Episode 4: Teens Lost in the Shuffle
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RUBY GREGG, HOST: Across Virginia, teenagers in foster care are more likely to bounce between foster home placements, face mental health challenges, and age out of the system than they are to wind up with a family to call their own. And when the system doesn’t work for them, the consequences are real: homelessness, incarceration, and generational trauma.
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Welcome back to Virginia’s Foster Care: Crawling Through Broken Glass. I’m Ruby Gregg. This episode, Teens Lost in the Shuffle, will explore the overlooked population of teenagers who languish in foster care and the efforts to find solutions to the problem. In Virginia, children age out of the system at 18. But they can decide to continue to receive services until they’re 21.
Melissa Cook, regional manager of DePaul Community Resources in Roanoke, says teenagers in the foster care system are misunderstood and avoided by the people who might be able to help them.
MELISSA COOK: I think people see stuff on paper and just, it scares them to death to think about taking a teenager into their home. And that’s really unfortunate because these kids have so much to offer, and unfortunately, what’s on paper really scares some people off from taking them into their home.
GREGG: Rockbridge County social worker Carrie Guzman says teenagers in foster care have often experienced years of instability—removal from their homes, rejection by extended family, and broken trust in every direction. That instability can show up as anger, detachment, or acting out. She says that once a teen is placed in a foster home, the challenges don’t magically go away.
CARRIE GUZMAN: What we want is for children to not have to come into foster care. We can try our hardest to make foster care the best experience that we can, but being out of the home is traumatic, and it is traumatic to come into foster care, and saying differently would be disingenuous.
GREGG: Dinah Hupman, director of the Rockbridge area office of the Department of Social Services, says it’s often hard for teenagers to understand why they’ve been taken away from their parents.
DINAH HUPMAN: Of course, the child, a child with their biological parents, is the best place for a child. Doesn’t matter what that child has become accustomed to, whatever the circumstance is, that child has become accustomed to living that way, and so they don’t recognize it as a problem. And that’s why we, as the Department of Social Services and as adults, say we need to take you out of this environment, make this environment safe and able for you to come back to.
GREGG: There are nonprofit organizations in Virginia, like Compass Counseling Services, that offer help to teenagers and their families before and after a child is removed from the home. Program Director Sarah Nolley says her team takes a trauma-informed approach, meeting teens and families where they are.
SARAH NOLLEY: Really, day in, day out, what we see is families learning how to communicate more effectively with their children, and their children communicate more effectively with them, thus creating a healthier family system.
GREGG: When counseling doesn’t work, teenagers bounce between placements, or worse, they wind up sleeping in DSS offices or hotels. Hupman says that’s because there aren’t enough foster parents who want to care for older children.
HUPMAN: We determine where is the best place for this child to go, based on availability. Sometimes that’s an easy process, and we can find something rather quickly. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes children do stay in our offices. Most recently, we had an individual that was in our office for about, I think, two nights, two days, two days, two nights, three days, two nights within our unit, and then again, we always have two staff members around the clock with that child.
GREGG: Social workers often try to place children in what’s called kinship care with relatives or close family friends. But Guzman says that’s also not easy.
GUZMAN: For kinship providers, they’re often getting a call in the middle of the night to say, hey, this person in your family, or this person that you’re close to, has had a disruption in their home, and they need you to take their child, or children, can you step up? And these people are not often prepared.
GREGG: Hupman says it’s better to place children with relatives and people they know. She says teenagers experience less anxiety when they see a familiar face if they are removed from their homes.
Eric Reynolds, the director of the Office of Children’s Ombudsman, says teenagers are often misunderstood and don’t always want material things. He says they usually prefer to be with their families. Before he became the ombudsman, he was a lawyer for children in the foster care system.
ERIC REYNOLDS: I represented two girls, teenagers back in the day, very smart, very smart. Well, the one was in, in she was placed in several different homes, well off up in Northern Virginia, where, you know, up in Fairfax County, where, I mean, the access to everything that she could possibly want or be interested in, sports, extracurricular activities, everything was there. She didn’t like it. And what she told me is, this is not how my family was raised. She wanted to go back to the class that she was kind of living in. That’s what she was comfortable in.. I’m like, wow, you know that just kind of opened my eyes. I’m like, you know, just because you have access and get everything that you want doesn’t necessarily mean that’s happiness. And some kids realize that, and they want what their parents gave them before wasn’t great, and of course, they were traumatized by whatever abuse, neglect got them removed from there in the first place.
GREGG: Reynolds says social workers can sometimes make incorrect assumptions about what’s good for a child.
REYNOLDS: And then you get into the discussion about culture, you know, and then, you know, the racial makeup of the foster parents, does that make a difference, you know, to the child, you know? So, there’s all kinds of questions about what’s in the best interest. You know, they can get everything they want. And you know, all their needs met in foster care are by this adoptive home. But does it separate them from the lifestyle and the culture and what they, what they identify with? You know? So, we gotta balance all this stuff.
GREGG: Fostering Futures is a program that DSS offers to foster children who remain in the system until they’re 18 and then decide to stay and receive services until their 21st birthdays. They also receive a monthly stipend of $836 dollars that assists with their expenses. Guzman, the family services supervisor, says the program is designed to provide a bridge to adulthood.
GUZMAN: To qualify for Fostering Futures, the child needs to either be working 20 hours a week or going to school either, or, and they can either be in like high school, a GED program or just a training program, or they could be in a program that helps them get a job.
GREGG: Guzman says the program also will help participants apply for Social Security Disability benefits if they have a mental health condition or a physical disability.
GUZMAN: So in between, while they’re applying and trying to get their disability benefits, they can participate in the Fostering Futures Program as well, and while they’re in that program, and they kind of have this choice, you know, they have a lot of autonomy being an adult. So they have this choice. They can choose where they’re living. So one option is that they could, you know, theoretically, return home, and they could be in the home with their parents, and they get a stipend from the state that helps, you know, cover a lot of their expenses.
GREGG: Guzman says participants must agree to visits from social workers once a month, hold a job or stay in school to remain in the Fostering Futures program.
GUZMAN: It covers everything you forget what you didn’t know. Once you’re an adult, and you’ve been adulting for a while, you forget that you just didn’t know things when you were younger. So, it can go from, how do you keep from overdrawing your bank account to changing a tire, figuring out how to get your driver’s license renewed. You know, all of these, these things that adults sometimes end up taking for granted.
GREGG: Hupman, the Rockbridge DSS supervisor, remembers one young woman who was a foster child and is in college now because of the Fostering Futures program.
HUPMAN: She is attending Radford University full time. Lives on campus, lives down there. We provide her housing for her, and she’s doing great in the school setting. So, it’s very good that we’re able to offer that.
GREGG: Cook, the DePaul Community Resources regional manager, says one of the nonprofit organization’s clients is an 18-year-old who is still in the foster care system.
COOK: She’s not graduated high school, so she is able to stay in our foster home through the Fostering Futures Program. So, and then she just gets her stipend so she can, she’s agreeing with DSS, I want to be here. I want to stay here. I’m going to continue in school. Think she also works. So, it’s a contract, so to speak, between the young adult and the local Department of Social Services.
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GREGG: What’s happening in Virginia’s foster care system is not unique. States across the country are struggling with caring for at-risk children. What state seems to be doing it right?
Reynolds, Virginia’s children’s ombudsman, says New Jersey has a good approach.
REYNOLDS: New Jersey does a really good job of all the kids that go into care, assessing their needs so that they’re placed in the right placement that’s going to meet those needs, that the parents are going to get the services that they need to get the child back, you know. So they do a good job on the front end of foster care, you know, I think every state struggles with the same challenges that we have, and not every you know, there’s no perfect answer to any of it, because we’re dealing with humans, and humans are imperfect, families, agencies, all human led, right?
GREGG: Clinton Page, first deputy assistant commissioner for New Jersey’s Department of Children and Families, says the state’s system has built in support for families—from day one.
CLINTON PAGE: Coming in here, and we want to, you know, we’re making sure this child’s safe, like it’s the way that you come in and you have those conversations, those real conversations with the family, and you can be viewed as, as a support, as you know, like help to them to get to a better outcome, and a holistic approach to the family.
GREGG: Page says New Jersey tries to support families before kids are taken away by assigning social workers to what are called child welfare cases.
PAGE: The worker approaches those types of cases with a different approach, where they’re saying, you know, like, this isn’t mandatory, but we did receive a call, and we want to support you. What can we do to help you know this particular concern that we’ve received? And is there anything you know? Can we give you resources? Can we give you the line to perform care in case it’s a mental or behavioral health challenge with a particular child. I think that approach, and again, like, I don’t have reports on this, but I think that that approach has been successful for us, and that, over time, has changed the public’s perception, or at least started to change the public’s perception. It’s not just viewing us as coming in to, you know, like, potentially taking people’s children and more, like, okay, they’re here because they want to really help us, and they want to make things better for my family.
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GREGG: In a perfect world, Hupman says the foster care system would be smaller.
HUPMAN: I think if we start more of having prevention services throughout the state then that would be less children coming into foster care, which is, would be a great goal over the next five to 10 years.
GREGG: She says helping families is the key.
HUPMAN: For me, it’s meaning that the families are getting all the services that are out there because a lot of times, families don’t realize that there’s services that we can help them get connected to, to help them with their situation, or they just are too, I don’t want to use the word afraid to ask, but because of their situation, they’re afraid that child protective services will step in if they do ask for help.
GREGG: Up next, Chas Chappell will explain how churches try to fill gaps in social services in Virginia. To read the full story, visit our investigative reporting page on the Rockbridge Report’s website at rockbridgereport.wlu.edu.
Music credit: “Mystery Box” by Amir Marcus