Foster kids ‘aging out’ too soon?

The 19-year-old woman in the middle of the second row of the history class looks like any other college student.

She is every bit the bookish student, more interested in grades than gossip.

But she is also a survivor with horror in her past and an uncertain future.

"I was always told I wouldn't make it past the seventh grade," said Lyndsey Benson, a freshman at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College.

As early as she can remember, she heard those discouraging words from her mother.

When Benson found herself in foster care at age 8, she kept hearing that she would fail.

"It was hateful," said Benson, who was sexually and emotionally abused before and after entering the foster-care system.

"Somehow, some way, I maintained some type of hope that I would become something."

As a foster-care child who failed to find a permanent family connection before reaching age 18, there's a wealth of statistical information that suggests what Benson might become. There's not much promise in the numbers.

She is among the thousands of children nationwide who "age out" of foster care every year - their benefits end before they're placed in permanent homes. Virginia has led the nation in that count, with 21 percent of the state's foster children leaving the system without homes in 2004, the latest year for which comprehensive national data is available.

As of Oct. 1, about 22 percent of the state's 6,603 foster children were in institutions, group facilities or independent-living programs.

"Every time a child ages out, there's a tragedy," said Nadine Marsh-Carter, director of the Children's Home Society of Virginia, whose adoption program includes the placement of foster children.

"They don't have that sense of connection, sense of permanence, sense of belonging, the go-to base when they have to make life choices that few of us are prepared to make at age 18.

"They just need a place to come home to, a place to help them out when they encounter a bump. Because really, family is where you get belonging and values and confidence and guideposts for all lifelong decisions. Every time a child ages out without that, they get the message, 'I don't belong to anyone.'"

. . .

Benson can think of quite a few people to whom she's glad she doesn't belong.

Her life started going wrong at 2, when she was returned to her biological parents after spending her first two years in foster care.

In the next six years, she would be sexually abused by her father - he's nine years into a 25-year sentence for those crimes - and abandoned by her mother.

At 8, she went into foster care for a second time. At 12, her foster parents adopted her and let her pick a new name, but by 14 her new family couldn't keep up with her emotional needs and checked her into a psychiatric-care facility.

At 16, she tried to kill herself.

She was the kind of child the state's foster-care system is supposed to nurture and protect.

But it didn't.

"They turned their backs on what was really happening," she said of the case workers under whose care she was placed.

From pysch wards to group homes to a brief stint living on the street to her current placement in an independent-living program, Benson has struggled. At times, the struggle has been for something as simple as her safety. At other times, the struggle has been to find permanent family connections that can last a lifetime.

While helping children of every age is essential, Marsh-Carter and others said children in their midto late teens need special attention because they are so often ignored in the system.

"That is a critical point in a young person's life and we can't deny they need support and structure and belonging," she said. "It says a lot of our society when we can turn to a person at 18 and say, 'You're no longer our problem, or our issue, or our cause of concern,' because they're not issues or problems or concerns. They're people.

"We need to be there for them because they deserve it and because society really does pay if we're not."

But what those children need and deserve is not what they have traditionally received, say people in the system ranging from foster children to first lady Anne Holton, who has led an effort to overhaul the way the state deals with children who need protection.

Of the children in the care of Virginia last month, about 72 percent have lived in at least two places since entering the system, according to state figures. About 16 percent, or more than 1,000 children, have had six or more placements.

Davon Mitchell has lived in seven state-sanctioned homes. And he didn't even start until he was 16, when he and his siblings - three brothers and two sisters - were taken from their mother.

"You could say I had some trouble fitting in due to some trust issues," he said.

Now 20 and a sophomore at J. Sargeant Reynolds, he's approaching the two-year anniversary of his latest, and he hopes last, placement. Under a recent change in the way the state oversees foster children, Mitchell can continue receiving benefits until he's 21, as long as he's in school and working.

"It was a period of loss," he says of his first two years in foster care. "But I learned a lot of things."

Benson said she learned a lot, too.

"I know how it feels to be ignored and not supported and everything," she said.

A.J. Sanders, 53, said her own story is much like Benson's. Now running a life-skills-training program called Beating the Odds in Bon Air that tries to teach foster children the types of things most people learn from their families, Sanders also went into foster care at age 8.

She spent a decade as a ward of Pennsylvania before aging out.

"When you grow up in the system, you feel powerless all the time," she said. "You have adults who care about you and a lot who don't. They're telling you what to do, . . . putting you down. There's a high level of insensitivity in foster care. A lot of it's not intentional, but people don't realize [the impact of] saying to a kid, 'You need to listen to us because no one else cared for you,' or, 'You're just a knucklehead; you're going to fail.' We hear those messages all the time."

Sadly, there's statistical evidence that failure is likely.

Twenty-five percent of teens who aged out of the system wind up in jail by the time they're 25, according to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts called "Time for Reform: Aging Out and On Their Own."

And 20 percent will become homeless, it says in that report.

Only 3 percent of people who have been through foster care will earn a four-year college diploma, the report says, far below the 28 percent of the general population who will.

. . .

For all that has gone wrong in her life, Benson stumbled into a bit of good luck when she heard about the program Grooming Responsible Outcomes for Women Now.

"To this day, I consider it a blessing," she said of her chance meeting with a former resident in the Henrico County program. "I thought it'd be one of those things I'd never get, but I did."

The program offers her an apartment, and she can fall back on the around-the-clock support of staff that works out of an apartment below hers.

"They need so much," said Latroyal Smith, who runs the GROWN program. "We have to teach them everything. You have to try to unlearn so many behaviors."

Benson, like most foster children, has trust issues.

She has been in the GROWN program for about a year and a half, and she and Smith both say they still test each other.

"Oh, I've pushed her to the limit," Benson said.

"It can get frustrating," Smith said. "But look at the population. These aren't kids from good homes. They have challenges, and we need to meet them. Once you begin to understand their hierarchy of needs, you can start to help.

"They don't know how to date, so we have to teach them how to act around boys. They don't know how to cook, so we have to teach them. They don't know about paying bills, so we show them. But we do it in a way that if they do mess up, they're not out on the street the first time."

. . .

While nonfamily programs such as GROWN and Beating the Odds claim successes, Holton said placing an emphasis on family placement was the right path to pursue.

"The social science research is pretty solid that long-term connections with stable adults is one of the best preventive factors for all kinds of trouble that a young person might get in," she said. "I feel confident in saying that having someone be in a permanent family is more likely to produce a permanent connection to a stable adult."

Benson said she wants to be there for some of those who can't find a connection in a home.

Her career goal is to become a social worker so she can help people like herself make smoother transitions in life. She'd also like to write a book and share her story.

She doesn't want the pain she has endured to be for naught.

"I want someone to come across my story and feel some kind of hope," she said. "Maybe a seventh-grader will come across it and be like, 'Dang, I've been told that,' but read on and see how far I've gotten" since moving into Smith's program in 2007.

"I'm still Lyndsey," she said, "but I'm such a different person now."

Contact Zachary Reid at (804) 775-8179 or .