AZ system often can be complex, confusing and largely secret
Two boys, living in a crisis care center after the state has taken them from their families, are asked: What’s your one wish?
“For nobody to hit me,” one boy says. A few words can sum up the entire concept of child welfare. Children should be safe. The idea is simple.
The reality, though, is complex, sometimes confusing, often largely secret.
That’s why we set out this year to talk to people from every facet of the childwelfare system. We asked them to tell us, in their words, what happens. In “Faces of child welfare,” you’ll see the faces of this system, with more to come throughout the year. You’ll learn, as we did, that the system is not one thing.
In Arizona, the system orbits the Department of Child Safety. The system, though, is far larger than DCS. And what’s best for the child is usually a complicated answer.
Read more about the people in the system on Pages
It started when she was 11 and ended five years later, when Kiana Barroso ran away from her last out-of-home placement in Arizona’s child-welfare system.
Over that time, she bounced among eight different settings. One of them — briefly — held the prospect of adoption. But everything went wrong. Her last placement wasn’t even in a foster home. It was in a shelter where, she said, she was jumped repeatedly by the girls who lived there.
“I wasn’t getting any of the attention I needed, the kind of help that I needed,” said Barroso, now a 21-year-old mother of two. “So I took it upon myself and I just left. I didn’t care if that meant I had no home, no food, no anything. It was better than being in a home with girls that didn’t like me for no reason.”
She was homeless for four months, but in a way, she had been homeless for years.
There was the filthy foster home in Winslow. She took photos, incredulous at how many children she says were crammed into one room, with trash under the beds and cockroaches skittering across the floor.
While the shelter was so bad it made her fear for her safety, the feeling of worthlessness she got from being a “foster kid” made her question why it was worth living.
Her caseworkers made her feel bad. “Every kid in foster care has to have something wrong with them,” she explained. “They can’t just be a normal kid. And they made me feel like if I was a good kid, I wouldn’t be where I was at. So I just didn’t want to live at the time.”
She did drugs. She drank. She acted out.
She dreaded the days when foster parents would pull out the folder they kept of her wrongdoings.
For all the turmoil, Kiana says, she’s better for the hell she went through.
“If I hadn’t gone through any of this, through CPS (Child Protective Services), through what I went through with my mom, I wouldn’t be who I am today,” Kiana said.
For 2-year-old Sunni Rose and baby Maiya Mae, Kiana says, she strives to be the mother she never had.
She’s drawing from her experiences in foster care to make her kids’ lives better.
There’s a broader potential impact, too: She is one of the original plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed against the state of Arizona. Her story is part of the case being built against the state as advocates push for reforms to Arizona’s foster-care system.