For a child his age, Jason has had few possessions, but he did have his own, worn suitcase.
He has slept in cribs and beds in 13 homes, on Chicago’s South and West Sides and in suburbs from Markham to Bensenville. He has tried to become a member of 13 distinct families in a series of foster relationships that have ended, sometimes after months, sometimes after days, as abruptly as they began.
He is 8 years old.
One day after he was born, authorities pulled him into Illinois’ overwhelmed foster care system after determining that his biological parents could not care for him. But in the years since, the state and the agency it paid to oversee his care have failed him.
They failed to find Jason a stable home. They failed to keep him out of harm’s way. They failed to help him feel happy or safe or loved.
The state and the agencies it hires are failing thousands of other children in the same way. Look at Jason and see a broken foster care system.
Jason called many of his foster parents by one in the small set of names that seem to promise forever: Momma, Ma, Auntie.
Meanwhile, Jason, a skinny boy with a giant, full-face smile, keeps moving, like so many others. Some 6,400 children–12 percent of those in state care–lived in eight or more places, a 1999 study showed.
The damage from these moves, experts say, can include academic delays, attachment disorders, depression, identity problems, loneliness and stress.
“Any repeated movement of a child from home to home during the formative years is troubling and traumatic,” said Mark Testa, an associate professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the Children and Family Research Center. “But when you have five or 10 or 13 moves–it is really compromising to the child’s healthy development.”
Jason’s case is extreme; the average number of moves is four. He shows symptoms of post-traumatic stress and “reactive attachment disorder”–in his case, he connects unnaturally to people he meets, seemingly having no sense about who is a lifelong friend and who is a passing stranger. When one child welfare worker came to talk to him, he thought she might be his next mother.
Jason feels rejected, victimized and unable to be part of a family, a psychologist said. “He desperately wants to feel special and loved but is so fearful of being hurt or abandoned that he withdraws or acts out his profound frustrations and disappointments.”
Another psychologist put it more plainly: “[Jason] is lost and confused by a world of adults who have come and gone throughout his young life.”
Jason’s story is contained in thousands of pages of confidential documents examined by the Tribune, as well as in the memories of people who cared for him and were interviewed for this report. Jason is not his real name, but a pseudonym once given him by the Cook County public guardian’s office.
Many of Jason’s foster parents recall sweet memories of a child who loved to eat anything with peanut butter, who wanted to grow up to be a police officer, whose favorite color was dark blue, who dressed in a tiny suit to sing in a youth choir and whose smile was unforgettable.
But there are other realities of his journey too. The shy 3rd grader has been transferred to at least seven schools since preschool, has struggled with delayed speech, a borderline IQ, behavior problems and bed-wetting. And he was allegedly sexually abused by an older child in one of his foster homes.
The sole constant in his life has been leaving.
Betty Bailey, his 13th foster mother, recalled hugging him in the doorway of her Auburn-Gresham neighborhood house as he moved out several months ago. “I told him, `I love you, but you have to go,'” she remembered.
“He looked sad there with his suitcase,” Bailey said. “But he didn’t say anything.”
DCFS steps in
Jason was born on a rainy, snowy March 29, 1994, in Bethany Hospital. His mother, a schizophrenic, was being treated in the hospital’s psychiatric unit at the time. No one is sure where his father is.
The state’s Department of Children and Family Services stepped in immediately because of earlier reports about the mother’s handling of two older children. Police said they had observed her swinging her baby daughter around “like a yo-yo” and suggesting that she might “throw the child in the garbage can.”
The new baby was shuttled off to a DCFS-licensed emergency foster home in the South Chicago neighborhood.
By October, Jason’s case was assigned to Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois, one of about 90 private agencies that DCFS pays to find foster homes for Illinois children.
In the 1990s, Illinois and other states began to step back from handling foster children and increasingly assigned the cases to private agencies. But the system had become increasingly strained because of the number of abused, neglected and abandoned children, and the children going into foster care had deeper problems.
Lutheran Services moved the baby to a foster home in south suburban Markham. Jason lasted just 12 days in his second home.
His new foster mother asked that Jason be taken away because he “had a bad diaper rash and foster parent was unable to maintain him because he urinated too much,” a caseworker noted.
The baby’s third home–a cramped, second floor apartment in a block of identical buildings in Glenwood–was a temporary stop, never meant to last. He lived there four months.
Jason was weeks shy of his first birthday when the agency brought him to his fourth home, a house on an out-of-the-way street in Markham.
Even then, adults had begun to worry about how all the change might be affecting him. He seemed timid at first, and his foster mother wondered if it was a result of being thrust into so many homes in such a short time.
By the time Jason was 2, it was clear that he could never live with his birth mother. So in 1996, authorities decided their goal for the boy was adoption. He needed a permanent home.
But Jason was not in a home likely to last. While Jason seemed to be thriving with the Markham couple, the foster mother was well into her 70s. She already had raised four grown children. She said she would keep the child “as long as DCFS wants” but made no secret of this–she did not want to adopt.
When the woman fell deeply ill in 1997, the boy had to leave.
As with at least six of the 13 homes Jason would live in over the years, he was dropped off next at a South Side foster home that was considered an “emergency” or “temporary” placement. But that type of placement guaranteed only one thing: another move.
When the boy came down with impetigo, a contagious skin infection, his fifth foster mother asked that he be taken elsewhere. She told a caseworker she was planning to have guests for the upcoming holidays and didn’t want Jason there. When the boy was brought back from an appointment the day before Thanksgiving, she wouldn’t let him in the door and suggested, instead, that he be taken to “a shelter.”
Another move
With that, Jason was sent to another emergency, temporary caregiver.
A Lutheran Child and Family Services worker told Susan Earley almost nothing about Jason before he appeared in her open garage in Bensenville just hours after he had been turned away from his previous foster home. About all Earley knew was this: The boy, now 3, had nowhere else to go.
So there he stood, wearing a pink diaper, sweat pants, a sweat shirt, black sneakers and a blue winter coat with a broken zipper. He had no socks on. It was odd that he wore a diaper, Earley realized later, because he was potty trained.
“Sometimes you don’t know what you are getting,” said Earley, 38, who along with her husband, Tom, took care of the boy for nearly a week. What the Earleys could sense right away was that Jason was hungry. He appeared to have a distended belly; he was a rail thin kid who looked pregnant. He ate nearly everything she put in front of him.
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Jason thumped his head on his pillow at night and had a speech problem–some other adults described it as a “thick tongue.” Mostly, though, he was quiet.
“He seemed like a normal little boy who had been through an awful lot,” Susan Earley recalled. “He sort of seemed like in a daze the whole time. He looked around at everything, very cautious. He wanted to make sure he didn’t get in trouble.”
The Earleys bought him a new coat, clothes and a plastic toy truck. “We gave him lots of hugs. We would sit there quietly and hold him. He didn’t look like he needed a whole lot of talking,” Susan Earley said.
One morning, they got the agency’s call saying Jason would be leaving in a few hours.
“We told him he was going to another place but he was a good boy,” she said. “He was going to get a new mommy and daddy.”
“He just listened,” Susan Earley remembered.
Then the caseworker put him in the car.
There’s no single explanation for why some children get moved and moved and moved again. Most often, studies show, foster parents discover they are not equipped to handle a particular child’s difficult behaviors and problems.
Advocates disagree about why that happens so often–and who is to blame.
Many foster parents complain that state or private agencies give them little or no warning about a child’s serious emotional, medical or educational problems. Some child welfare experts, meanwhile, say agencies license foster parents who are untrained and unprepared to handle the most troubled children. Others say foster parents simply aren’t paid enough–around $400 a month for ordinary foster care in Illinois–to cope with these children’s grave needs.
“With the kids who are coming to the attention of states now being much more disturbed than ever before, it is very difficult to find competent foster parents,” said Anthony Maluccio, a child welfare expert from Boston College. “The demands on foster parents are enormous, and they either aren’t provided with the kinds of help and services they are going to need, or the competent foster parents are abused by putting too many kids in the home.”
Jason’s next home, on a tree-lined street in Elmhurst, lasted for just 10 days. His new foster mother, his seventh, said she could not deal with his behavior. Too many temper tantrums, she said. And Jason had twice slapped her roommate.
Back to the city
So, at 3, Jason was driven to a brick townhouse on the West Side where there seemed a glimmer of hope for adoption. The foster mother was interested, she said, but she also cautioned workers that she wanted to “find out what his problems are” before she could “make an informed decision.”
Less than a year later, hope fell apart. A Lutheran Child and Family Services caseworker expressed alarm about the situation. His eighth foster mother wasn’t returning calls. She had moved and seemed to be “between homes.” Staying with her, the caseworker said, would leave Jason in jeopardy.
Some of the one- and two-line entries recording his foster parents’ decisions to give up Jason sound simple, even cold. For some, however, sending him on his way was a painful and wrenching choice.
Linda Felix’s eyes swell with tears when she talks about him. By the time he arrived at the Felixes’ Schaumburg home–his ninth–he was nearly 5 and his wounds were obvious.
“I don’t know where he had been,” said Felix, a pastor and founder of the Men & Women of Wisdom Ministries in Chicago, “but it had to have been ugly.”
Some moments, Jason seemed like a perfectly normal preschooler. He liked to play with GI Joes. His favorite movie was “The Lion King,” which was also his favorite soundtrack. “A sweetie,” Felix said.
But he clearly was struggling too. He wet his bed. He couldn’t stay still. He seemed to have sensory problems, she said, hearing the world at volumes that differed–sometimes louder, sometimes softer–with how others heard it. He wouldn’t listen. He feared taking showers and hollered at the prospect.
Felix let him take baths, but the other problems were harder.
When she got the boy, Felix said, she was told nothing about his past homes or his medical history by Lutheran Child and Family Services officials. “I wanted to know what had been going on in that child’s life before I got him,” she said. “There was no history before me but a woman who had been having problems with homelessness.”
At about the same time the Felixes took Jason in, they also brought into their foster home a newborn girl who had alcohol and cocaine in her system.
But Felix could not leave the boy alone with the newborn. Jason would torment the girl, putting safety pins in her crib. Asked how the pins got in there, he would lie.
“In his heart he wouldn’t want to hurt her,” Felix said. “But his way of relating is that people he loved hurt him. I could not leave him alone. He had to be watched all of the time.”
Worried, her husband warned her: “He will be the death of you.”
Felix, 41, said she didn’t want to give up. Jason had become part of their lives; she had marks on a wall in the house, measuring the 5 inches he had grown in their months together. “I had fallen in love with him,” she said. “He had fallen in love with me.
“He seemed like he wanted to fit. He wanted it to work. I was praying hard for it to get better, but it just didn’t get better,” she said.
Felix said she feared for the baby’s safety if Jason stayed. She could handle one, she figured, but not both. And the baby girl–because she was so much younger–could be more easily helped.
A short time after Jason’s fifth birthday, Felix asked Lutheran Child and Family Services to remove him from her house. The Felixes have since adopted the girl, who is now 4.
“I had to give him up, but I fought for her,” Felix said. “It was worth it. She is going to be OK.”
Felix will never forget Jason’s reaction when she told him he was moving: “Again?”
Felix told him to walk around the house and put anything he wanted into his suitcase. He left his toys behind. He took a bar of soap, a toy from the newborn, Felix’s gloves and her husband’s hat. He packed crackers, cookies and candy. “I need this for my journey, Momma,” he told her.
It was a wet, dreary day that Felix last saw him. “We may meet up again,” she told him. “Love is nothing if you don’t give it away.” He responded, she remembered, with his massive smile, and then stood there with his suitcase, waiting to go, wearing her gloves and her husband’s hat.
To strangers, Felix explains Jason’s presence in her family photographs this way: “He was one of my foster children. He was just one I couldn’t keep.”
`Just wanted love’
Over the years, people have often asked Jason where he wanted to live. Nearly always, the boy responded that he wanted to stay right here, with this family and in this house–wherever he was when the question was asked.
A month after he arrived at Lillian Williams’ tidy bungalow when he was 5, Jason began to weep when he suspected–wrongly, at that time–that a caseworker had come to move him away from the woman he already was calling Ma. He wanted to stay with her forever, he declared.
“He just wanted love,” said Williams, who was also caring for two other young foster boys in her Ashburn neighborhood home.
Jason liked to jump on a trampoline in the yard and didn’t seem to mind her strict no-TV rule on weekdays. She distinctly remembers his signoff for the night: “Goodnight, Ma, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
“He didn’t have nobody,” Williams said. “He doesn’t have visits [from family]. He was just by himself. I thought maybe I would adopt him.”
Whatever prospect there may have been for that vanished nine months after he arrived. Another of her foster sons claimed Williams had whipped him. After an appeal process, authorities found the allegation to be false, but not before DCFS decided to move all three boys.
Williams said she never really worried about her own reputation. She knew she hadn’t whipped anyone. But she often worried about the boy with “the beautiful smile” who had, in such a brief life, lived so many places. Her home had been No. 10.
“I have thought about him a lot,” Williams said, staring at her floor. “He seemed really happy here. I wish he could get in one place and stay. Who is being hurt is the children.”
Jason’s 11th home was a basement apartment in Berwyn where low ceilings made the place feel like a maze.
His new foster mother saw clear signs of trouble: Jason shivered when she raised her voice at him; his head broke out in blisters and bled; when he grew angry, he banged his head against the wall.
The two other foster boys who lived with Jason in his previous home were moved with Jason, and the foster mother said she sometimes saw what she perceived as inappropriate sexual contact between the boys. She said she tried to solve that by telling Jason: “Little boys don’t do things like this. God doesn’t like stuff like that.”
Again there was talk of adoption, even court dates.
But 18 months later, the foster mother told agency officials she was ill and said that if the agency did not come and pick up the children, “she would leave them with the baby-sitter.”
The foster mother recently said she only wanted the boy removed so she could undergo a minor surgery and that she later pressed to have him returned once she had recovered, but her request was ignored.
Jason never got to tell the woman goodbye. He never understood why, and talked about it often. He thought it was his fault.
House No. 12
A year ago, Jason was sent to Morgan Park, where his 12th foster mother had been taking children into her house since her beautician recommended Lutheran Child and Family Services five years earlier.
Her living room was large, its furniture covered in plastic. On a recent day, the 55-year-old woman wore a T-shirt that read: Love Unlocks Hearts.
“All foster kids, they hide their real identities,” the woman said. “They show you the good parts. But I said, just relax. Be you.”
When Jason loosened up, he turned out to be a “fireball.” He rocked. He swore. “When he gets mad, he’s like a madman,” she said. “He gets a look on his face like `I can kill you’ then and there.”
Jason was 7 then.
“He was the type of person, he will cuss you out,” she said. “I just look at him–give him that look. I never have a problem. You have to really get down with these kids. All of them are like that.”
She said she lays down several rules with children. She will not bail them out of jail. Slap her, she will slap back.
Asked whether she considered adopting Jason, the woman shook her head firmly: “I wouldn’t get caught up with nothing like that for nothing in the world.”
Jason was allegedly sexually abused in this home.
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A 13-year-old boy, the woman’s adopted son, was accused of having oral and anal sex with Jason in February. Jason has said it had happened before.
The foster mother lost her foster care license after the incident. She was furious about that.
“I’ve been through an awful lot,” she said as she pounded one fist in her cupped hand. “It hurts. I’m still trying to deal with it. How can I get my license back? I was trying to open a day-care center when this all happened.”
The woman said she should not be held responsible for the behavior of the adopted boy. She said Lutheran Child and Family Services failed to tell her about his history as a victim himself of sexual abuse. And workers from the agency, she said, pressured her to adopt him more than a year ago, even though she was unsure about the idea.
“Look how this works: I adopt a little boy, and he abuses another kid,” she said. “I cannot take this. Why didn’t somebody tell me that [my adopted son] had been abused? I wouldn’t have adopted him. They never told me about him.”
But Lutheran Services officials say they never push foster parents into adopting children and that the foster mother was well aware of her adoptive son’s history.
In fact, the older boy had been accused of nearly identical sexual abuse with a different, younger foster boy in the same woman’s home in 1997, raising questions about why officials would have placed Jason there four years later.
Lutheran Services officials said Friday that, in response to Jason’s case, they are now examining all foster homes where similar previous incidents or reports have been made.
The foster mother, meanwhile, now said she is thinking about undoing her adoption of the older boy, although she said she has been told that DCFS officials will frown on that. “I do want to end it,” she said. “I don’t want to be an adoptive parent anymore. I say to hell with DCFS.”
The woman said she expects Jason was “all right” following the abuse because it did not appear to be his first sexual situation.
“He knew so much about sex from day one, it’s pathetic,” she said. “That little boy had been around somewhere.”
Another home
On the evening of Valentine’s Day this year, Jason arrived at Betty Bailey’s South Side home. Lutheran Child and Family Services workers were searching for somebody to take the boy right away.
Bailey, 53, who was already caring for a young girl, could not adopt Jason but was willing to keep him temporarily: “I said, yeah, I’d give him a try.”
“He wasn’t no real bad child,” she said. “When he first got here, he would never just sit down. He was very hyper, moving and rocking and bumping his head on the mattress. He would kick and tear stuff up.”
He pressed the button on the TV in his bedroom so hard that it broke, so he could no longer watch professional wrestling.
She said she heard “everyday” from his school, where teachers complained he had been “acting up” and fighting with other children.
Jason left in June.
Told that her home had been the boy’s 13th, Bailey raised her hands to her face in shock. “My God, that’s a shame,” she said, then added, “You know, I liked that little boy.”
Lutheran Child and Family Services does not defend its handling of Jason’s case. “There are really no excuses for what has happened to this child,” said Gene Svebakken, Lutheran’s president. “We all agree that we have failed [him].
“Who was really advocating for his best interests over the long haul?” he asked. “Unfortunately, there was not a strong advocate. That should have been done by our workers.”
In eight years, at least six caseworkers handled Jason’s case. “We tended to place the child with the first available foster parent that indicated an interest,” he said. “This is the perfect example of when you don’t find foster parents who have the capacity to respond to a child’s needs.”
But Jason’s case is by no means the norm at the 130-year-old Lutheran Child and Family Services, Svebakken said. “This is the exception,” he said.
Lutheran Child and Family Services is not alone in moving children. Of 36 private agencies that place Cook County children in foster homes of non-relatives, Lutheran Child and Family Services ranked 19th–right in the middle.
In fiscal 2002, all but two of those agencies moved children more than DCFS would like.
DCFS Director Jess McDonald also said he ultimately accepts responsibility for its failings. “Anything that happened in this case and all the other cases with a lot of moves is on DCFS,” he said. “It is my responsibility to make sure kids aren’t bounced around.”
To that end, he said, DCFS has started considering agencies’ records on how often they move children. DCFS is also beginning a program in which children entering the system get an immediate, top-to-bottom assessment of their lives and problems. The hope, McDonald said, is that will mean better–and fewer–homes for children.
That comes years late for Jason.
At the request of the public guardian’s office and with the support of Lutheran Child and Family Services workers, Jason now lives at a group facility where experts are examining all of his needs–psychological, medical, educational, neurological, social.
It is a temporary placement.
Assessing Jason
So far, they have found a boy who sees his world as unsafe. He expects danger and confusion.
As part of the testing, Jason has been asked to make up stories, and woven through them is his sense of “pervasive uncertainty about his future or a resigned hopelessness.”
He told of women who ended up dead, hurt or scared.
He told of a house “all messed up and wrecked.”
He told of a boy: “He’s alone, maybe he ain’t gonna have no friends.”
“Overall, [he] appears to be struggling with intense needs of belonging to a family and to feel loved and cared for by a maternal figure,” the psychologists said.
On a recent afternoon, Jason wears an Old Navy T-shirt and jeans too big for his skinny frame. He whispers that he has a stomachache from eating too many cookies.
Unlike the other children at the group facility, he has no regular visits from his birth mother or his older siblings, both of whom have been adopted. Instead, a worker has started bringing in her pet dog, Rufus, to play with Jason on certain days, so he has his own “visits,” as the other kids do.
After the full examination is complete, officials hope to recommend a proper home–a new and final home–to send the boy to.
But Jason has told workers here he is worried about where he will go next. He wants, he says lately, to stay here.