DeLays' Private Campaign For Kids

RICHMOND, Tex. -- With its white rail fence, long entry drive, and landscaped lawns surrounding large brick houses, Rio Bend looks like many of the neighborhoods springing up in the exurbs southwest of Houston. But the 13 adults and 26 children who have moved in since summer of last year are part of a novel experiment in foster care -- built with money from the fundraising operation of former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and his wife's drive to change child welfare policy.

Rio Bend, still under construction, is the only subdivision in the United States designed for each home to be filled with a foster family.

The 10 girls and 16 boys living here so far share the damaging histories of youngsters throughout Texas and the nation's overburdened foster care systems: neglect, beatings, sexual abuse, psychiatric disorders and the added trauma of moving from place to place. This nascent community is to provide a permanent place to live until they become self-reliant adults: a family-like environment with a strong Christian presence that erases the stigma of being a foster child because every kid here is one.

When he resigned from Congress last week engulfed in legal and political troubles, DeLay said that one of his main goals is to finish building Rio Bend -- and to use it as a role model to transform foster care around the country. His wife, Christine, is the hands-on board chairwoman of the nonprofit corporation, Oaks at Rio Bend Inc.

The ideas behind Rio Bend shatter the orthodoxy of both the right and the left about child welfare. The DeLays' belief in long-term foster homes departs from mainstream thinking that foster children should be reunited with a parent or adopted. Christine DeLay said she is "not big on family reunification" and that teenagers, the focus of Rio Bend, seldom get adopted.

The experiment unfolding here also breaks away from the idea of foster care as mainly a government responsibility. Although the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services remains legally responsible for the children here and pays their foster parents a stipend, the neighborhood is being built entirely with private money -- $8.9 million so far, $7.3 million of it raised through a controversial charity affiliated with DeLay. The foster parents pay a small rent, $450 a month, that is pooled to pay for extras not covered by the state.

Governments "do a sucky job taking care of individuals," Christine DeLay said in an interview.

Rio Bend is a work in progress. There are patches of bare dirt and acres of brush where two dozen more foster houses are planned, along with "guest cottages" for Rio Bend alumni whenever they need a place to stay. The children attend public schools, although there is talk of a charter school here someday. Programs are still being planned, including an evangelistic ministry at the big chapel here on Sunday afternoons and eventually a kids' council to help set rules.

"This is a little scary for me. I have to be honest," said Timothy Blackwell, a retired Houston transit administrator who with his wife, Gladys, had fostered about 70 children over a dozen years before moving to Rio Bend several weeks ago. "It has not jelled, the actual footwork of how some of this is going to be done."

Building Families to Last

Throughout the neighborhood, the buildings and policies are being created to try to help youngsters stay for a long time.

Around the corner from the eight foster homes built so far is an unusual ninth house, called a retreat center, that is designed as "a safety valve for the community," said Margaret Gow, Rio Bend's administrative director. It is where the Blackwells live and where youngsters can stay for a cooling-off period, if they have had such friction with their foster parents that they otherwise might be ordered to leave.

If a youngster must leave for an intense residential treatment program, for instance, or jail, Rio Bend gives the foster parents $15 per day to hold the bed until the youth can return, a provision found nowhere else in Texas's foster care.