Open-Door Policy

Dona and James Perry are a foster child’s dream.

Their yard is filled with jungle gyms, a trampoline, chickens, pigs and fruit trees. Their house is a happy jumble of toys, bicycles and clothing.

Children dash through the rooms and cartwheel across the back lawn.

Four-year-old Rikki--who came to the Perrys three years ago with a fractured skull and signs of autism--dangles upside-down on a bar like a monkey, giggling and chewing gum.

Nine-year-old Azael--deaf and mute--gestures wildly to his foster mother in sign language from atop a ship-shaped toy.

And 6-year-old Roberta--who was born three months premature, weighing less than 2 pounds, addicted to cocaine and suffering from syphilis, meningitis, swelling of the brain, and intracranial bleeding--hoists her plump little body hand over hand on the monkey bars yelling “Look! Look!” until she comes crashing down and runs crying into her foster mother’s open arms.

The Perrys care for six children, all severely disabled and considered the most difficult to place into foster homes.

By all accounts, the couple have met their commitment to their foster children, building their lives around the youngsters and pouring their own money into raising them.

“We didn’t intend to do it,” Dona Perry said. “It’s one of those things that just happened.”

But the foster-care system has broken its commitment to the family, they say, by cutting their annual payments nearly in half and leaving them thousands of dollars short.

The rationale?

The family moved from Calabasas to Ventura County, where the reimbursement rates paid to foster parents of severely disabled children are significantly lower.

The Perrys argue that Los Angeles County agreed to keep their rates unchanged and did so for the first two years after their 1994 move.

In fact, the family took in two more children during that period at the request of Los Angeles County’s sprawling Department of Children and Family Services.

Myia arrived in May 1995 after moving through three foster homes. Rikki joined the Perry family in January 1996.

James Perry, a certified public accountant, poured $200,000 into the new Camarillo home--putting in a pool to help the children develop their motor skills, expanding the dining room to fit a table long enough for the whole family to sit together, and putting up fences to keep the yard safe.

But in 1996, without warning, their payments dropped from about $60,000 a year to about $36,000. And despite 14 administrative hearings settled in the Perrys’ favor, the state has consistently blocked restoration of the money.

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So the Perrys turned to the legal system last week, filing a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court for each of their foster children.

They are seeking back payment from when the rates were cut in 1996, and demanding Los Angeles rates for the future. And they hope to adopt the children if payments can be continued--as they would be if they still lived in Los Angeles County.

Los Angeles officials had not seen the suits and would not respond to questions last week. State officials also would not comment on the case. But local and state documents filed with the suit substantiate that the rates were cut.

At a time when national and state legislators are urging better foster care and more adoptions, advocates say the Perry case shows the tremendous obstacles that foster families face.

Andrew Bridge of the nonprofit group Alliance for Children’s Rights, which provides free legal services to foster children and children of poverty, says there has been a push to get foster children who are not going to return home adopted. This is especially true of special-needs children--those with physical and emotional disabilities such as the Perrys’ children--who are extremely difficult to place.

Bridge, who is one of five lawyers working on the Perry cases, says foster care was never intended to be a long-term solution.

“The goal is to get the children back into a normalized family setting, a setting not dominated by lawyers, courtrooms, bureaucrats and social workers,” he said. “The goal is to get them into families with parents.”

Parents such as the Perrys.

Instead, he says, the system has turned its back on the couple.

“Los Angeles County should be doing everything it possibly can to support the Perrys,” he said. “But instead what the Perrys face is a trail of broken promises and commitments on the part of the department, and capricious actions on the part of the state.”

Assembling the Family

It’s almost dinner time at the Perrys.

Dona Perry bustles about the kitchen, pulling leftover green curry pasta from one refrigerator, and two giant loaves of garlic bread from another.

Azael dutifully sets the long, wooden banquet table, carefully arranging the silverware.

A Brownie leader drops by. James Perry’s 20-something son wanders out of a back room. A neighbor returns from gymnastics class with two more children--Myia, 7, and Shawn, 6. Shawn is of Chinese descent and has Down’s syndrome.

Roberta clatters through the kitchen in a satin Southern Belle costume and high heels that are too big.

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As she chops the bread and boils the pasta, calmly presiding over the crazy whirl of activity, Dona Perry talks about how she and her husband ended up taking in six disabled children.

As she tells it, it was an accident.

But she knew she wanted to work with medically fragile, special-needs kids--the kids who don’t know if they are going to live, die or go home.

And she knew that women such as Mother Hale--who worked with crack babies in Harlem--and Mother Teresa--who worked with India’s impoverished--were her idols.

Still, she and her husband never expected to take in six children. And they definitely never expected to try to adopt them.

Dona and James Perry, both 51, both have children from earlier marriages.

“But we never had kids together,” James Perry said.

During the first 10 years after they married in 1983, they traveled the world in search of adventure, sailing to the Channel Islands, and scuba diving in Australia and Mexico.

But they longed for something more.

In 1991, they took in Shawn, their first foster child.

Next they brought home Roberta.

She came to them after three months in neonatal care. She had just had brain surgery. She couldn’t stand to be touched, or even looked at. When the infant finally looked them in the eye and smiled after six months, the Perrys got a bottle of champagne and cried for joy.

“It was just like giving birth at that point,” Dona Perry said. “You are just so involved.”

She launches off, describing with pride how much progress each child has made.

Rikki was hostile and angry, anything would set him off. At 14 months he would not talk or babble. He just lay on the floor and screamed. They thought he was autistic. Now he races around, talking endlessly. He still won’t talk at school, but “his teacher said he just made his first friend last week,” Dona Perry said.

When Myia arrived with two baskets of clothes, and no toys, Dona Perry said the girl would literally tear her clothes apart. If they gave her a doll she would tear it up, then crumple to the floor and cry. Today Myia cartwheels on cue, and her smile dazzles.

“I just feel so good about what I am doing,” Dona Perry said. “If you can make a difference in the life of a child, that’s what’s important. I feel that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing.”

She says she can already see the difference that a sense of security has made for the children. And these days, she worries about what could happen if that security were disrupted.

“It may take three years to resolve this lawsuit,” she said. “But we can’t give that time back to the kids.”

At present they are giving the children all they can, she says.

Each child has a busy schedule packed with extracurricular activities, tailored to his or her specific developmental needs. The jungle gym, pool and trampoline help the children with coordination.

Azael dives, and is a Cub Scout. Myia, Roberta, Shawn, and Kimba, the youngest, all perform gymnastics. Roberta and Myia also take speech and music lessons. On Saturdays, Dona Perry takes them to classes at Cal Lutheran, sponsored by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, to teach them about their African-American heritage.

The Perrys have hired a driver to help ferry their children to all their activities, as well as an aide, who works Monday to Friday helping with cooking, cleaning and the 40 loads of laundry each week.

When she felt the children were behind in swimming, Dona Perry hired a private instructor to teach them all in the backyard.

Above and beyond the state reimbursement they originally received for the children, the Perrys estimate they put $25,000 of their own money annually into the children.

It’s a life a lot of families might be jealous of.

“A lot of people will say, just because they are foster kids doesn’t mean they should get everything,” Dona Perry said. “But they have a lot of catch-up to do to become productive members of society.”

The family sits down for dinner. Each child has an assigned seat.

“Thank God for our food and family and friends,” says Dona Perry, with a chorus of voices. They all speak sign language as well, so that deaf-mute Azael is part of the prayer.

They talk of the children, and celebrate their histories. “Roberta cried for six months,” teased James Perry. “Waaahh. Waaah. Waaah.” Roberta grins and sticks her fingers in her ears. She knows this story.

Determined to Stick Together

In 1993, when the Perrys had just four foster children, they began to consider moving from their home in Calabasas to a home that would be better and safer for their growing brood.

They found the perfect place, nestled among the citrus orchards of Hill Canyon in Camarillo.

And when Los Angeles social workers asked the Perrys to take in two additional children after they had moved to Camarillo, the couple agreed to.

Again, the Perrys were assured they would receive the higher rates of financial assistance, they said.

For two years it worked.

The monthly payments came in at the Los Angeles rates.

But in June 1996 the Perrys received notices that their foster care payments were being reduced to Ventura County rates.

The Perrys appealed, and 14 administrative hearings followed.

The Perrys prevailed in every one. But ultimately Eloise Anderson, the state director of the Department of Social Services, used her authority to overrule each one.

Anderson could not be reached for comment.

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In her ruling May 19, 1997, Anderson conceded that the Perrys relied on the county’s promise of funding in making their decision to move. But she added that continuing to pay the additional sums “would nullify a strong rule of policy adopted for the benefit of the public.”

For their part, the Perrys are at a loss. They have sold a boat and their house in Calabasas to cover their costs.

They have weighed their options. They have thought about giving some of the children back, but decided they couldn’t do that to the children, their siblings or themselves.

“My husband makes a good deal of money,” Dona Perry says, though she would not specify how much. “It’s enough for two or three kids, but not enough for six. And we want to do it right.”

She looks out across her yard, where children romp and play.

“It’s so incredible,” she says. “It’s such a grab bag. And we got such beautiful children.”