The Stand-Ins : Foster Parents Who Stick With County Program Take Their Roles Seriously

For more than 9,000 abused, abandoned or neglected children in Los Angeles County, foster homes offer a haven of protection and another chance. The Department of Children’s Services, which runs the foster care program, says that about 1,000 children, half of them infants, come into the county system each month. Most of them have suffered physical or sexual abuse or severe neglect and have been born addicted to the cocaine or heroin or other illegal drugs their mothers used during pregnancies, according to Barbara Uchida, children’s services administrator.

Foster parents, among other things, must agree to abstain from physical punishment and to provide 24-hour adult supervision. They are paid on a scale that ranges from $294 to $433 a month, depending on the age of the child, with somewhat higher amounts for children who are addicted to drugs or are physically or developmentally handicapped. A child’s stay with a foster family can be as short as a few weeks or as long as a several years, until the child is reunited with his or her family, is adopted or reaches age 18.

The number of licensed foster homes on the county roll--3,811--is not nearly enough to meet the need, according to a recent county Grand Jury study. The study, noting that up to half of all new foster parents leave the program within two years, called for more training and support, as well as a re-evaluation of recruitment practices and a streamlining of the licensing process.

Here are the experiences of some foster parents who have stuck with the program.

“We call them the screamers, especially if they are withdrawing from PCP,” said Nancy Lee, cradling the first non-drug addicted newborn she has seen in some time.

“And then the cocaine babies, you have to wake them up to feed them. They sleep and sleep and sleep. Most of my babies are drug babies.”

Lee, 51, and her husband, Dale, 56, a carpenter, have tended about 60 babies and toddlers over the last 32 years in their comfortable three-bedroom Bellflower home, in addition to the now-grown son and daughter they adopted.

“I especially do well with premies and newborns,” she said, happily feeding formula to a tiny Latino boy abandoned at birth. “I just get them skinny and fatten them up.”

The Lees decided to become foster parents after Nancy Lee suffered a serious illness shortly after they married and was left unable to bear a child of her own.

“I believe,” she said, “the Lord prolonged my life just to do this. We just feel the Lord has given us so much, and we wanted to share.”

“And we just love children,” her husband said. “Seeing them grow, seeing them develop, knowing that we are helping in giving them a start in life--that’s worth whatever we do.”

The blue-eyed, blonde foster mother is more amused than offended if her assembled youngsters--most recently a black infant, a red-haired 1-year-old and a Latino 2-year-old--attract stares when she takes them shopping.

She keeps shelves of various sizes of little white shoes and boxes of clothes, collected from sales and parents of growing children, so that any newcomer can be fitted immediately.

“I think it is important for foster children to be dressed well, to boost their self image to be able to handle whatever comes,” she said.

At 77, Fannie Saenz can look back on a 40-year “career” as a single foster parent--and she has no plans to retire.

Recruited by a friend, the stylish woman adopted the second child who came into her home. She now has a 22-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy under her roof whom she has brought up from infancy and would have adopted if their natural parents had permitted her to do so.

She has also parented about 40 other children, mostly preteens or teen-agers.

The only concession she has made to her age is to request children who are 10 to 12 years old.

“I find that older children now have such an attitude that is mean or hard,” she said softly with disapproval. “Me being alone, I feel it is better that I not take those teen-agers now with all the gang problems.”

She now has 11-year-old twin girls along with the young collegiate woman and the high school youth.

Saenz brings her charges into her genteel life style. She provides lessons in piano, Spanish and ice skating. She teaches them table manners, as well as how to shop and cook.

“When they come here, they don’t know what it is to have a napkin or how to hold a knife,” she said. “Here we live like decent people. We have a complete place setting.

“I make sure they know how to eat. I can take them anywhere,” she said proudly, “and I introduce them as my children.”

Like many foster parents, Dorothy and Tommy Martin say it can be tough to say goodby to a child they have sheltered.

But Dorothy Martin said she eases the pain of parting with a strong desire to see a broken family reunited.

“When I take them, I take them with it in my mind that I got to take care of these little guys and maintain the relationship until the family can be back together,” she said thoughtfully. “The parents can go and get counseling and get themselves together again. . . . “All children should be with their parents.”

The Martins have seven grown children, but they became foster parents just about a year ago, when they were looking for a while to make their new, five-bedroom home in the middle of a large family compound in Compton seem less empty.

In addition to a 2-year-old niece, Dorothy, 52, and Tommy, 48, are parenting five foster children ages 9 months, 2, 5, 7 and 9.

“I enjoy being able to help, being there for them sometimes at night when they have these bad dreams and wake up crying,” Dorothy Martin said. “I enjoy being able to soothe them.”

After nine years as foster parents, Manuel and Consuelo Huerta dropped their foster-parent license last year after a 16-year-old girl in their care became pregnant and eventually left their home.

“We used to warn her and tell her when to be home,” said Consuelo Huerta, 61. “But we wouldn’t know what she did over at her mom’s.”

Recruited by an advertisement for foster parents in a neighborhood throwaway paper, Consuelo Huerta and her husband, 59, had attended an orientation session on problems involving foster children and felt prepared to take in children ages 3 to 15. Their own four children are 17 to 36.

But Consuelo Huerta said they were not as well prepared as they had thought.

“A real problem is that you don’t know their backgrounds,” she said of older foster children. “You have to watch out for the girls.”

The Huertas’ “retirement,” however, didn’t last.

Unable to live with her natural mother, the girl returned to their home with her baby. Consuelo Huerta requested reinstatement of their foster care license.

“I guess I’m a soft touch, especially with the baby,” she said.

“Having little kids around keeps me going,” she said. “If I didn’t have them, I would probably be sitting down doing nothing.”

When the hyperactive little boy repeatedly broke the window in his room, Juanita (Momma) Buttry talked to him about what he had done, punished him with “time out” from play and television, and finally took away all the toys he might hurl through the glass.

When he broke the window for the seventh time--by banging his head into it--she had it replaced with plexiglass.

“They are not all little jewels. There are some difficult children,” Buttry said.

She ought to know after 27 years as single foster parent to 85 children she describes as “medically fragile.”

She lives with her extended

family and four foster children in the spacious five-bedroom pink stucco house she bought on the Pomona corner lot in 1957, two years after her Air Force pilot husband was killed in a cockpit accident.

“I needed to be needed,” Buttry said in explaining why she responded to a newspaper article soliciting foster parents in 1962, and why she persisted when county officials were reluctant to license a foster parent who was single.

“I have never got burned out. I’ll probably be going to PTA meetings when I’m 90,” she said, firmly refusing to disclose her age.

Buttry quickly gravitated to the children most foster parents are reluctant to accept--those with severe medical or emotional problems.

“It just seems more rewarding,” she said. “The little girl I adopted, they said would never walk or talk. She does both. It is a great satisfaction to think I may have helped.”

Grizel Perez, 32, sometimes feels like a taxi driver.

She and her husband, Richard, 30, a career Navy man, estimate that she logs 60 miles a day just driving children between their compact three-bedroom townhouse in Bell Gardens and Catholic elementary school in Torrance, plus kindergarten, a Headstart program and preschool for the developmentally disabled.

The riders include their own two sons, 11 years old and 9 months old; and two daughters, ages 7 and 5, and two foster sons, who both have developmental handicaps, a 22-month-old they are adopting and a 4-year-old.

“I was not very enthusiastic at first,” Richard Perez said of the decision to sign on as foster parents. “I thought our priorities should be our own children.

“But I didn’t realize there was such a need,” he said. “It wasn’t really that much to bring another child into our home and treat them like our own, and I felt we were doing something very rewarding.”

His wife said having foster children helps her own children learn sharing and compassion.

“It used to be, ‘Mom, I have to have the Reeboks.’ Now it’s, ‘Mom, whoever needs it most.’ They appreciate things so much more.”

Not that being a foster parent doesn’t have its frustrating moments.

“Foster parents have to fight for the children’s rights,” said Grizel Perez, who went all the way to the Board of Supervisors when social workers failed to visit one foster child in her home for more than five months. The visit was made within two days.

When the 12-year-old girl came to stay in the attractive three-bedroom Montebello home, she had a reputation for ditching school and making terrible grades.

“She wanted to be a cheerleader, and I said you can’t do that unless you have a B average,” said Alvin Silva, 50, who works nights for a metal container company and attends classes days at Cal State L.A.

“She did it too. Now she’s an A and B student. It just takes a little incentive.”

That incentive cost Silva money. The county stipend for the girl’s care did not cover the $300 price tag for her cheerleader’s uniform, any more than it paid for the $250 braces she now needs at age 14.

“What am I going to do--tell her she can’t have her teeth fixed?” said Silva with an indulgent shrug. “It’s just like the cheerleader uniform. That was important to her, and to us because it got her involved in something.”

Silva and his wife, Luz, 50, are active in a Latino foster parents’ association that lobbies to increase foster care support payments. They estimate that current stipends cover about half a child’s expenses “if you want to give them a nice life.”

The Silvas, whose own three children are grown and married, first became foster parents when they saw a televised request for volunteers. Sixteen years and 117 foster children later, the adoption they had hoped for never materialized.

But they approach foster parenting with a missionary zeal, recruiting friends to provide the always-needed Latino homes, organizing parent meetings and training sessions, and assisting county workers in placing children.

“You really have to like kids and understand kids,” Alvin Silva said, sitting at his large dining table and answering phone calls alternately in English and Spanish, “because they come with all kinds of problems.”

Not all can be solved. After a year of trying to work with a couple of boys who were buying and selling drugs, the Silvas had to ask the county to remove the boys.

“We were in over our heads,” Alvin Silva said.

But most of the time, “there are beautiful rewards,” Luz Silva said. “The child that leaves our home is not the child who came. He knows another kind of life. That is our reward.”