Chesterfield foster child gets new start in Chesapeake

CHESAPEAKE Cassandre Monique Wynn Steele is having a Christmas beyond her wildest imagination.

There are the presents, for sure. She, like baby Jesus, is getting three.

But the real gift for the 16-year-old wasn't placed under the tree in the Steele home in Chesapeake, and Cassandre didn't have to wait until this morning to get it.

The gift for a lifetime is a place in the home itself. Cassandre got it for keeps last Friday.

The Steeles adopted Cassandre after a whirlwind courtship that began in November at the Children's Home Society of Virginia in Richmond and concluded a little more than a month later, when Cassandre left her foster home in Chesterfield County for the trip two hours southeast to her new home.

The process was much faster than normal, because the Steeles previously had worked with the society, and because Cassandre quickly made a connection with the family, she and the family said.

"It just feels like home," she said Sunday. "I'm so excited. It's so loving here."

The addition gives Alan and Dana Steele a dozen children - three from his first marriage, nine more adopted in the past eight years - and gives Cassandre a solid, two-parent family for the first time in her life.

She quickly became a magnet for her newest siblings, with 5-year-old Taylor, 6-year-old Tawnee and 6-year-old Jake taking turns sitting on, hanging from and generally attaching themselves to her.

Aimee, at 10, and Ana Karen, also 16, were on hand, too, all smiles and, on occasion, giggles as their newest sister blended easily into the family.

Eden, 24, and Evangel, 22, sisters by birth and again as adoptive members of the Steele family, live nearby and also were present.

The other four live far from Virginia - 24-year-old Hanna is in Ethiopia - but were there in spirit and in pictures. Walls, mantels and nearly every other space in the Steele home are covered with photos. Just a couple of days into her stay, Cassandre was on the wall.

"Every kid needs a family," said Alan Steele, who owns and manages rental property. "When they're 18 or 20, they need support, too. Maybe more so."

"It's something we can give them," Dana Steele, a self-employed lawyer, quickly added, picking up the sentence just as Alan finished.

"It's stability," Alan said. "We're always going to be here for them."

. . .

Finding families to adopt children Cassandre's age - not to mention 18 or 20, as Eden and Evangel were when the Steeles adopted them - is not easy. By the time foster children reach their mid-teens, they often are headed into independent-living programs and then released on their own.

According to a 2004 study from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the most recent national study available, Virginia leads the nation in the number of children who age out of foster care every year.

Those are children whose benefits run out before they find family placements. They are much more likely than their peers to become homeless or incarcerated, according to the study, and they're much less likely to pursue education beyond minimum requirements.

For many children, the problem is perception, said Krista McCulloch, a former social worker who now finds homes for children at the Children's Home Society. The risks of taking in children in that age group aren't as perilous as they seem, she said.

"There's a negative stigma with foster children in general, especially as they get older," said McCulloch, who was Cassandre's caseworker from August until her adoption.

"People think that they have problems that can't be fixed. What they need is stability and moral support. When they get that, they tend to get better."

Eden and Evangel saw the stability in the Steele home as visitors and then discovered its power when they were adopted.

"I saw what it looked like from the outside looking in," said Evangel, who accompanied her foster mother to the Steeles to baby-sit. "I really wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be one of them."

Eden said the adoption was just a formality.

"I already considered myself part of the family," she said.

She said the Steele home is "cozy, comfortable. They work hard to make you feel like part of the family."

. . .

It's not all feel-good every day, though, and the Steeles are quick to acknowledge that.

"Cassandre might have problems she doesn't realize," Dana said. "A lot of stuff that happens to these kids, it happens when they're pre-verbal, and it can take years to figure out."

Not that anything would stop them from taking in kids.

Several of the dozen have special needs resulting from the abuse that landed them in foster care in the first place.

"If you'd told me 10 years ago that I'd have a house full of kids, I'd have laughed you out of the room," Dana said.

"We were close to being empty-nesters," Alan said.

Dana corrected his math - they were a few years, not a few months away from that day - but not his spirit of the time eight years ago when they adopted Aimee.

Neither could pinpoint the moment they knew they'd wind up with a dozen kids or explain why. It just happened.

They both kept going back to the idea of kids needing a family.

"You have to understand that," Dana said. "Kids need family."

Cassandre can appreciate that idea. The Steele home is her 10th since she was born in 1993 in Haiti.

She has lived with a nurse and a nun. For a while at the beginning of the decade, she was adopted and lived with a family in Richmond, but that didn't work out and she wound up back in foster care.

Since August 2007, Cassandre has changed homes, and schools, on a regular basis.

Halfway through her sophomore year in high school, she's ready to settle in and start her life anew. She eagerly switched her last name and then for the first time in her life took a middle name. It felt so good, she quickly added a second.

She said she was looking forward particularly to living in a home with a father.

"There are two of them," she said of her new parents. "I've never had a positive male role model."

Contact Zachary Reid at (804) 775-8179 or zreid@timesdispatch.com.

Contact Alexa Welch Edlund at (804) 649-6382 or aedlund@timesdispatch.com.