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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (June 16, 2017)
Page 8 News S tre e t R o o ts • J u n e 1 6 -2 2 , 2 0 1 7 Fostering Child welfare workers will be looking for potential foster parents at this weekend's Pride celebration on the Portland waterfront BY EMILY GREEN STAFF W R ITER rowing up LGBTQ can be tough. For kids growing up Oregon’s foster care system, it can be even tougher. From the time Rickey Bedolla was about 3 years old, he spent most his childhood in one Washington County foster home or another. As he was becoming a teenager, he’d found a stable placement where he’d stayed for five years. It was around age 13 that Bedolla began to question his sexual orientation. There was this boy at school, he said, that kind of . “sparked it.” The family he was living with at the time was LGBT youths have religious, “but they didn’t different problems tforce it on you,” he said. | Their brand of faith was A survey of more then 10,000 better than a family he’d U.S. youths ages 13 to 17 asked: lived with previously, he “Your most important problem ...” ^explained, which “was the tforced-upon-religious type of Non-LGBTQ Youth home.” • Classes, exams, grades He’d heard stories about • College, career a girl who couldn’t stay at • Finances related to college-job her home after coming out fas a lesbian, and he never LGBTQ Youth broached the subject of • Non-accepting families sexuality with his foster family. • School bullying I Lucky for Bedolla, his • Fear of being out or open child welfare caseworker Source: Humw Rights Campaign, noticed he was starting to "Growing Up In Amenta' (20125 have identity questions. This caseworker, an employee of Oregon’s Department of Human Services, or DHS, decided to place him with Matthew Fisher and Joe Williams - a gay married couple the caseworker had placed other kids with in the past. “We were always kind of the go-to with the LGBT youth,” said Williams. “There was obviously a need out there for more, at least just accepting foster parents.” Sage Dupre, 18, is a bisexual-identified youth who has been in foster care for the past 5 years. Out of the six placements she’s had, she said it wasn’t until she was placed at her current LGBTQ-specific foster home in Gresham that she finally felt accepted for G who she is. She said at one home she was in, the foster mother would watch her closely, not allowing her to be alone with girls and scrutinizing her every move. Religion was a factor in that home, but she said p art of the problem was that many foster families didn’t know anyone in the LGBTQ community, so they had a hard time understanding her. Once she said she got in trouble for explaining what it meant to be gay to another foster child who had asked her about it. “It’s been a rough road,” she said. ‘it’s really bad’ Every night, in Multnomah County alone, five to 13 foster kids sleep in hotel rooms because DHS has nowhere else to put them, said Melissa Masserant, a foster and adoption trainer for DHS’s child welfare division. “It’s really bad. Across the board we’re in need of more foster families,” Masserant said. “It’s not just Multnomah County, it’s a need across the state. But we are putting special emphasis on trying to find homes that are affirming for LGBTQ-identified youth.” DHS spokesperson Andrea Cantu Schomus said it’s difficult for DHS to measure exactly how many additional foster parents the agency would need to meet the demands of finding placements, as it varies depending on the needs of the kids and where they live. But in July 2016, Reginald Richardson, deputy director at DHS, reported the agency had lost more than 400 family-run foster beds and 100 residential facility beds in the span of 12 months. A statewide assessment the same year found the agency had fewer than half the number of homes for foster children than Cantu Schomus said it would ideally have in order to match kids with the right foster families. Anytime the child welfare system experiences a shortage of foster parents, it exacerbates the difficulties in placing kids who have specific needs, such as LGBTQ youths, said Cari King. King chairs DHS’s PRIDE Employee Resource Group, which was informally established nearly a decade ago. Today it serves as a resource support group for LGBTQ-identified youths’ needs in the foster care system. One of King’s focuses is recruiting new foster parents from the LGBTQ community. “We have about two times as many LGBTQ-identified youth in (foster) care as in general population,” King said. “It’s important that we are placing LBGTQ youth in families that are not only just OK with their identity, but affirming.” That’s one reason DHS will have a booth at this weekend’s Pride Northwest celebration at Tom McCall Waterfront Park See FOSTER, page 9 P H O T O B Y E M IL Y GREEN Rickey Bedolla plays the piano for his former foster dads, Matthew Fisher (at left) and foe Williams (at right) at their home in Tigard. The couple enrolled Bedolla in piano lessons when he was placed with them as a young teenager, and they attended his first recital. Bedolla still visits their home on a weekly basis as an “honorary fam ily” member.
