DeLays' Private Campaign For Kids
Rio Bend Project Is Foster Community Unlike Any Other

By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 9, 2006

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.

At 46,000 square feet, the houses are larger and fancier than most of the children have known before -- and filled with features to help their occupants get along. "You are putting six unrelated children in a household," Gow said, "and hoping things turn out okay."

Each one has seven bedrooms, six bathrooms, walk-in closets, two kitchens, three refrigerators, two washers and dryers, and four hot water heaters. No more than two children share a room, and there is a spare nanny room -- though no nannies yet -- to give parents a break. The floors throughout are cream-colored tile -- easy to clean with the cats and dogs, which are encouraged because Christine DeLay favors pet therapy for youngsters with attachment disorders.

Although children can be of any religion, the parents welcomed here are Christian, married couples with only one working outside the home. They must be experienced as foster parents. After a grand opening last August, 200 people called to say they were interested. Candidates are first screened by Lutheran Social Services, the largest provider of child welfare services in Texas, which works with the parents and children here. The decision rests with Rio Bend, and the congressman's wife interviews many finalists.

The goal is for children to feel as if they are part of a regular family in a close-knit neighborhood. "We have been to plays and bowling. They all have their library card. We go out to eat. Anything any other family would do," said Sharon Horn, who sold her house and gave up a 13-year job as a special-education teacher near Corpus Christi to become the first parent to move in July 2005.

One morning, Sandy Gandy, who is fostering five children with her husband, Larry, noticed Rio Bend kids skipping school in a gas station parking lot. She told them to get to class and notified their parents. "You are foster parents for the community," she said.

Ideals and Investors

Christine DeLay formed many of the ideas behind Rio Bend as a court-appointed advocate for foster children here in Fort Bend County, part of her husband's congressional district of 22 years -- and from three teenagers the DeLays took in during the 1990s. One was a 16-year-old boy who had lived in seven temporary places before their Sugar Land home, and she asked him what was hardest about being a foster kid. "Getting used to the way the pillows smell," he told her.

She decided to build a new model of foster care from the ground up -- one she said can stop "disgusting, repugnant" patterns in which too many youngsters cycle through the system, too many adults shelter kids for the money, and too many foster children end up homeless or unemployed.

Late in 2000, she approached the George Foundation, a Fort Bend philanthropy, to ask for land. The following summer, the foundation approved a first installment of 30 acres, worth $403,000 at the time, to be deeded to Rio Bend once it had raised enough money for the neighborhood to be built.

In part, Rio Bend is relying on local help such as Rotary chapters and Eagle Scouts chipping in. But more than 80 percent of the money raised so far has come through the DeLay Foundation for Kids, the charity established when DeLay was first elected to Congress.

Rio Bend's houses, Gow said, were built at cost -- $260,000 apiece -- by Houston home builder Bob J. Perry, a major backer of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which campaigned against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. The day Christine DeLay approached Perry to build the houses, she said, he agreed on the spot -- plus handed her a check for $50,000.

For a $250,000 donation, Michael and Susan Dell of Dell Computer Corp. have their names on a metal plaque on one house. Next to a man-made lake stands the ExxonMobil gazebo, and the small library is named for Comcast Corp. Continental Airlines, Gow said, has donated $25,000 a year worth of travel that the Rio Bend staff and the DeLays have used to tour other facilities for children and to attend hunting and golf fundraisers. The companies have also donated to DeLay's political campaigns.

Gow said it will cost about $13 million to build the rest of Rio Bend, and the George Foundation has promised another 20 acres, if the money is raised. Christine DeLay said that her husband will become more directly involved in "making sure the vision gets a chance to be successful," and she predicted they may attract "a different kind of donor" once he is out of the political limelight. Since DeLay's indictment last fall, Gow said, fundraising has slowed as the DeLays raised money for his legal defense and what had loomed as a difficult reelection campaign. "We haven't had time to raise money for this," Christine DeLay said. "How could we?"

Mixed Results So Far

In its early months, Rio Bend has had some growing pains.

Despite the promise of a permanent place to live, 12 of the 38 youngsters here since summer 2005 have moved out. None of them, state records show, has moved back home with a parent. A few were too young for Rio Bend's mission. One girl was too threatening. A boy did not get along with his foster parents.

Two sets of parents have moved out, too. One couple wanted to take in only babies and was asked to leave, said Danny Wright, who works here for Lutheran Social Services. And Iva Power said she and her husband, Michael, moved out last month because they felt Lutheran Social Services did not give them enough support.

Meanwhile, Wright said it would help if state placement workers had a clearer understanding of Rio Bend's goals so that they send the most appropriate youngsters here.

Still, the people creating Rio Bend find early signs of hope. At the first meeting of all the foster kids, Wright asked what they liked best about living here: "The security," one replied.

The retreat center has been used once since the Blackwells arrived. A girl stayed with them last month after she had been suspended from school 28 days, run away three times and behaved so badly in church that her entire foster family was asked not to come back. When she first arrived, Blackwell said, she threw things and cursed but then "sort of mellowed out." One Saturday, she borrowed a dress and heels from his wife to go with them to church. She joined a church choir. And after about 10 days, she moved back into her own foster home.