An open letter to the Governor of the Great State of Ohio:

Have you ever had someone tell you your son wasn’t welcome? Did it crush your parent’s heart (or your pride)?  I hate it. I had this happen twice in one week.  He’s 9.  He’s loving, compassionate, inquisitive, unbelievably resilient, bears physical and emotional scars everywhere, and his body and brain are usually completely out of control.   This is what long-term childhood trauma looks like in our house. 

I’m a mother of 5, three adopted with special needs from foster care, and an educator.  I lead an educational foundation in one of the biggest school districts in Ohio.  I have served with CASA, fostered, adopted, advocated, spoken to groups, and spent all my post master’s education on studying how to support kids from tough places.

My first generation of kids (biological) didn’t get to go to daycare before and after school.  Now, those kids are moving into adulthood, and I am really ready to work again full time.  Like really ready.  I miss the productivity of tasks accomplished, adult interaction, using my master’s degree, normalcy, and predictability.  I have been grateful for a part-time job in education for many years, but I really miss working.  This hasn’t happened because there are so many behavioral needs and medical appointments for our three adoptees, both of us cannot maintain full time work.  Last week, after paying to send all three of my adopted kiddos to day camp all summer (why this is necessary: another day, another adoptive blog post), I tried to re-enroll my son in the before/after school daycare he has attended since he moved in with us.  He moved into our home on the day before kindergarten started.  Today he started fourth grade.

This is the heart of this letter.  “We’re not sure we will take him back”.  Relieved that they made it to the end of last school year, the daycare had apparently formally “kicked him out” of the program, although I didn’t receive any notice of this.  It has been like this for the last four years since he came to us as a foster child.  Every place he goes, there are threats.  I meet with people, offer education, support or resources, and try to tell them enough of his personal story to instill compassion and empathy in them, but often it isn’t enough. 

He has tried baseball, soccer, swimming, basketball and now football.  We know he needs gross motor interaction, and frankly, if we could figure out how to harness the crazy, he would be an amazing athlete.  On our last annual respite away, I watched The Blind Side again on the plane.  My husband, Dan, of 23 years laughed at me as I sobbed my way through a movie I have seen 20 times.  It’s the hope of the redemption that gets me.  It’s the hope that someday he will not only not interrupt my ability to find hope in a future without this much hard in it, but he will even feel hope and plan for a good future of his own.  The coach asked my husband at football the other day, “Does he like it?”  He kind of does.  It’s hard work.  He doesn’t have a lot of stamina.  He is distracted by 1 million blades of grass, the weather, sounds, chewing on his mouthguard, potentially the sun, air, and clouds, but also thinking about whether he is ok and safe in the middle of a field.  He lives in fight or flight mode.

The daycare center came back and told me they would take him back conditionally this week:  I must sign a document that states that if he “puts his hands on any other child” that he will be “disenrolled”.  I agreed out of desperation at this late date, and when the page was put in front of me, it stated, “Bullying Agreement”.  Having heard them use the term “intervention” and “inclusion” recently tells me we have a problem.  He has an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) and BIP (Behavior Intervention Plan), has para support at school “for his own safety and the safety of others” and sees a psychiatrist.  According to this childcare center’s website,

At [this childcare center] we’ve been committed to providing rich educational, engaging, and inclusive environments for children of all abilities, backgrounds and experiences for almost 50 years,” said [the company’s] Chief Academic Officer. “We understand that every child is unique, and each learns differently. We provide our teachers with the tools and support they need to help all children learn.”

The [center’s] Inclusion Services team is a team of dedicated professionals who help teachers and staff create warm and welcoming center environments for every child and their family. Inclusion Services guides teachers and staff with:

·        Strategies for responding to or preventing challenging behaviors,

·        Creating inclusive environments that value every child and family,

·        Identifying community resources to support children, families, and our educators,

·        Supporting all children including those with special needs, and

·        Tips for caring for children experiencing stressful life situations such as divorce, natural disasters, family separations, a new baby in the family, and so forth.

I spoke with the Director today and asked if I could meet with anyone about any kind of supports that we could identify, advocate for, look for funding for, or put in place so he could be successful 3-4 hours a day at this center, which is under new management and ownership in the last year.  Some people may question why we continue to use the center.  The folks asking to date have never fostered or adopted children.  Its crazy hard to get a foster child enrolled anywhere.  In my own county experience, the CSA’s (county children services agencies) covering the cost of daycare for some foster families (inconsistently) demand to pay 50% of the going rate at the facility.  The childcare centers have zero incentive to take on the hardest (and most in need of socialization) children in our community.  We stay because it is familiar to him, because it is affordable, and close to home.  We never planned to pay for childcare for a fourth grader.  We have four other kids at home.  But his trauma behaviors are so intense in his safe familiar home environment that other adopted and biological kids in our home need the respite to do their daily school things.   He loves going to the center, in spite of all of this.  The director assured me today that they have all had “trauma training” but “we could always use more”.  My argument would be that the right kind of trauma training would include empathy and a deep understanding of just how little the trauma-impacted children participated in their own early childhood developmental assault.  Proper trauma training would inspire a change in philosophy away from self-preservation to one of community (local, state, and national) responsibility to raise our own American children coming into foster care due to the heroin epidemic.

We are in danger of using the word “trauma” to the point of dismissal in some cases.  The key ingredient to getting it to stick, in my experience, is empathy.  Empathy leads to personal responsibility, sharing of resources, extension of kindness and grace, and ultimately relationship with the child.

The second time I heard he wasn’t welcome was at church.  It has been decided that if there aren’t any volunteers signed up for the month to accompany him to our very large children’s church program, then he cannot attend.   He is very excited to go to class at church and has a terrible time sitting still, but he most assuredly cannot attend adult church.  We need the time away from him to address our own spiritual needs being in this lifelong job.  This policy that was recently implemented was intended, I believe, to mirror what schools are bound by law to do with IEP supports (like a para riding a bus with a child).  What it does, though, is further marginalize foster families and vulnerable children in our community AWAY from all community.  I have heard people refer to large foster families as “one of THOSE” families, knowing when they come in the door with that big group of behaviorally challenging kids that it would be easier to look away or not serve them. 

But I stand before all and humbly ask,

If they don’t take in those children, where would YOU have them go? 

Who will provide a bed, a family, a home, for those children?  Who should raise them? Not in an ideal world but in the one we have?

And for the love, instead of stepping back, step up, step in, and hold out your arms. If you are an American, these are YOUR children.  These are YOUR future.  These are YOUR future tax burden should they not have a pathway and model to become a productive, connected adult.

I believe Ohio is on the right track with regards to increasing resources to children and families in care and working to attack the heroin epidemic.  Thank you for your efforts thus far. 

Could I ask you to please consider these three things today:

1.       Please listen to the people who are in the trench actually doing the hard job. In multiple counties, schools, and areas of our state.  The moms, dads, biological siblings, educators, doctors, neighbors, grandparents – all the ones who must live every day with the hard, and figure out how to do it well, honorably, and stay healthy enough themselves to continue.  In most cases, social workers, case workers, and county administrators have never raised a foster child, or even children of their own.  Ask the ones who have been doing it for years.  The ones the other foster families know to call for help.

2.       Secondly, please make the funds and resources available directly to the families that are doing the job.  Not by having them wade through tons of red tape (such as Ohio’s PASSS Program – please see my article on the current system in Warren County) only to have the same CSB that may or may not have treated them fairly or kindly review a request for support.  Let’s tie the funding, therapy, and all supports to the children themselves (their teachers, schools, medical providers, homes, foster family members).  It is crazy hard to find good medical care, dental care, childcare, after school programs, parent education on available resources and special needs advocacy – that can handle our children.  Foster care programs must be administered more at the state level and less at the county level.  There are too many systems of doing Ohio foster care in each of our counties.  Many of Ohio’s children cross county lines to be fostered and adopted.  Nothing is consistent.  There isn’t a lot we can count on as parents who agree to adopt.  Much is left to discretion.  Having adopted in Florida also, where the system is handled completely differently and with many more guaranteed supports, I have seen the difference in a huge way with the Ohio adoption of my last two.  Like many coming into care in our state now, heroin impacted every single part of their world, and now mine.

3.       We need a campaign to CELEBRATE and RALLY around foster and adoptive families in this state, that works to remove old stigmas and paradigms.  We need to tell the stories of the children and the families in a way that people, schools, providers, and families not in the trench can understand.    

Governor DeWine,

We would love to invite you and your wife to dinner at our house, with the people around us who raise the children of the heroin crisis every day, to hear it first-hand.  We would like for you to see the kids, and get a true picture of how hard it is for our school, daycare, medical providers, church and community to handle these trauma behaviors, and consider how we could conquer this problem of truly supporting Ohio’s foster and adoptive families every day, after the sirens, in work, school and play.  I believe this is key to having enough families to provide a home for them all.

Kindest Regards, 

Kim Rupert, Mom of 5, Mason, Ohio