May
25
She’s on her 7th family at age 7; Girl shuffled through state’s foster system for five years
Filed Under features | Comments Off
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
She called everyone “Mommy.”
Wrapping her arms around women and holding tight, the 2-year-old tried out the name on her foster mother, her preschool teachers and her caseworker at the Department of Children and Families. She seemed to hope that, if she called enough women Mommy, she could get just one to stick.
But since that time, five women who planned to adopt her said they were sorry, but they could not. Over and over, they sent her away to live with strangers.
Now 7, the girl has not really belonged to anybody but the state of Florida for five years – four longer than allowed by federal law.
As time goes by, she gets a little less precious, a little more damaged.
Last year, the girl, whose name is being withheld, threw herself out of her chair during dinner. She banged her head and tore her clothes. She dared her foster parents to punish her, saying they couldn’t do anything to hurt her.
Then, she asked when she would be adopted.
Since she was taken from her biological mother in April 1998, two state DCF administrators, three local child welfare chiefs and at least four of her caseworkers have resigned or been fired. Florida’s child welfare agency heaved in panic over high-profile horrors like the death of Kayla McKean in 1998 and disappearance of Rilya Wilson in 2002, as this girl and thousands of other anonymous children shuffled from home to home.
Her former foster parents say the little girl has been wounded by a system straining so hard to make sure children are alive that it cannot possibly ensure that all of them are well.
They blame past caseworkers who didn’t tell them the extent of her emotional problems, therapy that came too late and ended too soon, and doctors who prescribed drugs, mistaking her sadness and fear for hyperactivity.
Several of her foster families wrote letters to judges, child welfare bosses, the governor and the president of the United States, begging for help. It was slow in coming.
On May 2, 2000, when she was 4, a psychologist agreed with her increasingly strained foster mother that the child needed long-term psychotherapy with a specialist who could address her “emotional issues and behavioral difficulties.”
She was not getting that therapy in November of last year, when she was committed to the mental ward of Columbia Hospital in West Palm Beach.
Confidentiality laws prohibit DCF and the Children’s Home Society, the private contractor that handles the county’s foster care adoptions, from commenting on her case.
In general, said Jan Beerman, a Children’s Home Society program director, “You hope you have done a good job preparing the children and preparing the family, that you have the services in place to help that family. . . . But there are times, despite the best efforts, that it doesn’t work.”
The Children’s Home Society finalized 110 adoptions in Palm Beach County between July and December of last year. That was more than Miami-Dade, and only 12 fewer than Broward, which has about twice the number of foster children.
Even so, more than half of the children in foster care in Palm Beach County have been there longer than allowed by law. About one-fifth have lived in three or more foster homes.
In the 2001-02 school year, the girl attended kindergarten at four different schools, with four different families. She is now living in her seventh foster home.
TAKEN INTO CUSTODY AT 2
The state took the child and her two siblings into custody April 23, 1998, when she was 2. Her mother, Debbie, was homeless and admitted that she and her boyfriend were using crack in front of their three children.
The boyfriend’s mother, Peggy Harris, took in their baby, Mariah, her blood granddaughter. The girl and her older brother, Jay, weren’t family – they had a different father. They had no place to go but foster care.
That day, the caseworker reached Kathy Woltz, a longtime foster mother with a soothing voice and soft brown hair. A deeply religious woman, Woltz believed God made her unable to conceive so she could help abandoned children.
Woltz took the girl, who came to her with raggedy sweatpants, matted blond curls and marker scribbles all over her legs. The child seemed terrified of adult men and didn’t speak for two days, Woltz said. Badly dehydrated, she clutched her sippy cup as she toddled around the house.
But she was loving and sweet, curling up in Woltz’s lap to have her hair brushed. She also could be a tomboy, hurling herself on top of two wrestling brothers more than twice her size.
In preschool, the girl dipped her hand in paint and pressed it to paper. Her teacher printed the words: Here is my hand, so tiny and small/That you may hang upon the wall/So you may watch as years go by/How we have grown, my hand and I.
Woltz planned to keep her. She even posed her in formal family portraits with her adopted son, Tony.
But she was also getting notes from preschool, saying her foster child was attacking other children.
Woltz thought the girl needed intense therapy. But for two years, she said, she never got help.
She rarely got return phone calls from the DCF caseworker, Valerie Coombs. When Coombs did call back, she said she did not believe the little girl needed therapy, according to Woltz. She appealed all the way up to the head of Palm Beach County’s DCF, but said she never got a reply.
In the summer of 2000, Coombs told Woltz that the plan was for the girl and her brother, who was living in another foster home, to be adopted by grandparents in Georgia.
One day in August, Woltz gave up. She picked up the girl from school and took her to DCF. She told her that she was going to live with her grandparents and left. The child was sent to another foster home.
Months later the plan to send her to her grandparents would fall through and Woltz would go into a depression. She was furious with DCF, but asked herself, “Why couldn’t I have done more?”
The woman who once believed it was her divine mission to care for children has never taken another foster child.
When Woltz dropped off the girl that afternoon in August 2000, DCF called Kathy South.
South said caseworkers told her they had a little girl, cute, no problems. South wasn’t sure whether she could take the child, so they put her on the line.
“Hi, new Mommy,” she said.
DCF dropped her off an hour later.
At first, the child was confused, asking why she couldn’t go home. The move away from the mother she had known for half her life required some reprogramming.
“Kathy is not your mother anymore,” South told her. “Tony is not your brother. Now you have a new family.”
South had the same problems as Woltz. On Nov. 13, the girl was sent to the principal’s office, where she hurled her shoes, jumped on furniture and hit the walls.
Her pediatrician diagnosed her with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and started her on the drug Concerta.
South said she repeatedly called the girl’s caseworker, still Valerie Coombs, but could not get her to start therapy. She sent a letter to DCF, saying that, in five months, she never met Coombs in person. Coombs was fired in May 2002 for failing to visit another child.
Coombs said Friday the child did get therapy and the parents chose to give her up because of their own problems.
Three days after the girl started kindergarten in August 2001, DCF found her a new family. South carried her out of her house in her arms to meet her new parents.
The little girl clasped her arms around South’s neck, until they peeled her off.
Then she sat in the back seat of her new family’s car, sobbing, as it pulled away.
HALF-SISTER CHOSEN OVER HER
DCF finally agreed to start counseling that fall. But less than three months later, she was up for adoption again.
The next to take the girl was Peggy Harris, the grandmother of her half-sister, Mariah. In November 2001, Harris started caring for both girls.
“I tried not to show favorites, but I’m sure I did a little bit,” she said.
A single mother getting by on wages from her job as a warehouse clerk, Harris had raised two boys of her own. The half-sisters fought constantly, exhausting her. She decided that she could adopt only one.
Harris chose Mariah and tried to console the other.
“We’ll still see each other, still get together on weekends,” Harris told her.
A caseworker came to take her away one day, while she was at school.
‘This is her sixth placement’
Pam Malone had three sons, and always wanted to adopt a little girl. She and her husband spent the spring of 2002 remodeling a room, adding fresh white paint and a butterfly bedspread.
The little girl came in April.
At first, she seemed to be adjusting. The twice-weekly counseling sessions she had for less than a year were stopped. Soon after, the girl started acting fidgety and upset, picking at her gums, refusing to get ready in the morning.
In November, after months of fighting to restart therapy, Malone took the girl to Children’s Home Society offices and demanded that they treat her immediately.
Caseworkers committed the girl to the children’s crisis unit at Columbia Hospital. She spent nearly a week there saying she missed her brothers, her dog and her bird and asking why she could not go home.
On Nov. 23, Circuit Judge Roger Colton had a hearing on her case.
He ordered Malone not to lose her temper again. He told the caseworkers to restart therapy. He called it “reprehensible” that they had not secured a permanent family long ago.
“This is her sixth placement. Her sixth placement,” he said, punching out his words.
How would you feel, he asked, if you had to lose your mother, your home, your pets – six different times?
As he moved to adjourn, his tone switched to tired, and resigned.
“We can’t fix everything. But we can try. That’s all I’m going to say, folks.”
He sent the girl back home with the Malones.
‘ATTACHMENT DISORDER’ CITED
After diagnosing her with hyperactivity, bipolar disorder and depression, after trying to treat her with the drugs Adderall, Concerta and Zoloft, the girl’s caretakers now realize that her main problem is foster care.
They believe she has attachment disorder, a problem shared by most children who have been abused or neglected, then moved from place to place. They may be charming around strangers but exasperating at home. Often, they behave perfectly for the first few weeks in a new home, then they collapse. They reject a family before the family can reject them.
It makes sense, therapists say, when these children have lost most everyone they ever loved.
For a foster child who has moved many times, the outlook isn’t good, said Elaine Baker, a Palm Beach County attachment therapist.
Therapy for attachment disorder isn’t likely to work unless the child can stay in one place for six months to a year. But the child has a hard time staying in one place that long until she can get intensive therapy, she said.
DCF found homes for her brother and sister long ago – Jay lives with Debbie’s parents in Georgia; Mariah is still with Harris.
Many of the girl’s former foster mothers still call her, look out for her and invite her over for long visits. They hope to find the perfect two-parent home for her, ideally with no other children. They want committed parents who have seen her worst but promise to keep her, anyway.
They like her new caseworker at the Children’s Home Society and believe he is doing his best.
But they know the child’s chances are waning.
When children turn 8, the state classifies them as “special needs,” acknowledging that it is hard to find homes for older children. Two-thirds of the 1,105 children adopted statewide in the first half of this budget year were 7 or younger.
Malone sent the girl for a trial visit with a new prospective family this month. Halfway through the weeklong visit, the new family fell in love with the cute little girl, like everyone always does.
They called Malone and asked her to pack the girl’s things.
Malone said she wasn’t able to say goodbye or explain to the girl why she had to move again.
She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know what will happen now.
Copyright 2003 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
May 25, 2003 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 2028 words