Help Grows For Kids Aging Out of Foster Care
Lifeworks opened its new 31,000 square foot campus in East Austin last week, adding to the local resources available to help foster kids growing into adulthood. Photo by LifeworksAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
More than 16,000 children are in foster care in Texas. And when those kids become adults, they’re often left to fend for themselves. But the amount of help available to those youth appears to be slowly growing in Travis County.
Of the 1,500 children who age out of foster care every year in Texas, some are success stories, like Dustin Haley. He was put into foster care when he was eight years old.
“My mom was abusive to my sisters mostly. She was alcoholic, did drugs,” Haley said. “They were just getting in a fight, an actual physical fight. And they ended up outside on the front lawn fighting. My other sister Erin called the police, and the police came. A [Child Protective Services] caseworker came and took us to a shelter.”
That began Haley’s ten year journey through Texas the foster care system. He’s now 21 years old. He’s in his junior year at the University of Texas at Austin. And he’s volunteering as a Court Appointed Special Advocate with CASA of Travis County to help other foster kids.
“I had a lot of caring adults in my life,” he said. “I didn’t connect with any of them. And I really want to connect with a kid and help them realize their potential, not get down and dejected in the system, because it is tough.”
Watch a video interview with Dustin Haley.
Some 18-year-olds with generous, loving parents would have a hard time living independently. But 18-year-olds who have no parents, no adoptive family, and have bounced around thirty different foster homes? They’re facing even longer odds.
Michael Salazar, a front line social worker with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, says he sees a lot of these “unfortunate stories.” He remembers one client in particular, whom he declined to name because of confidentiality rules.
“He did have a job for a while. He lived in Austin for a little while,” Salazar said. “He ended up moving to Houston. Went there, met some friends, and that was pretty much it, he ended up being homeless.”
Studies suggest anywhere from 15 to 40 percent of foster children experience homelessness within 18 months of aging out of the system. Steve Bewsey with the local non-profit Lifeworks tries to help them.
“I like to think about it this way. These kids have been classified as this and that, ‘Well he’s a foster kid,’ or, ‘He’s a kid with mental health problems.’ In reality, especially once they turn 18, that’s my neighbor,” Bewsey said.
Bewsey thinks the most important thing to do for “emancipated foster youth”, as they’re officially called, is to make them feel like they are part of a larger community.
“My sense of doing this for 42 years is that that’s the key,” he said. “When you feel like you’re being cared for, when you feel like you’re part of a community, and when you’re able to give back, whether it’s the church, the neighborhood, whatever it is, it’s getting those kids connected to a community. That’s the biggest barrier.”
Lifeworks last week opened a new 31,000 square foot youth and family resource center in East Austin, behind Austin Community College’s Eastview Campus. Phase Two of the project will see the construction of a 45-unit affordable housing development for homeless young people.
“I think the challenges faced by youth who are aging out of foster care have definitely gotten more visibility over the last few years, and you’ve seen the community very willing to respond,” Lifeworks executive director Susan McDowell said.
“In addition to us building our support continuum for youth who are aging out, you have other service providers who traditionally served younger children in foster care who are now seeing the tremendous need we have as they’re aging out,” she said.
The Austin Children’s Shelter, for example, opened two cottages in 2010 for young men and women who are aging out of foster care. And just in September, a local non-profit called the Settlement Home for Children opened transitional living apartment units for young women aging out of foster care.
19-year-old Ria Woods is one of the residents and is not sure where she would be without the program.
“Honestly, I would probably be in jail for my anger. Well, my old anger,” she said. “I used to have a lot of anger, and I didn’t want anybody messing with me. I would probably be in jail if I wasn’t here.”
Now she is taking classes and working and wants to study child psychology.
The Settlement Home’s residence program is run by Crimson Holland. She says she’s noticed a shift in attitudes at the state level over the past five or six years when it comes to foster youth gaining their autonomy.
“The old school way [was that] they have to have an adult with them at all times until they turn 18. There’s a different perspective now of young adults,” Holland said. “They need to go out into the community. They need to learn how to ride the bus. They need to have a cellphone. They need to have those opportunities.”
“Before, the way that things that were set up with supervision and licensing and those kinds of things, you were at risk, really, if you allowed kids to do that,” she said.
But for all the progress in shifting attitudes at the state level, the Department of Family and Protective Services acknowledges the current foster care system is structurally flawed. That’s why DFPS is in the middle of overhauling it.
It wants to place children in foster care as close to their hometowns as possible, and do a better job of putting them in permanent homes. But it may be too late to avoid serious legal repercussions.
A New York-based child advocacy group filed a class action lawsuit against the state last year on behalf of 12,000 kids in long-term foster care. Children’s Rights alleges the state has failed to get those foster kids into permanent homes, leaving them without parents to lean on when they turn 18 and try to make it on their own.
