Kimberly and Pat Turner expanded their family by fostering three children and ultimately adopting them. Their three new children KayLee, Kierra and Jacob join Kayla, the Turner's 12 year old biological daughter.  The Chesterfield couple says they have a heart for children and are now giving back to the system by mentoring and training other would-be foster parents.

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Foster youth embracing the system his peers reject

 

The emotional roller coaster of foster care has lifted and dropped Derrick Cash for seven years.  Now it is his calling.

Nestled on a high stool in a Richmond’s Sine pub – munching french fries and a grilled chicken sandwich – Derrick Cash talks about the daily letters he writes to his incarcerated mother.

The Lexington native talks about the illegal drugs he once sold to help her pay the bills; about the six different group homes he stayed in after being taken away from his own at age 10; and about the daily fist fights he endured to “just survive” one institution.

“But, you know if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t change one thing about my life,” said Cash, who now lives in a foster youth group home in Southern Virginia.

Cash is one of the nearly 8,100 foster care children in the commonwealth.  But at the age of 17, he could soon “age-out” of the system.  Since 2000, Virginia has had the highest percentage of 18 year olds leaving foster care, more than 500 children each year, according to information published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Cash has watched others leave the system and he understands why.  “We feel trapped.  Nothing is in our hands.”  But he says he won’t.
Despite their “street smarts” emancipated foster youth suffer from a lack of family and social support.  Their isolation hampers their effort to find employment and lead an independent life.

Fighting to beat the odds

“That’s what they say: 85 percent of foster kids end up dead and in prison,” said Cash.  “I don’t want to be another statistic.”

When Cash was eight years old, complaints were made to local social service officials that he and his older sister weren’t being properly cared for.  He didn’t know his father, who had been incarcerated since before his birth.  And his mother was in the grips of a drug addiction.  Over the next two years the reports piled up.  Cash was removed from his mother’s house.

The separation angered and confused him.  It pushed him to hang out with older kids in his Lexington neighborhood, “the wrong crowd,” he called them.  Soon after, a series of minor brushes with the law landed him in juvenile detention.

“I hadn’t even made sense yet of the foster care stuff and next thing I know, I’m serving time in detention,” he said.

Over the next six years, Cash bounced between group homes and detention centers.  He was briefly reunited with his mother and later with a grandparent, neither placement worked out.  He continued to spend time with neighborhood kids.

“I had no family.  I never had supervision,” he said.

Samantha Higgins, Derrick Cash’s Parole Officer, said policy prohibited her from discussing him or his case but did say, “I’m glad somebody’s writing an article about him.  He deserves that.”

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What's it like to be inside the foster care system? Local foster youth and an experienced foster parent talk about their first-hand experiences and some of the many challenges facing foster children today.

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“I had to fight every day to survive.”

In 2006, a police officer stopped a car in which Cash was a passenger.  The vehicle had been stolen.  Cash says he was unaware of the theft but was convicted for the unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.  He was sentenced to serve one year at the Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center in Chesterfield County.

Bon Air, Cash recalled, was filled with “robbers, rapists and murderers,” Cash said.  Nearly one-third of the youth in the facility were convicted of robbery; Almost 16 percent were convicted of sex offenses and more than 10 percent were convicted of murder, according to statistics published by the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice.  

It was the toughest environment he had experienced.  “It was a violent place.  I had to fight every day to survive.”  He wrote to his mother frequently while inside the Bon Air facility.  A family friend who worked with Cash’s mother said that she would cry while reading his letters.

Cash cried too, but only after leaving Bon Air.  He says they weren’t tears of joy, or relief, or even frustration.  They were tears of pity.  “I felt the need to help those people.  Nobody else is,” said Cash.

Less than a week after leaving Bon Air last January, Cash was moved to Victoria, a town of 1,800 people in Lunenburg County where he lives in a private, independent living facility called the Concept 1 Academies, a group home for youth between the ages of 16 and 20.

“I can see my potential.”

Cash seems to be a different person at Concept 1.  He was elected by his peers to be the president of the student council.  He organizes trips and activities.  Three times a week, he leads a meeting of fellow residents, where he collects ideas and suggestions that he carries forward to facility management.

He is driven, he says, to help the younger children he sees around him.  “I see myself in them all over again, “Cash said.  “No one should have to go through what I had to go through.”

Cash is also working on earning a college degree – a rare achievement if he makes it: less than three percent of foster children in Virginia ever earn a college degree.  “Foster kids don’t have perspective,” said Cash.  “You don’t think about the future.  You are thinking about that love you want from your family you can’t get.”

While living at Concept 1, Cash enrolled in the Middle College program at Southside Virginia Community College.  Until that time, he had no formal education beyond the eighth grade and it showed.  He was reading at only a seventh-grade level.  His mathematics and science test scores were no higher.  After four-months of intense work with Middle College instructors, he doubled his test scores and passed the GED exam.

Stephanie Currin, a veteran Middle College instructor, describes Cash as, “one of my exceptional students” who made a dramatic turnaround from testing poorly and seeming disinterested at first to embracing the process of learning.  She says Cash accomplished in five months what often takes students a year, and sometimes longer.  “Anything he puts his mind to, he can accomplish,” Currin said.

He graduated in May.

“Walking across the stage was the greatest experience ever,” said Cash.  “School is becoming addictive.”         

Cash’s dedication went beyond his graduation.  He served as a volunteer at the college’s Literacy Fair in late May.  Cash did anything that was asked of him from helping with the set-up to passing out t-shirts at the front door.  “We hosted people from all over Virginia and so many of them offered compliments about how professional and helpful Derrick was,” Currin said.

“Now, I know I have book smarts.”

Over the summer, Cash completed an electronics camp and this fall he will begin work on earning a workforce certificate in heavy equipment at Southside Virginia Community College, while also working on an associate’s degree in human services.  “I thought I only had street smarts.  Now, I know I have book smarts,” Cash said.

He will also get to live out a lifelong dream of playing on a school basketball team.  Having never attended a typical high school, he never before had the chance.

So what is the future holding for Cash?  He says he wants to complete his studies at the community college and go onto a four year school, perhaps Duke University.  He wants to convert the journal entries he’s been writing into a book about growing up in the foster care system.  And he wants to become a counselor and eventually open his own group home for foster care children. 

“I’ve heard staff at the homes I’ve been in say they want to help just one out of 10 children they work with.  That’s not good enough,” said Cash.  “Counselors should treat foster kids as if they were their own kids.”

Sandra Thompson is the director of the Middle College program and has spent a lot of time with Cash outside the classroom.  She said in light of Derrick’s past there are two things about him that really strike her:  “He is really thankful for what he has and he has such a kind heart for other people.”

When asked what needs to be done to make the foster care system better, Cash looks down and thinks for a moment.  “They should make it harder to leave,” he says.  “A lot of 18-year-olds have nothing, and people just let them go.  There are a lot of benefits inside the system.  But kids are just confused.”

And Cash yearns to reunite with his mother, who is now six-months into a three-year prison term for drug possession.  Cash writes her a letter every day because he knows how lonely it can be inside an institution.  “Every time we’re about to get together something gets in the way,” Cash said.

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Facts about Virginia's foster care youth

 

Virginia’s foster care youth are twice as likely to end up homeless or incarcerated as they are to see the inside of a college classroom.  They are more than twice as likely as other children to drop out of high school.  And only three percent of them graduate from college – and ominous statistic in today’s knowledge-based economy.

There are slightly more than 8,100 foster children in the commonwealth. According to a study released by the Pew Charitable Trust, Virginia has the highest percentage of teenagers aging-out of the foster care system in the nation.  Since 2000, one out of every five Virginia foster care youth age out of the system, more than 500 every year.

Minority children are overrepresented in the foster care system; six out of every ten foster care children in Virginia are minorities.  African-American children, specifically, are more than four times more likely than white children to be placed in out-of-home care and much less likely to ever be reunified with their birth family.  That’s a challenge for communities like Richmond, in which African-Americans account for 80% of its foster care children.

(Reported in July 2008)