Foster kids on their own
Young, Kelli. Canton Repository, Feb. 4, 2007.
Satairia Hood reached for her sister’s hand over the space between their beds. She knew Ariel Morgan was too scared to grab for hers.
Holding hands from their separate beds, Satairia, 9, and Ariel, 7, closed their eyes and prayed: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep ...”
They asked God to bless their mom, dads, aunts, uncles, sisters, cousins, and anyone else they could think of. And they asked, “Please, God, let our mom get us back again. Please let us see the twins again.”
They recited that same bedtime prayer every night for the first three months they slept at Mary Bazen’s home.
The sisters were old enough to know that their mother, Pamela Hood, wasn’t perfect. Her drug addiction had forced them to go hungry more than once. But at least they had been together.
Now — as wards of Stark County’s child welfare system— they were away from their twin sisters and away from their mother.
Stark County social workers put the girls in the foster home in February 1992 after Canton police found cocaine residue on two crack pipes in the basement Pamela Hood rented at 707 Newton Ave. NW. Social workers also found dead rats, dog feces and urine-soaked beds.
The county sent their sisters, 4-year-old twins Ivory and Ebony Hollamon, to another foster family in Orrville because social workers couldn’t find an appropriate relative here.
TEMPORARY INTERVENTION
Foster care is supposed to be a temporary intervention by social services to make sure children are safe and with a family to care for them.
In the best of worlds, Hood would kick her drug habit, find better housing and reunite with her four daughters.
Social workers tried to help, and Hood tried to quit drugs. But she soon stopped attending counseling and didn’t call social workers back.
The next-best option, case workers believed, would be family members raising the girls or someone adopting them. Hood’s brother stepped up as a foster parent, taking the girls for a few years, then told caseworkers his family no longer could care for them.
So the sisters, like an average of 25 children in Stark County every year, left the child welfare system at age 18 or when they graduated from high school without being adopted and without a biological family who could support them. None of their birth fathers ever wanted custody.
The four sisters were in charge of their own lives now — a transition many teens struggle to make by themselves. Nationally, half of the teens leaving foster care at age 18 soon end up unemployed, and a quarter of them end up homeless, child welfare advocates say.
HIGH RISK
When foster children leave custody, many have no safety net: no one to loan them money when they’re strapped, to provide medical insurance, or to co-sign an apartment lease, a car deal or a student loan.
Teens who return to their biological families usually don’t stay; the idealized image of a reunited family quickly crumbles. And child welfare agencies have limited funds to help teens who leave state custody pay rent, school and transportation. At best, the agency can help pay for housing while the teens go through college and can refer them to other agencies for help with health care.
“I tell them, ‘We will help you help yourself. If you don’t take control of planning for your future, the most we can do is give you the names of homeless shelters and soup kitchens,’ ” said Joanne Shankel, a program evaluator for Stark County Job & Family Services. “They have to be empowered that way because most don’t have anybody else (who) cares for them.”
Until they are adults, the agency makes most decisions, such as housing and money, for the children in its custody. Many foster children miss out on the normal rites of passage to prepare for adulthood, such as getting a driver’s license. Job & Family Services can’t co-sign for a learning permit or pay for auto insurance, and many foster parents can’t or won’t assume the liability.
Many teens also leave custody feeling they can’t trust anyone.
“You’re waking up every morning calling somebody else’s parents mom and dad,” Ivory said. “You don’t know if you’re there a few days or for a while. ... You have to look out for yourself.”
Growing up, Satairia said other kids would tease her because she wasn’t living with her real parents. “I hated to go to a borrowed place.”
“You don’t feel important as a foster child. Most people think we are child delinquents.”
Still, Satairia, Ariel, Ebony and Ivory believe the foster-care system provided a start to a better life.
Different dealings with mom
Pamela Hood acknowledges she made mistakes; she “went down a whole lot of wrong paths.” Every February, she said, she relives the day a social worker and three police officers took her children from her.
“What hurts the most is that there’s still two of my babies not a part of my life,” Hood said.
Only Ariel and Ivory speak to her. Ariel often has been the link between Hood and the other children; Ivory reunited with her just in the last year.
Satairia cut ties in 1999 during a supervised visit at McDonald’s.
Then just shy of her 15th birthday, Satairia remembers sitting stubbornly silent through most of the visit, staring at her hamburger and fries as Ariel and the twins talked about school, about life.
“You need to do good in school,” Hood lectured the girls.
That irked Satairia.
“You can’t tell them that,” she said. “You don’t even know anything because you are never here.”
It had been six years since Hood visited the girls. She spent three of those years in prison for aggravated drug trafficking.
Satairia grew angrier, “You need to give up your parental rights, because I’m not interested in being your child anymore.”
Hood forgets what happened next. “When your child tells you something like that, you block out the rest of the conversation.”
A family court judge terminated Hood’s parental rights months later when Hood didn’t show for the court hearing.
“I used to believe everything she said,“ Satairia said. “When I grew older, about 9 or 10 ... I began to realize she was just telling us lies. She would say, ‘I got a house, I got a job.’ It was something to make us feel better. Who wants to keep believing lies and false hope?”
Ebony severed ties with her biological mother in 2004. Like Satairia, she met Hood at a McDonald’s, “I went to tell her I didn’t want her in my life. She is not where my heart is. .... She cried, I left, and that was that.”
Hood said the news hit her hard, “Everything in the room went dark.”
She has tried to follow the girls’ lives. She attended Satairia’s graduation from Jackson High School in 2001, though she stayed in the corner because she knew Satairia didn’t want her there.
“I just want my children back in my life so I can share their pain,” Hood said. “God knows I’ve put them through enough.”
A NEW NAME
Some of that pain only became clear to Satairia four years after she left the foster-care system. That’s when the financial help she received from child welfare agencies dried up.
Satairia left the foster-care system in 2001 with a level of support from her foster parents, Starlett and Charles Isles, that social workers seek for all foster children.
She credits them for her successes. “Eating dog food as cereal, giving my sisters baths before school, those things I had to be aware of at such a young age. If I had not met my (foster) parents, I ... would be like those kids I’ve seen my age, they are repeating the same thing their parents did.”
Though she wasn’t adopted, Satairia changed her last name to Isles in November 2004 to “make it permanent.”
“I have two parents,” Satairia said. “If I’m on my deathbed, I know where to go.”
When she dropped out of Ohio State University, the Isles family welcomed her back home. They allowed her back again when she left an apartment she’d rented for four months. They taught her the responsibility of saving money, to better prepare her for the next move out.
“They said, ‘You can get your own apartment, or pay rent here.’ I paid rent,” Satairia said.
In October, Satairia, now 23, celebrated her first year in her own apartment in Massillon.
“Before, I just wasn’t ready, really,” she said. “Now, I have a stable job, and I was able to do that.”
But even the Isleses can’t provide everything Satairia needs to continue her education. They care for eight other children.
So Satairia found few financial options in August when she tried to enroll at Concordia University, which offers online courses for child development and is where Starlett Isles earned her master’s degree.
Satairia has borrowed virtually all the money she can, and has no parent to co-sign for another loan.
“I’m not saying all parents help kids out, but there are some times in life where the parent is supposed to step up,” Satairia said. “I’m a strong-minded person. But when you hit adulthood, you feel that person should be there anyway. ”
Despite the support of the Isles family, she said, the past holds her back.
“My (foster) parents gave me all the tools I needed. I work 10 hours a day. Some kids don’t work 15 hours a week,” said Satairia, an education coordinator at the Isleses’ Fair Play Family Center. “I’ve put in my time. You would think that would count for something.”
She scraped together the money for tuition this year, but next year, she faces a bill of at least $10,000. She’s trying to build credit, but knows she needs a better plan to go on for her master’s degree.
She also needs to plan for her role as a foster mom. She hopes to be one by this summer. “I want to teach them a foundation, the importance of family — not many foster kids have that,” she said.
ON YOUR OWN
Ariel spent her 18th birthday — April 24, 2003 — as a runaway. She left her uncle’s home to baby-sit, and she didn’t return until nearly a month later.
Instead of bouncing among foster homes like her sisters, Ariel bounced between family members, who also were foster parents. Though they were family, she felt distrustful and depressed.
She tried to kill herself at age 16.
“I was having nightmares. I couldn’t experience happiness,” Ariel said.
She barely spoke to her sisters. She felt Satairia deserted her when Satairia chose to live with the Isles family in 1998, and she felt slighted when the twins also went to live there in 2000, and she was not given the option.
“I don’t know if having them there would have changed anything,” Ariel said. “But at least I wouldn’t have been so lonely.”
Ariel quit Canton McKinley’s digital school in August 2003 — just four months after quitting the foster-care system. The following February, she gave birth to Shaniya.
“Looking at the life I had, it’s a blessing to be alive still,” Ariel said.
Now 21, she has two daughters, Shaniya King, 2, and Arieyonna King, 1.
The three moved into a three-bedroom duplex on Tuscarawas Street E in November. It’s the first place Ariel has rented without her on-again-off-again boyfriend and father of her two daughters.
She sought help from Job & Family Services to help pay the security deposit. She hopes her job at Maggiore’s Drive-Thru, as well as careful budgeting, will keep them in the apartment.
“I’m now pulling the pieces to my life together,” said Ariel, who took classes at a YWCA to earn her general educational development diploma in August 2005. “I’m going to do whatever I can do to not let my kids grow up the way I did.”
SEPARATED LIVES
Ebony’s and Ivory’s challenges after foster care have just begun. And, for the first time, they face life without each other.
Ivory moved out of the Isleses’ home four months before she turned 18. To her, the Isleses were a “borrowed family.”
She believed that by moving into Lois Bryant’s house, who is Ariel’s godmother’s mother, she could reunite with her biological family. She reintroduced herself to her mother a month later.
The twins’ 18th birthday — July 15, 2005 — was the first they’d celebrated apart.
Ivory, who graduated from Canton’s McKinley High School in June 2005, invited her sisters to her graduation-birthday party.
Ebony and Satairia didn’t show.
“They thought our mom was going to be there,” Ivory said. “They didn’t want to deal with her. ... It still hurts.”
Ivory left for the University of Akron that fall. She lived in an apartment on campus and worked at a nearby McDonald’s while taking classes. But before the first semester of her sophomore year ended, she moved back to Bryant’s home in Canton.
“Things got a little tough financially” at the university, she said. “I moved back home to keep a cool head.”
Now 19, Ivory plans to attend Cleveland State University this fall for “a new atmosphere,” and wants to go into art or nursing.
Meanwhile, she’s hunting for a job. She refuses to rely on social services. “Being in foster care never helped me pay my bills. ... It’s proof I was in foster care.”
And she’s still dealing with emotional scars.
“If I think I’m going to get my feelings hurt, I push away,” Ivory said. “I’m so afraid to get close to people because of the stuff in my life.”
MY OWN PLACE
Ebony, the oldest twin by eight minutes, moved into Satairia’s Massillon apartment after graduating from Jackson and leaving the child welfare system last year.
She had been living with the Isles family since 2000, but wanted more independence after graduation.
Satairia provided the bridge. “Transitioning for me was so easy because I was with someone who cared for me a lot, and I moved out to someone who cared for me a lot,” Ebony said.
Ebony decided in August to go the next step, moving out of Satairia’s apartment and into one of her own.
“I’m kind of scared,” Ebony said. “I’ve never been by myself.”
She consulted Satairia and Starlett Isles, whom she calls mom.
“We had a conversation about ‘Was I ready?’ I had to call my mom to have her ... say, ‘I can do it.’ ”
The 19-year-old got the keys to her one-bedroom apartment near the viaduct in Massillon in September. The Next Step program for former foster kids helped, supplying a month’s rent, security deposit and some school supplies.
“It’s OK to be by myself, but it’s boring,” Ebony said. “I’m used to having everyone running everywhere.”
She calls Starlett Isles or Satairia at least once a week “to make sure everything is OK.” Ebony also works with Satairia at the Isleses’ Fair Play Family Center and plans to follow her sister to Concordia University this month for training in social work.
She considers college just another step away from the life she once lived.
“I’m not living in the projects, living on welfare with no education. Somebody told me I could do it, and I did it.”
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