For Youth In Foster Care in New
York City, Anxieties Over College, Aging Out Remain
By Clarissa Sosin and Daryl Khan
NEW YORK — They had it all
planned out. Christina Young and her roommate would share an Uber together and
make sure they got to the graduation ceremony on time. They were graduating
from John Jay College in Manhattan. It was the Big Day, the day they had been
waiting for, working toward, and it had finally arrived.
Young remembers the buzz among
her classmates and friends. As a foster youth who came tantalizingly close to
dropping out of high school, the day held a special significance. But unlike
her other classmates, Young’s mind was elsewhere.
Young remembers the front she put
on that day. She didn’t want to let down the people who came to support her.
Young joined in on group photographs and flashed her wide, infectious smile for
the cameras. But on the inside she was anxious, consumed by one fear. As
everyone else was wondering which graduation party they would be attending she
was worried about whether she’d have a place to live.
Reaching this day was a milestone. Young is
one of a fraction of foster youth that make it all the way through to college
graduation with a bachelor’s degree. Only 50% of foster youth graduate high
school by the time they turn 18. Those that do graduate often do not fare well
in college. Only 20% go on to post-secondary education. The numbers vary, but
experts say that 1 to 11% finish their degree.
As a foster youth over 21, Young
had been part of a pilot program called the Dorm Project. It offered a solution
to one of the biggest problems facing foster youth: stable housing. It allowed
Young and a few dozen other students to live in their dorm rooms all year. When
other students went home for break or holidays, Young could stay in her room
without having to navigate the complicated foster care system and worry about
finding a new temporary home to live in until the semester went back into
session.
But when graduation day finally
arrived, the room she had called home — the first room she had ever had all to
herself — would be gone. She felt betrayed.
“I felt like I didn’t deserve
that,” she said. “I was diligent about my education. I was a good student. I
felt at that moment that the system kind of failed me. I figured if I did what
I was supposed to do and thrived that they’d have my back.”
The day that was supposed to be a
celebration was marked by anxiety.
“I was alone and I had to figure
it out on my own,” she said.
HUGE CHANGES BUT …
The changes in New York’s foster
care system have been staggering over the last 25 years, according to the
Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), the agency that oversees the
foster care system in New York City. By the end of 2017 there were fewer than
9,000 children in the system. That is a fraction of the more than 50,000
children who were in the system 25 years ago.
An emphasis on prevention saw a
44% decline in the number of children coming into the foster care system
between 2006 and 2016. The caseload for caseworkers assigned to foster youth
lightened. The number of children leaving the system and achieving what is
known as “permanency through kinship guardianship” — when a family member takes
over as legal guardian of a foster child — and adoption steadily rose as well.
ACS opened the Office of Training and Workforce Development, which developed a
variety of programs that, among other goals, help foster youth find employment.
Young, now a foster care
advocate, and other advocates worry that the average person is lulled into a
false sense of complacency when they see the numbers improve as they have over
the last several decades. There are a lot of little things she doesn’t want
people to forget. The biggest misunderstanding that the average person has
about foster youth, Young said, is that they’re taken care of and all their
problems are squared away.
“Technically we are called the
ward of the court; the government is supposed to be overseeing us and that
everything will be OK,” she said. “That doesn’t mean the youth are getting the
proper services they need and the resources that they actually deserve.”
Young wasn’t even formally introduced
to her first foster mother. The day they met, she gathered her stuff up in a
few garbage bags, was medically cleared, debriefed by her case worker and then
dropped off in a cab in front of a stranger’s house.
“My social worker gave me a prep
talk,” she remembers. “She told me, ‘They’re really nice, if you’re good and
follow the rules you should be fine.’ I didn’t know how to feel.”
Most kids can put a request in
for dinner. Maybe quesadillas, one of Young’s favorites for instance, or pasta.
Not in a foster home. If you want to watch cartoons, too bad. You don’t have
any say about what you watch on the television. Small but meaningful
interactions between a parent and a child, the in-between moments, are denied
to a foster child.
“You can’t ever weigh in. What
you think doesn’t matter. You always feel like a guest,” she said.
Young didn’t see a movie at a
theater until after she left the system because she had to choose between
budgeting her small allowance for essentials and hanging out with her friends.
So she often found herself getting bullied since she was never joining in
after-school activities. Or she was jumping from school to school across the
city. Parent-teacher nights were always rough. She’d have to come up with some
excuse for why her real parents weren’t there.
Moving from borough to borough,
always being the new face, took a toll on her.
“‘Oh, that’s my aunt, that’s my
uncle.’ There was always a lie, a little tale to tell,” she said. “Or simply
hope they wouldn’t notice.”
STOIC TO SURVIVE
Foster kids grow up obsessed with
not losing their temporary home. They don’t want to speak up or articulate
their desires for fear of losing a place to sleep.
“You do what you gotta do to keep
your bed,” she said. “It felt lonely. You don’t know who to turn to. You don’t
feel supported at all. You feel if you do cry out for help you don’t have
anyone to turn to, because it’s always this thing of you have to have somewhere
to sleep, you have to preserve your placement, you have to preserve your bed.”
So, she said, foster kids always
feel like they have to deal with whatever comes their way.
After a mad scramble she managed
to find housing after graduation. The security deposit was a struggle but she
has a home she calls her own.
Young now works as a program
specialist at iFoster. She helps foster children like herself navigate the
foster care system and transition out of it. She connects them to programs like
the Dorm Project, which helped her successfully do what so many foster youth
never get to do — graduate from college. She wants them to be self-sufficient
when they leave the system — and that means encouraging bigger ambitions than
just holding down a job. However, she sympathizes with that feeling. She
remembers her goal used to be to get out of the system and work. She never
considered pursuing higher education.
She remembered looking up how
much college costs and thinking her foster parent would never pay the high
price tag. She didn’t realize there were programs out there to help people like
herself.
“The light at the end of the tunnel for me was
just getting out,” she said.
She grew up feeling embarrassed
about being a foster kid. But that all changed when she entered college. When
she realized her status as a foster youth gave her access to grants, housing,
laptops and other essential supplies for excelling at school, along with other
support systems, her outlook changed.
“That made me feel empowered,”
she said.
Now, the light at the end of the
tunnel is law school.