symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 4, 2000 | by Heidi Goldsmith, | Richard Wexler

Q: Are boarding schools for abused kids preferable to foster care?

Yes: Boarding schools for neglected children are needed in addition to foster care.

Where there is high-quality foster care available, and where siblings can remain together, foster care may be best for some children, especially younger children, until and if parents can treat their children with the love and care they deserve. But foster care alone is insufficient. There needs to be additional options for neglected children, including making them more quickly available for adoption, as federal legislation passed in 1998 mandates. Boarding schools need to be available for other children, particularly for children age 9 and older who are less likely to be adopted or selected in foster care and for whom peers are extremely important. There needs to be an array of choices for neglected children. The option of boarding schools for disadvantaged children and youth is gaining popularity across the country.

The reality is there aren't nearly enough foster families for the more than 550,000 children currently in the foster-care system. The number of children is increasing, and the supply of families is decreasing. There also are problems with the foster care that exists. Many parents going through hard times permanently postpone improving their own lives because they fear losing their children to the foster-care system while they get their own lives in order. Some foster parents are inappropriate, to say the least. In many areas, the foster-care system itself is in shambles. Time magazine's Nov. 13 cover story chronicled the sorry state of foster care in the United States. The article claims, "Often these (children) are held hostage to abuse and neglect, to bureaucratic foul-ups and carelessness, condemned to futures in which dreams cannot come true."

In northern San Diego County, where the new San Pasqual Academy, a residential school for teens, is being started, there are 1,000 foster-care children ages 14 and older who already have been in seven to 25 foster homes. They are unlikely finally to find a stable home and a family they can bond with in the 26th placement! And what happens when the child turns age 18, when foster-care payments end? How many foster parents keep foster children with them without being paid? How many children really have the skills for successful independent living at age 18, especially those who have been in and out of so many living settings and so many schools?

A few critics of boarding schools suggest returning abused and neglected children to their drug-abusing biological parents and even recommend that we pay these parents to care for their children. I find this suggestion preposterous. Is the biological bond really that sacrosanct? Children will pick up their parents' habits or be used as prostitutes to earn quick money to support their parents' habits. When do neglected children who have been bouncing around from foster homes to treatment programs to foster homes get to taste the other, healthier, more hopeful side of life?

What looks like a family isn't necessarily what children need. Children need a living setting which behaves like a family, providing them consistent love from caring adults, stability and satisfaction of their physiological needs. They need living environments which provide structure, values, a place they feel they belong and matter and where dreams are encouraged. That setting can be a small community with many adults and positive peers who care for, nurture and serve as role models for these children. Boarding schools are little communities or "villages."

I personally was inspired to make this option available for at-risk youth, having seen Israel's 65-year-old network of 70 children-and-youth villages. These villages were based on a hybrid between a kibbutz and an English boarding school. Israelis tell the children in the villages, "What your family cannot do for you, your community will." Some of Israel's most successful politicians, business leaders, artists, teachers and other citizens are graduates of the youth villages and attribute much of their success to them. People are people, kids are kids, regardless of the culture. We can, and need to, create a similar option for children in this country.

There is some confusion as to what today's boarding schools for disadvantaged American children -- some of which were founded as "orphanages" -- are, and how they differ from group homes, residential treatment centers and juvenile-detention facilities. Included under the umbrella term "residential education," the term "boarding schools" often are synonymous with prep schools, orphanages, children's villages and youth academies. These 24-hour educational, future-focused settings become students' "second homes." Children in some of the boarding schools for disadvantaged children, such as the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pa., and the Happy Hill Farm Academy in Granbury, Texas, live with full-time "house parents" -- a married couple -- and their children in a middle-class home with nine other children of the same sex. Some house parents have been house parents at these schools for 25 years. The 20 to 90 (in the case of the Milton Hershey School) homes look like a lovely neighborhood in suburbia, and the schools and sports fields are nearby. At other schools, the children live in dormitories with full-time, live-in house parents or residential advisers.