids are bad,” she laments. “It’s sad.”
Victims of abuse and neglect, the emotional baggage these children carry can be heavy.
“Some of the kids are troubled,” Hyder reveals. “But not everybody handles everything the same way.”
Travis Jones, development director at Covenant Kids, an Arlington child-placement agency, says the challenges these kids face can be substantial though not insurmountable, given a loving, stable environment.
“We see developmental delays and academic problems and health concerns,” he reports. “More than anything, we see kids act like who they feel that they are. If you believe that you are stupid, dumb, ugly and unlovable, you’re going to act like it. They feel like they’re alone and they feel like they can’t trust other people.”
Chantel, a foster parent of seven years, stresses that with love and patience, trust can be rebuilt. She admits that she had “ups and downs” with Natalie. “But I know she loves me and I love her,” she explains. “This was very difficult for her. But we need to end the myth that foster care is a bad thing. It’s a home away from home. They just want to be loved and treated like any other child.”
Natalie is a rare example of the system, which strives to keep families intact, working. Her mother completed the steps necessary for reunification as outlined by the state, and Natalie and her siblings (who were placed in a separate homes) will return home this summer, something she’s exceedingly happy about.
“It’s going to be fun playing with my siblings,” she exclaims. “[We’re] getting our family bond back.”
But frequently, children don’t get a happy ending.
Many spend years waiting for a resolution that will never come, bouncing between temporary homes and fill-in families until aging out of the system (typically at 18) and striking out on their own.
No kid is bad
“The statistics are terrible,” Jones says of the more than 20,000 children nationwide who age out of the system each year without a permanent family. These children, he says, face a particularly dire plight.
According to Children’s Rights, up to 30 percent struggle with homelessness. Fifty percent struggle with extreme financial hardship and 40 to 60 percent of young women end up pregnant within 18 months of leaving care.
Determined not to become a statistic, Kelsey fought hard to overcome her demons and make a future for herself. “I'm a different person on paper,” she admits. “If I showed you my file right now, you’d write me off.”
Given her troubled history, stemming from the abuse she suffered as a child, her case file is undoubtedly thick. But spend five minutes with the 20-year-old and you’ll find her engaging and energetic. She’s intelligent, opinionated and driven.
Today, Kelsey lives in McKinney with a loving foster parent while she works and takes classes at a local community college. She opted to participate in Extended Foster Care, a program for young adults up to 21, to gain her footing before going off to college.
Finally, she found somewhere that feels like home. “It’s a good change,” she asserts.
Kelsey would like to become a lawyer. She hopes to get married and maybe even adopt someday. “I’ve always had people dealing my cards for me,” she explains. “I want to deal my own cards. I want to be the best.”
Above all, she hopes to break down stereotypes and prove those who have written her off wrong. Like many kids in foster care, Kelsey’s spent the majority of her life put in a box, a helpless victim of her circumstances. But she hopes to be an example of what’s possible — to show that there’s no such thing as a bad kid, just bad circumstances. And she wants to prove that even when the system fails you, you don't have to fail.
“You can be fixed,” she assures. “You just need someone to love you. Genuinely, unconditionally love you. No kid is bad. People just give up too soon.”
No room for error
With stereotypes of bad kids, callous foster parents and lackadaisical caseworkers firmly in place, it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the abused and neglected children living in our own backyard and to accept the status quo.
For the vast majority of us, the phrase “foster care” elicits a mixed bag of emotions. There’s sympathy for the parentless child featured on WFAA’s Wednesday’s Child; reverence for the family down the street willing to take troubled youth into their home; disdain for the bottom feeders who allegedly cash in on children in need and, in many cases, complete indifference.
Above all, there’s confusion.
The reality is, for those of us who don’t live it, the foster care system is an entity shrouded in mystery, the children within the system abstract, seemingly foreign from our own.
But behind what is, admittedly, an exceedingly flawed system, are real adults and real children who both exemplify and shatter stereotypes.
“Don’t look at foster kids as these broken children that have no hope,” Hyder urges. “We’re like anyone else. We like to do everything your kids do. We just want somebody to love us. Kids need love. They need somebody to care about them.”
They also need a system that works, a system that will “protect the unprotected.” But until that becomes a reality, they’ll continue to need people who aren’t afraid to step in and make a difference where bureaucracy can’t; because when it comes to the lives of children, there’s no room for error. Not even 1 percent.
“It’s easy to stay removed and think of it as someone else’s problem,” Jones says. “But these are real kids. They’re our kids. They live in our neighborhoods and go to our schools. They need to be in our families.”
Published June 2014
