Fostering hope

Born in a Spokane motel room at 26 weeks gestation, Lance was the ninth child of his biological mother. The paramedics think it was the high amount of cocaine in his blood that stimulated him enough to breathe until they got there.

The 1-pound, 15-ounce boy spent many weeks in intensive care before going home with his foster mother, Linda Rogers. Rogers went on to adopt Lance. Today, he is blind and has some other developmental problems, but has grown into a perky 5-year-old ready to start kindergarten in the fall.

No stranger to the foster care system, Rogers is the Foster Parent Recruiter through the YMCA, has fostered numerous children and has adopted two of them, Lance and a 7-year-old girl.

“I became more involved as I saw the need become greater and greater over the years,” Rogers said. She estimates that the local foster care system needs at least five new foster families a month just to keep up.

Meth in particular has become a growing problem, bolstering the number of children in foster care to approximately 1,000 at any given time, Rogers said. “I go to churches, booths at the fair,” she said. “Whoever will let us talk about foster care, I’ll go.

“I’m not asking people to take 10 or 15 kids. You can make a difference in one child’s life,” Rogers said. “If we had a lot of people doing that, we could really make a difference.”

One of the newest foster parents she has recruited is her biological daughter, Melissa Reid. Licensed in March, Reid was given a newborn baby girl to care for in April. “She’s very sweet, which is a blessing for our first placement,” Reid said of the tiny infant with thick black hair. Reid picked the girl (whose name is being withheld due to privacy laws) up at the hospital and will keep her for 30 days while case workers try to determine the best living situation for her.

Reid grew up with foster children in her home, and after having two children of her own, said she felt a calling to help. Several months ago, she began the licensing process.

Designed to educate, screen and enlighten, the foster parenting course begins with an orientation session to let people know what kind of opportunities are available. For example, a person can choose to do respite care, taking a child for a day or two at a time to let their foster family have a break; immediate care for up to 45 days while social workers decide what is best for the child; long-term care; or foster-adopt, Rogers said.

Once they know a little about their options, volunteers take classes three nights a week for three weeks, and participate in background checks, home visits and interviews. “They ask how we grew up and what our parenting styles are like,” Reid said. “They need to know how you deal with children and what kind of family you have.”

Most important, they try to prepare potential foster parents for the realities of the job. “They open your eyes to the worst case scenario. They don’t want anyone to go in and be blindsided,” Reid said. “They try to give you emotional preparation for everything you can come up against.”

Many children in foster care come from homes where they were chronically abused and neglected by drug-addicted or alcoholic parents. By the time they have been moved to a foster home, many have developed emotional and behavioral problems.

“I have not met anybody whose foster child has not needed counseling,” said Andrea Martin, a Spokane foster parent. “When you know what these children have been through, it freaks you out a little.”

For her first placement, Martin had a very trying case. In 2004, two boys ages 8 and 6 were removed from the home of their meth-addicted parents. They were initially separated due to behavior problems; the elder would try to suffocate and kill the younger. The 6-year-old would get up at night and eat cat food because that was often all there had been in his parents’ home. Martin said the boys missed a lot of school because their parents were too strung-out to get them there, but were so disruptive when they did attend that school administrators were happy to see them go.

“It’s the biggest shock when you have a child who’s had a normal upbringing with the love and care they need. Then you see these children that haven’t been taken care of,” Martin said. “How can anyone neglect them so badly?”

Two years later, the boys still need a lot of extra attention, but have made huge improvements, Martin said. The elder brother, “gets A’s and B’s in school. He hasn’t missed one day, and he tries really hard to get along with his friends and his brother,” she said.

Six months ago Martin decided to file for permanent guardianship. “We love them to death. At one point we weren’t even going to keep them, but they’re like my kids now. They tell people they’re my kids,” Martin said. “This is stable for them. This is home. They’ve made huge strides and we want to keep that going.”

Martin chose permanent guardianship over adoption because it allows the children some state-mediated contact with their biological parents and allows continued access to state-provided services, such as counseling. The boys will stay with Martin until they reach adulthood; their biological parents would have to prove her an unfit parent to get them back.

The 30 days Reid was asked to care for her infant foster daughter are nearly up. She has been carefully chronicling the time; photos, hospital mementos and tiny socks will be sent along so the child has a sense of who she was in those first days of life. With the day the baby will leave rapidly approaching, Reid is preparing herself and her family to send the little girl to her next home.

“You don’t realize how attached you’ve become until you have to prepare her to move on. It’s better for her to have been with our family for a month and had four people love and dote on her than not to have had it at all,” Reid said. “I’d rather go through a little heartache when she goes than to not have given that love.”