Left to Themselves: Foster Youths in L.A., a Before-and-After Story

The foul smell came from the bathroom, where the toilet had been left to overflow for two weeks, turning the carpet sticky underfoot. They were addicts. They had abandoned all responsibility. Oatley’s explanation to the cops was that the landlord wouldn’t be paying back the deposit anyway.

Like a house in premodern times, their home contained no refrigerator and no food. Six-year-old Doundie would later complain to DCFS of eating “too many hot dogs.” The living room was piled high with garbage. Kyzer’s arm was covered with fresh track marks. The police took Oatley into custody for an earlier warrant and the children were whisked into the temporary care of their maternal grandmother.

Dylan Kendall at the studio where she reaches out to kids through art

John’s look-alike older brother, Chris. John destroyed the photo after Chris went to prison for 11 years. He later painstakingly pieced it back together.

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More About

• Kathleen Ealey-Tutt
• Dylan Kendall
• Ernestine Willis
• Social Work
• Foster Care

This was 1992, when the Department of Children and Family Services was swollen with 50,000 children, more than three times today’s number, largely because the streets in L.A.’s low-income neighborhoods were flowing with crack and jammed with crack heads. Crime was at a historic high and “parents” were among the major offenders. DCFS was yanking kids out of houses fast, fearing bad press about dead babies.

Jacquelyn McCroskey of USC’s School of Social Work explains that supervisors pressured social workers to make the case for removing kids because, often, “there were no other options.”

Former DCFS director David Sanders pushed to preserve families when possible. In 2004, Sanders launched Point of Engagement in the Compton office of DCFS, in which parents, their children and a third party, from a church or social-services group, met to discuss how best to care for a specific child before being forced to make the momentous decision of taking away a child. The new approach was a radical change.

In Compton, the results have been dramatic, with 232 children removed from their parental homes the year after it was launched, compared to 487 the year before. Moreover, before, about 20 percent of these kids were eventually returned to their parents. Under Sanders’ reforms, 67 percent of kids are returned home within a year. This has made Compton’s DCFS office, long known as a highly unsuccessful operation, the leader in keeping families together in Los Angeles County, McCroskey found in a recent study.

Kyzer and Oatley’s filthy Lawndale apartment left authorities no choice but to immediately remove their three imperiled children. Although today other options are explored in an effort to keep families together, this wrecked couple almost certainly would not qualify.

Doundie, 6; Chris, 4; and John, 18 months, were pitched into a system that tore them up as people, and which eventually helped to drive both boys, who showed promise as kids, into jail in their teens and young-adult years.

“The system that was designed to protect and serve abused children became a nightmare,” McCroskey writes in her study.

“I was kind of scared because it was this thing, ‘Oh, my God, I’m gonna have a black mom,’ ” Doundie Kyzer says about the day she and her two brothers (all three are white) arrived at the foster home where, unbeknownst to them, they would stay for 14 years. “I didn’t know what to think.”

Doundie, now 23, sits next to John in the cramped home she rents with her husband in tiny Superior, Montana. She moved there because that’s where her birth mother is originally from, and she hoped the safe, small-town culture would give her the intangible sense of “family” she’d never had. It’s spring 2009, and John has caught up to her in Superior.

Doundie’s eyes, a clear blue like John’s, flicker from somber to excited when she talks about the change that veteran foster mom Ernestine Willis’ Long Beach house represented. There were toys and a swimming pool. “Then we got all excited of course,” Doundie says.

But what they wouldn’t understand and come to resent until later was that Willis was making money, and lots of it — as do the vast majority of foster parents. Of the $4,700 in monthly income Willis was earning in 1995, $3,500 came from DCFS for the three Kyzers and two other foster children, according to court documents obtained by the Weekly.

Today, foster parents are paid a “basic rate” of $446 a month for babies and toddlers up to age 4, $485 for ages 5 to 8 — all the way up to $627 for teenagers older than 15, all to cover food, clothes and other normal living expenses. For kids with a “D-rating,” for mental illnesses and disabilities, a foster parent can get another $600 to $800 per month based on a child’s age and whether the child takes prescription drugs. A medicated teen can mean nearly $1,200 a month in income — some of it profit. Opportunities for profit are one of the pressing problems in the foster-care system.

Daphna Ziman, founder of Children Uniting Nations — a well-regarded agency that trains adult mentors — who has adopted two foster children, says that many parents take in kids for the right reasons. But many are in it for little more than the money. “Every child inherently has the right to shelter, nutrition, education and a permanent family. Those are children’s human rights. When you are substituting foster care for welfare you are overlooking a child’s human rights.”