Hooray for Mariah Maxwell -- great job!!

From Foster Care to Forensic Psychology

Ramsey, Krista. Cincinnati Enquirer, April 20, 2013

Mariah Maxwell remembers exactly what she planned to do with her life when she was a high school senior. “Nothing,” she says.


She was well on her way.




Bright enough to get into Walnut Hills High School, she fell behind once she got there and started avoiding the issue by skipping school.



Midway through her senior year, she was failing several classes and hadn’t started on a single college application.




“I hated school. I wanted to drop out. I was like, ‘OK, if I graduate, I graduate,’ ” she says.
Statistically, a high school diploma for Maxwell was only a 50-50 proposition from the start. A foster youth, she had been removed from her home after her mother beat her sister. She spent the next 10 years moving among 11 foster families.



It did not bode well.


At adulthood, a fourth of all former foster youth end up in jail; another fourth eventually become homeless. More than half are unemployed a year after leaving high school.


Only 3 percent will be lucky enough, or plucky enough, to find their way to college and graduate.
Which makes the odds of what Mariah Maxwell has accomplished almost infinitesimal.


On April 27, the 21-year-old will graduate from the University of Cincinnati with two degrees earned in three years.


As a teenager, she had nothing planned for her future. Now she’s waiting to hear if she’s admitted to UC’s graduate program in criminal justice, then hopes to pursue a doctorate in psychology. She plans a career as a forensic psychologist.


A local program called the Higher Education Mentor Initiative is a big part of Maxwell’s success story.



Begun in 2009, it matches foster youth with mentors who help them finish high school and enter college, and provides programming to support them once on campus.


“The mentors are just a godsend,” Maxwell says. “I owe where I am now to my mentor Kate Livingston and the HEMI program.”


A UC graduate student in women’s studies, Livingston took on many of the responsibilities a parent would handle. “She actually listened to me and tried to figure out why I hated high school,” Maxwell says. “I told her the real reason – because the work was too hard for me.”


So Livingston tutored Maxwell, then helped her sign up for college boards, analyze her financial aid package, schedule college classes, tour campus, move into her dorm.


Three years later, the two are celebrating Maxwell’s graduation as the first HEMI student to earn a degree.


Maxwell says her success has, in a sense, brought her life full circle. Her interest in forensic psychology stemmed from trying to understand her mother’s abuse. Her college studies, in turn, helped her make peace with the life she’d lived.


“My going into foster care opened up a lot of doors. Without it, I wouldn’t have met Kate or my foster mother, Sheeila Foster – they pushed me, and encouraged me to finish school,” she says.


“Now I don’t want my siblings or me to be statistics. I don’t want us to be homeless, to be incarcerated. What I want is to see ‘Doctor’ in front of my name.”