To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) Read Online Free Page A

something equally appealing for a toddler to yank on; Allyson says decorating is her way to de-stress. A wooden elephant stalks the center of the table; a curlicued stand draped in gray cloth props up a painting of a lion; a gold Buddha perches atop the television screen. But Allen focused on people more than things. He was a quiet child, and trusting, sticking one of his feet into a conversation with a half-smile on his face and then running away, hoping someone would engage in a game of chase. If no one did, he’d scramble back, still without a sound, and climb into an open lap, settling his head into a chest or neck to suck his thumb. Everybody loved Allen, but he wasn’t an easy baby at first.
    â€œHe used to cry a lot, and he was always angry—I’ve never seen a child who was so little with so much anger,” Allyson said, remembering that the first week he was with her, he only wet his diapers and didn’t soil them once. She thought he was constipated because of the poor diet in his last foster home. She still felt bad that a kid so young had been through so much change.
    There are a lot of reasons that kids, even babies like Allen, end up shuttling from foster home to foster home before they get adopted or go back to their biological parents. In New York, the conflicts and the chaos start within twenty-four hours. After the child has been removed and placed with either relatives or strangers, the parents have the right to plead their case. The parents do this with ACS in a meeting called “family team conferencing.” The biological family, the ACS caseworker, and a community advocate together determine what would make the home safe enough for the child to return. Does the stepfather need to move out? Could Grandma move in? Does the family need help with food stamps or vouchers to get heat and hot water? Does the mother need anger management or rehab? The team draws up a plan and they set a date, generally several months away, to pre-­ sent it to a judge. If the parents disagree with the plan, they can get their own lawyers, to fight for their side. After this come the court procedures, the promises, the reunifications, the battles, the multiple placements, and all the things that foster care is famously bad at, which is safely sailing a child through a temporary boarding while everybody waits for a fairy-tale ending.
    In this time period, which can be months or many years, everybody gets a different social worker—the child, the biological parents, and the foster parents. In this time, more lawyers step in and draw up more plans: How often will the parent see the child; what will visitations be like? Where will visits be held; what are the milestones toward reunification? Throughout this, a judge, who in New York City sees about fifty family court cases every day,makes the binding decisions as to who must do what by when.
    Meanwhile, the kid has been living in a real house, with real foster parents, placed at a moment’s notice. If the foster family is a bad fit, if the kid doesn’t like her new family, if they don’t speak the same language, if there’s abuse, if they live across town (and sometimes across state lines), if the foster parents practice a different religion, send the kid to new schools, have unfamiliar styles of discipline, or if the kid simply misses her biological parents, there can be conflict. Foster kids run away; foster parents terminate relationships. It’s not unusual, while waiting for somebody to kiss the frog and the real parents to come home, for a foster child to live in ten or twenty different houses.Fatimah, Bruce and Allyson’s sixteen-year-old daughter, had been in twenty-one homes since she was five years old—and before she was placed with the Greens.
    In Allen’s case, Tom wasn’t around for the family team conferencing meeting with ACS when his son was removed. He was in an inpatient rehab facility. ACS removed