Far from Home

By: Sarah KarpForty-five minutes after leaving Englewood, the white van pulled into the infamous Maryville City of Youth campus in northwest suburban Des Plaines and, as advocates and former residents stepped out into the parking lot, in front of them unfolded ponds of geese and an expanse of green land. Freddie, a thin 19-year-old, soon muttered under his breath that he shouldn't have come. "I feel kind of bad. There were a lot of bad things that happened here," said Freddie, who asked that his last name not be used.

He was brought back to the campus by a group of children's advocates, who are trying to help former residents, and wanted a tour. The advocates were catapulted into action after numerous reports last year brought to light many problems there, including fights, vandalism and suicide attempts, and indicated the environment was chaotic and dangerous.

"But this was home," he said. "I played football over there and hooped over there."

Later, the van pulled up in front of a three-story brown brick building. Again, Freddie got sullen. This, he said, was the place where he had lived for five years with other boys. Now that they are older and have left Maryville, they're spread out and are not doing very well. "We left here with nothing," he said. "Now we are just trying to do anything we can to get by."

Experts say moving back home--to neighborhoods made unfamiliar by years of distance--is a difficult, but not unusual, experience for children who have lived at such institutions. A group of advocates is now calling on the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to pour resources into poor, black communities so that these neighborhoods can keep troubled youth within their fold, whether it is by developing more group homes and institutions or offering intensive support services in foster homes. They also want the state to help Freddie and other former Maryville residents who are trying to heal from the experience of growing up in a flawed institution and to adjust to life as young adults.

Wards of the state placed in residential facilities--either group homes or institutions--mostly find themselves far from their communities, shows a Chicago Reporter analysis of DCFS data. While more than two-thirds of the children in those facilities are black, the facilities are typically located in areas that are mostly white.

The top 10 ZIP codes where children in residential facilities live are, on average, 63 percent white. Six of the areas have median household income figures above the statewide median. But 68 percent of the children in residential facilities are black, up from 63 percent in 1998, according to DCFS. About 10 percent of the state's 19,825 wards are in residential facilities, which houses children with emotional or behavioral problems so severe that they can't live in foster homes.

Placing children in residential facilities far from their neighborhoods is at odds with DCFS policy. Since 1997, DCFS has mandated that children be placed as close to their homes as possible. This was important, experts said, because staying in familiar surroundings makes it easier to maintain ties with families and communities.

As a result, most children living with foster parents or relatives stay in mostly black neighborhoods in the city and south suburbs, the Reporter found. The top 10 ZIP codes for children in these foster homes are, on average, 79 percent black. All have median household income figures below the statewide mark, according to the Reporter's analysis.

DCFS officials point out that its group homes are more likely than its institutions to be located in Chicago neighborhoods. The institutions, the officials add, are only supposed to house children for short amounts of time. The average stay at treatment facilities is 11 months, according to DCFS. However, several former Maryville residents said they stayed on its campus for several years.

Parents say distances are troublesome, as it makes it hard for them to visit their children. "When children aren't able to be with familiar faces and attend the churches and schools that they are used to, they, already melancholy, become depressed about being somewhere they don't want to be," said Ayo Maat, whose daughter spent three years at Maryville. "It sets them up for failure."

Also, these children often encounter prejudice in these communities, and this, she said, makes it less likely for their complaints to be taken seriously. "Suburban attitudes toward inner-city children are not very good," she said. "So, if these children are being abused and try to run, the response from the community is not to protect them, but to send them back to be further abused."

Jordan Luhr, vice president of development and public relations for Allendale, a lauded residential facility in north suburban Lake Villa that specializes in clinical treatment, said the community is usually accepting of residents, but he admits that there are subtle tensions. About 50 percent of the children at Allendale are black, while Lake Villa is 91 percent white. "As you know, racism is not always obvious," he said.

But Luhr points out that there are some advantages to getting away. It might provide young people needed distance from chaotic family situations, he said. Also, it is harder for them to run away because public transportation isn't accessible.

James Guidi, clinical and program director at Maryville Academy, said some of the agency's 21 locations are in far-flung places because they once housed services that DCFS no longer needs, leaving the agency to find creative ways to use the facilities. For example, the farm campus in Rockford was where the state sent kids who needed to escape gangs and, at one time, it had a witness protection program.

Guidi, however, said it's important that the "very troubled, very disturbed" children deemed in need of restrictive residential treatment centers in remote areas be transitioned eventually into lesser levels of care. "In the ideal world, you would want to do that. You'd want to test them at different levels with different kinds of expectations," Guidi said. "But sometimes things don't work out in the best way."

In October, the Black Executive Directors Coalition, a group of African American leaders from Chicagoland social service agencies, held a press conference to commend DCFS Director Bryan Samuels for being fair to all agencies. In the past, they said, they have felt like black child welfare agencies in the city were shut down for infractions less severe than those committed for years at Maryville.

"There should not be exceptions to the rules and regulations," said David Whittaker, executive director of the Chicago Area Project, a social service organization focused on youth. "If you are going to close down facilities, the same thing should apply across the board. Clout should not play a part when the welfare of children should be most important."

After DCFS officials spent a year urging Maryville to change, Samuels held a press conference in October announcing that he was going to remove all children and force leaders to rebuild the program. But Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago's 14th Ward Alderman Edward M. Burke and other political heavyweights bashed the decision. Later, DCFS announced it would allow Maryville to keep the Des Plaines campus open, but it would have to change its mission from treatment to education.

While perhaps no other agency has Maryville's clout, many of the other big agencies that run residential facilities have operated for more than 100 years, have multi-million dollar budgets bolstered by donations and are fortified with endowments.

When making the Maryville announcement, Samuels, who was appointed in May, said he did not know how much better those other institutions were than Maryville. He pledged to start a monitoring system, and to spend a year taking a hard look at every agency's contract and evaluating how well each was doing.

Leaders of black agencies that operate in the city said that it is difficult for them to adjust to changes in the child welfare system and, therefore, they struggle to compete with big agencies.

Habilitative Systems Inc., a 25-year-old West Side social service agency, decided to get out of the business of running group homes in the late 1990s after DCFS implemented new requirements that penalized the agency based on its caseload, said Donald Dew, the agency's president and chief executive officer.

"It put too much pressure on good caseworkers to make quick decisions," he said.

Ann G. Deuel, executive director of Jamal Place, a 10-bed group home in a three-flat on the West Side, said the agency has had difficulty adjusting to recent shifts in the population. Six years ago, half of the residents there might have needed anti-depressants; now all 10 of them use psychotropic drugs. The more troubled the children at a facility, the more educated its staff needs to be, and Deuel said she constantly needs to invest in training.

Still, Deuel, who worked at Maryville as a family educator 20 years ago, believes organizations like hers are needed near the children's homes. "The boys become rooted in this neighborhood," she said. "They are not isolated."

On Oct. 27, at the new DCFS administration's first community forum, held at Northeastern Illinois University's Center for Inner City Studies on the South Side, Samuels was unexpectedly confronted by Freddie and several other teenagers who spent time at Maryville.

At the end of a statistics-filled speech about what's going on in DCFS, Samuels announced that those in the audience who had questions should write them down on blue sheets of paper and pass them to the front. But the suggestion angered many in the audience. A group of activists instructed the teenagers from Maryville to begin forming a line in the aisle.

"Let these kids who were victimized by Maryville speak," shouted a member of VOTE, an activist organization of mostly ex-offenders that routinely disrupts meetings.

At one point, Samuels offered to let the young people talk. But he got into a heated exchange with with Toni Stith, a parent advocate who brought the teenagers to the meeting, and others in the audience began yelling at DCFS staff on stage. Eventually, Samuels was led out the back of the auditorium into a waiting chauffeured car.

The kids left with Stith, grabbing some cookies and punch on their way out.

But the teenagers later said they wished that the DCFS officials had taken a moment to listen. They said they were struggling to figure out how to go on.

"I feel like I was in a fantasy world at Maryville," said LaToya, 19, who spent four years on the Des Plaines campus before being sent home. "Now I feel like I am being thrown into the real world."

A sense of dreariness pervades the small house in Englewood where LaToya lives with her mother, Alphonso White. Since she came home earlier this year, this has become an unofficial meeting place for some former Maryville residents. On many afternoons, the home is swarming with teenagers. Many of them spent several years growing up together, and they share stories and laughs like brothers and sisters.

But they all have sad and perplexing tales of being taken away from their mothers, moving from foster house to foster house and ending up at Maryville.

Now, as young adults, they seem even more confused. Few of them have high school diplomas or jobs.

One afternoon in November, about five boys sauntered into White's home. They boasted about sneaking into the girls' dorms at Maryville and joked that the girls later wound up in the agency's program for pregnant girls. They traded stories about how they did what they wanted to there: waking up late, skipping school, running away.

Their lives, they said, now consist mostly of sleeping late and getting high. They also said they were trying to do all they could to get as much money and support from DCFS as possible.

"They ruined our lives," one said. "Now they should pay."

Yet, Guidi said, despite the problems at Maryville, there was still plenty of opportunity on the Des Plaines campus for young people who wanted to get an education or job skills. Even once they leave, Guidi said, former residents are welcome to return and take classes. "They have to have some initiative themselves and they have to have a sense of commitment," he said. "But, if they want to do it and they are willing to work hard, we will help them."

To Erica Howard, another former Des Plaines campus resident, the problem was not about outright abuse, but rather the attitude staff and the community had about residents.

"We felt like we weren't worth being helped," she said. "They knew our whole history and made us feel like our past defined us."

Of the 20 young people at Maryville's Des Plaines campus who could have graduated last year, Howard said four, including her, got diplomas. Howard is now part of another Maryville program called Stepping Stones through which she moved to an apartment in Rogers Park on the North Side.

Now a student at Columbia College, Howard said Maryville officials see her as a model and, during the controversy, invited her back to show board members that not all teenagers were hurt by living there. But she said her grades in college are not so great, and she remains frustrated at having to deal with the demands of caseworkers. At 19, she's also pregnant.

Howard said she saw so many young people in worse shape and not being helped that she carries with her some survivor's guilt.

"I feel bad because a lot of these kids feel like they have nowhere to go," she said. "No one will hire them, and they don't have a high school diploma. It is just that so many kids left there with no hope."

Samuels has said the department has not done a good job helping teenagers make successful transitions into adulthood, and one of his priorities is doing a better job preparing older youth for the future.
White, LaToya's mother, notes the irony in the situation. "Here they took my children away from me and judged me, and then threw them into a hellhole," she said. "What sense does that make?"

One of the complaints she and Stith have is that these teenagers have grown up in controlled environments with no responsibilities where they came to believe that things should be done for them. Then, when they came home to rough neighborhoods, they had to learn quickly how to negotiate dicey situations and work for what they want.

"These girls were out here trading sex for a pack of cigarettes," White said. "They don't know how to behave."

Maat said it hurts her to watch her daughter try to recover from the experience. And, while her daughter doesn't like to talk about what happened there, she answers directly when asked, Maat said. "She tells me it was the worst experience of her life, and she does not let me forget it."

Sitting in her home, now devoid of noise and all signs of teenagers, Linda Calhoun said she's readying herself in case her twin daughters are returned from two separate Maryville campuses.

Even as she continues her four-year fight to get them back, they are getting older. Soon, she said, the child welfare system will lose interest in them.

"They will be back here looking at me," she said.

Yet Calhoun said she has no choice but to meet this challenge. "I am a mother. No matter where your children are or have been you remain their mother," she said. "What has been done cannot be undone. What my children have suffered we need to work through."

Contributing: Hiroko Abe and Erin Meyer.