May
21
Local kids show faces for a new family to love
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More than 200 children in Palm Beach County are growing up with no parent but the state of Florida. For a story about a traveling exhibit of photos of some of those children, we recorded my interviews with 15 of them for an interesting, cute and occasionally heartbreaking audio package. Here’s the accompanying print story about Palm Beach County’s Heart Gallery:
LOCAL KIDS SHOW FACES FOR A NEW FAMILY TO LOVE
Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Monday, May 21, 2007.
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Eleven-year-old Montell has a long list of heroes.
There are Martin Luther King Jr., Louis Armstrong and Muhammad Ali, plus his favorite gospel singer. And the lady who wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus, Rosa Parks, though he sometimes forgets her name.
But he still needs other people to look up to, like a mom and dad. He is a “good and nice boy,” he said, who needs a good family to care for him.
Montell is one of 46 local foster children photographed for Palm Beach County’s Heart Gallery, a traveling exhibit of local children in need of adoptive families. At last count, 217 children in the county had no legal parent but the state of Florida.
A decade ago, the faces of children in Florida foster care were fiercely protected and always confidential. But the Heart Gallery, which began in New Mexico six years ago and spread to states all over the country, has shown that people respond powerfully to the faces of real kids who need to find a home.
The pictures, taken by professional photographers, are meant to capture the spirit and personality of each child.
“These kids are reaching out to you,” said Penny Martin, supervising attorney for the guardian ad litem program in Palm Beach County. “They are calling out to our community, saying, ‘Here I am.””
The county’s gallery includes Chelsea, a 10-year-old with freckles and strawberry-blond bangs who loves horses and all kinds of animals, including “lizards and reptiles and mammals and birds and scaly creatures.”
“I care for animals a lot,” she said. “I would give my life to a cat I really liked.”
Matthew, a 9-year-old with sandy-brown hair, took his picture in a sophisticated black turtleneck.
“I am like a normal kid,” he said. “I’m not like a big popular famous kid, but I plan on writing a book.”
He said he always has something to do: “I’m never bored, lazy … I have a big schedule for the day, and I’m proud of that,” he said.
Matthew would like to be a writer, then retire and do something that might come to his mind later, like maybe joining the Marines. His heroes are “the people in the war.”
Asked what he would want in a family, Matthew said he would like to find someone with courage.
“I’d like to be adopted because that would be good for a kid who is trying to – searching for a family. That would be good because you could have someone to look up to and someone to care about,” he said.
The public needs to know that many local children are without parents, said Frank Colavecchio, who organized the project with the help of a grant from the Quantum Foundation. Organizers plan to display the panels in local libraries but still need help finding shopping centers or other public venues that would allow them to put up the pictures for several weeks at a time this summer.
John Walsh, an attorney who heads the Foster Children’s Project of Palm Beach County’s Legal Aid Society, said the exhibit represents a larger shift in the way people think about foster children.
Ten years ago, Walsh said, Florida paid to advertise adoption on buses and billboards, but would never show the face of a child in foster care.
“You hid them,” Walsh said. “We as adults felt like it was a shameful thing. But they are not ashamed. And they are our best marketing tool.”
The idea to show large, close-up photographs of the children’s faces is beautiful in its simplicity, Walsh said.
“They haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. “They just need families.”
The Florida Department of Children and Families began exhibiting the faces of children available for adoption on its Web site in November 2000, spokesman Al Zimmerman said. At any given time, the site has photos of about 1,000 children who have no parents and no prospective home.
The site helps recruit parents who prefer older children, could take brothers and sisters together or are interested in a child with a disability.
Gov. Charlie Crist thanked the legislature this session for passing a $5.7 million bill to increase annual payments up to $5,000 for families who adopt children with special needs.
The state also guarantees free tuition at any Florida college for children adopted from foster care.
Parents who adopt from foster care need the patience to work with older children who may act out after surviving abuse, abandonment and uncertainty. They also have to accept that no matter what has happened, many may still feel love and loyalty for their biological parents.
Judith Warren, who oversees local adoptions as executive director of the Children’s Home Society in Palm Beach County, said parents learn the skills they need in the state’s training course for foster and adoptive parents.
“I’ve seen successes – really big successes. It can work with teens, it really can,” she said.
Teens who volunteered for the Heart Gallery know that time is running out.
Many who don’t find families will move from place to place or live in group homes until they turn 18, when they are on their own.
The hardest thing, many say, is not having anyone in the crowd to cheer for them when they walk across the stage at their high school graduation, and not having anywhere to go on holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Melvin, 17, said he hasn’t stopped hoping for a parent.
“When I see all the other kids with families, I just look at myself and say, ‘Wow, I wonder what it would be like if I had a family.’ I dream about it, daydream and dream about it every day.”
He said he is a nice and funny kid with a big heart. He’d like someone who could help him with his homework, someone to go to when he has a problem.
“If I were to get adopted, the things I would like to do with my parents is go out to Disney World maybe, or go to Universal Studios, because those are places I’ve never been. And I see a lot of families doing it, and I would like to try it.”
It would be like a family vacation, he said.
“We could go every summer, maybe. And just have fun.”
Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
May 21, 2007 Monday
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