Word: mazzafro
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...home made all the difference for Michael Mazzafro, now 17. The son of an alcoholic, drug-abusing mother, he spent six years shuttling back and forth between foster care and his mother's home. At last he was adopted by a Pennsylvania couple, but his behavior soon proved too much for them. While they made arrangements to terminate the adoption, he was stashed in a hospital for more than a year. That's where he was when Joe Mazzafro, a Philadelphia bachelor now 39, took...
When he first arrived a little more than four years ago, Michael refused to bathe, disappeared from school for weeks at a time and filched money with Mazzafro's cash-machine card. "I was used to people taking me, then leaving me," the boy recalls. "I guess I was testing Dad all the time to see what he would...
...What Mazzafro did was offer Michael large doses of love and patience. That formula had already worked wonders with Tuan, now 14, a Vietnamese refugee who had come to Mazzafro four months earlier, speaking no English and still toting the cardboard box that had been his bed at a relocation center in Malaysia. Now he's an honors student at the local junior high, while Michael has become a computer whiz with his sights set on Princeton. Meanwhile, Joe Mazzafro is applying his methods to Brandon, 9, his third adopted son, who tumbled through nine foster homes in his first...
Faced with a shortage of couples for the growing numbers of special-needs children, adoption officials have been forced to discard orthodox notions of what constitutes a family. Two years ago a White House task force recommended that states eliminate barriers to adoption by singles like Mazzafro, working couples, older people and the physically handicapped. "We've had situations where married veterans have been encouraged to adopt special-needs children, but when they show up in a wheelchair, they are shown the door," says Mary Sheila Gall, who headed the group. "We had to change the system...
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