Word: fostering
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...told, Homer Bennett has lived in 14 different foster homes, seldom staying in one longer than a year. At one point, he did get to stay with his maternal grandmother, but she was frail, elderly and unable to care for Homer and Frankie. So the brothers went back into state care, where they were separated and placed in different homes...
Homer was sometimes beaten with belts. "We didn't know that beatings were against the rules in foster homes," he says. "We found out from another foster child." One of his foster mothers, he says, threw a knife at him, cutting his forehead, then forcing him to say he had molested another kid. "Because of foster care," he says, "I didn't really grow up anywhere." Now he's an adult, and for the first time he's facing the prospect of living on his own--a situation for which the system has never quite prepared...
...many kids are growing up in foster care that social workers are beginning to worry about how they will survive after leaving the state's care. Studies show that former foster kids are at risk of becoming criminals, homeless or pregnant after being "emancipated" from the system, according to child-welfare experts. Until a few years ago, many kids who reached legal age had no help to ease the transition. Somebody would show up on the doorstep of their foster homes and tell them to pack their belongings in a plastic...
Homer, however, may be getting some help. A few years ago, he wound up at New Directions, an independent-living program run by Hull House in Chicago. Foster kids between the ages of 16 and 21 can rent an apartment with welfare stipends. "When you are little, you don't want people to know you are in the system, that you got taken away from your mother," says Homer. "When you get your apartment, then...
...years he was in foster care, his family disintegrated. He very rarely sees his birth mother or his brother Frankie. His father is dead. Homer, at 20, is a father himself, of an infant girl, and he says he's worried about keeping his own family together. He hopes to get his GED and maybe even graduate from a community college. But technically, he was a ward of the state until he turned 21 last week, when he was released. With so many bad things behind him, Homer says, there is only one good thing about his long trip through...