A Foster Child Comes of Age

After Years in a System Offering Support Networks, A Young Woman Learns Skills to Thrive Independently

Marie Willis was running late. Her biology class had already started, and by the time she slid into a back-row seat, only 25 minutes were left in the lecture. She had worked a double shift at her waitressing job the day before, rushed home for a minor emergency after her early-morning class and by 11 a.m., it already seemed as though it had been a long day. She tried to stifle a yawn.

In many ways, Willis, 21, is like most students working their way through college: juggling two jobs, a full course load, bills and roommate problems. But for the junior at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, the exhausting, fast-paced schedule was part of the preparation for one of the biggest challenges of her young life: discharge from foster care to life on her own.

Willis is one of the approximately 24,000 young people nationwide ages 18 to 21 who leave foster care each year, children who were never adopted or returned to their parents or guardians. For many, it is a time of mixed emotions and uncertainty. Some are relieved to be out of the system, but they also are worried about whether they are ready to negotiate life's challenges alone. Willis appears to be better prepared than most, but she still faces many obstacles.

A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trust found that an increasing number of young people are "aging out" of foster care, even as research shows that many are ill-prepared for life after the system. Many have not finished high school or college and have limited employment and job skills. A 2005 study by researchers at the University of Chicago found they have higher rates of homelessness and incarceration than their peers.

Virginia and other states are starting to address these problems, with some allowing children to stay in foster care longer, offering transitional housing and providing financial assistance so that they can pursue higher education.

"This can be a tough time for a lot of our young people," said Gayle Bonner, a Fairfax County caseworker who has been paired with Willis for more than five years. "Marie is tough and responsible; she'll be able to handle things that come her way. But I think sometimes it's harder to adjust to not having some of the extra support they've had for so long."

In many ways, Willis is poised to beat the odds. She graduated from high school and hopes to receive a bachelor's in education next year from Old Dominion. She wants to be a special education teacher, and her foster parents have said they will help her.

Willis's early experience in foster care was a familiar one. At 7, she was removed from her grandmother's Fairfax County home after caseworkers found that she and her sisters were not sent to school regularly and were verbally abused often, according to Willis and local caseworkers. She had been placed with her grandmother eight months earlier because of abandonment by her father and the death of her mother in 1993, according to caseworkers. By the time the siblings were placed in the Shenandoah Valley foster home of Ray and Shirley Caplinger, they had been shuttled from Fairfax to a few group homes in Winchester and finally to Harrisonburg.

But Willis, who stayed with the Caplingers for 13 years, was lucky. Her older sister, Cassandra, moved from home to home before leaving the system voluntarily at 18; her younger sister, who has Down syndrome, was placed with another family. Bonner said the stability of life with the Caplingers helped Willis; most children who are in foster care for that long live with multiple families.

The University of Chicago researchers found that young people coming out of foster care often are more isolated socially than their peers and are more likely to suffer from mental health issues. These are among challenges for which Bonner and others have tried to prepare Willis: overcoming any emotional scars left by the neglect that led her to be in foster care.

"Some of my friends who know what I'm going through, they ask, 'You're doing this on your own, aren't you nervous or scared or whatever?' " she said. "But the way I see it, it's not like the entire world is changing. There are some scary things about it all . . . but all I can do is rely on what I know and what I know I can do."

Steps Toward Independence

Bonner, who has worked with dozens of teens during her career, could tell that Willis was unusually mature when they met in the summer of 2002. But there was still work to be done. She taught Willis how to budget her modest biweekly paychecks and the $644 a month she received in foster-care boarding payments from the state. She helped Willis manage a savings account and monitored her academic progress.