Notes of Despair
On a D.C. Court Bulletin Board, Pleas for Vanished Parents And Stories of Foster Kids' Damaged Worlds Come to Life
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 4, 2007; Page C01
It is a bulletin board of silent screams.
In a windowless corner of the District's Superior Court, up where the escalators end, the Family Court bulletin board hangs -- pinpricked, pockmarked and covered with two dozen public postings that no one sees.
  Derrick Russell, left, supervisor of the Diligent Search Unit of the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, and investigator Larry D. Mickens try to find parents sought for court appearances. Their team often is able to find people using only shards of information, such as a nickname and physical description. (By Carol Guzy -- The Washington Post) |
They look like haphazard rows of tacked-up legal files. Their messages, summed up, read like social commentary.
UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a 6-month-old girl who was born HIV-positive with cocaine in her veins. Her mother has abandoned her. The people in whose care she was left had no idea, for days, how to give her the "several medications" required to treat her HIV.
UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a newborn son whose schizophrenic mother ditched him at the hospital and moved into a Travelodge in Northeast. She told the social worker who found her: The baby's father was " 'Nino' from 'the Bronx' who was 'not dark' and who could be reached by contacting 'Chief Ramsey.' "
UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a 1-week-old daughter. UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a 13-year-old son. UNKNOWN FATHER, you have a newborn whose mother has six other children; none of them lives with her. UNKNOWN FATHER, your 1-year-old has been found with an ankle burn and such hunger pains that when she was finally fed, she did not stop to chew. UNKNOWN FATHER, your child's mother has told social workers she "has problems remembering where she leaves her baby."
The capital letters shout, as if in fury and frustration, as if the legal announcements' bold-faced, double-spaced type could roar beyond the confines of the clerk's office, where the few people who see these documents are the court employees tacking them up and the lawyers who double-check that they've been posted.
Each document provides the slightest of glimpses into the lives of children in foster care, one of the most secretive and confidential -- by necessity, for the sake of those children -- systems in the city.
Last year, the foster system chased after 702 vanished parents. Although 87 percent were found, sometimes on the barest of personal details, there were still 94 stories to be publicly posted in a tradition that, in general, dates back hundreds of years. Court officials no longer tack notices, of any kind, to the courthouse door, and they especially don't do so with notices about children's lives and the devastatingly private details of them.
"Kids in the system suffer a stigma," says Jim Toscano, deputy general counsel for the District's Child and Family Services Agency, "and there's a balance between making that known and maintaining confidentiality."
The postings must stay up for two weeks, but they often linger much longer, as if on the bulletin board, as in life, these children's stories remain invisible and easily forgotten.
A Microcosm
"That bulletin board is more than just a bulletin board," says the District's Jonetta Rose Barras, author of "Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl: The Impact of Fatherlessness on Black Women."
