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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.