Word: sabreena
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...When Sabreena Boyd was 11, she stood before the congregation at the New Jerusalem Full Gospel Church in Muscatine, Iowa, and asked for a new family. A member of the church's Sunday school, she had recently been placed in a foster home after her mother could no longer care for her. "I gave a speech saying that I wanted to be adopted by a Christian family, a loving family," recalls SaBreena, now 20. Stuart and Tina Juarez, a recently married couple who heard her speak that day, were impressed by SaBreena's maturity and after much soul searching decided...
...what seemed at first like a storybook ending for a homeless child was actually the prologue to a far more complex tale. SaBreena, a tall, serious girl, had an explosive temper. A few months after her speech, she shoved a classmate's head through a school window and broke another girl's jaw on the bus, all in one week. And after she moved in with the Juarezes in the summer of 1998, she repeatedly ran away. "We did not believe that was the same girl that spoke at the church. It was like, no way," says Stuart. Nevertheless...
...married and a mother of two, SaBreena is close to her parents, but as her story shows, adopting a teen can pose all kinds of challenges for the parents and the child. Over the past few years, however, the number of 12- to 18-year-olds adopted out of foster care has risen sharply, from 6,000 in 2000 to 10,000 in 2004. That's thanks, in part, to financial incentives and intensive campaigns to persuade people to take in some of society's most unwanted children. Monthly foster-care subsidies, which used to stop after a child...
...SABREENA BOYD LEARNED TO cook, clean and take care of herself when she was just 7 because, she says, her birth mother was often too drunk or strung out on drugs to watch over her. After she moved in with the Juarezes, "I was told that I needed to try to live the rest of my childhood," says SaBreena. "But what does being a kid mean? I don't think I've ever gotten that explained...
...clicked right away with her adoptive dad Stuart, now 39 and a Baptist minister. Soon after she moved in, they painted her bedroom her favorite color--sky blue. And after school, Stuart would talk with her about her day. "It was me and Dad all day, every day," says SaBreena, who never met her biological father. Getting along with her new mom Tina, a state clerical worker, also 39, was harder. Says SaBreena: "We didn't have anything to say to each other. The only time we would talk was about chores." Says Tina: "Dad was the friend...