By Yen Duong
With the dogwoods, rhododendrons and mountain laurels in bloom, the Marjorie Williams Academy graduation ceremony on June 1 was already perfect. The entire senior class had received copies of the Dr. Seuss classic, “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” signed by legislative leaders and their surprise graduation speaker, Gov. Roy Cooper, who also sent a video message to the small school, nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains near the border of North Carolina and Tennessee.
Then eight students who graduated that day walked outside and saw the cars, complete with bows on top and pieces of paper with their names stuck to the windows.
“My first thought when we walked out there and saw the cars was ‘I feel like this is a prank’,” said Dalton Geough, a gangly 19 year old with freckles and sandy hair.
Tyler Dula, who delivered his valedictorian speech before the surprise, agreed, “I legit thought they were gonna take them away, like they were gonna let us sit in them, do a lap and then be like, ‘Nope, sorry, kids.’”
These graduates aren’t used to getting large, unexpected presents. Williams Academy is a charter school on the Avery County campus of Crossnore School and Children’s Home, which has housed many of western North Carolina’s foster children since its founding over 100 years ago.
This was the first class to benefit from Crossnore’s new “Driving to Success” program, which sends graduates to adulthood with a free car to carry them through college.
“This is really to help them like any family would help their child launch to adulthood without having to worry about whether they’ll be able to get to school or to work,” said Crossnore director Brett Loftis. “They deserve the same opportunities that every kid has.”
The number of children in foster care in North Carolina follows nationwide trends. Since 2008, North Carolina has stayed at about four children in foster care per 1,000 kids in the state, while the national rate has stayed higher, between five and six kids per 1,000 American children. Graph credit: Yen Duong, data accessed through NC Child.
The vehicles have been donated by donors who want to remain anonymous, Loftis said, and the dealer he worked with was moved enough to chip in on the cost of one of the cars as well.
Derailed by a car
According to the National Foster Youth Institute, about half of children who go through the foster system graduate high school, and the dropout rate for foster kids is three times that of other children.
At Williams Academy, 80 percent of the 135 students in kindergarten through 12 grade live at Crossnore and the rest come from the nearby community. Loftis hopes that “Driving to Success” will help incentivize his students to stick with school.
“Graduation is the goal,” Loftis said. “[In terms of] lifetime earnings, over $900,000 is the difference between a high school graduate and not. It’s like winning the lottery.”
Of this year’s class at Crossnore, Geough is heading to the Marines and Dula will enroll at East Tennessee State University to study teaching. The rest will attend community or technical colleges, in stark contrast to the NFYI statistic that fewer than 3 percent of foster children graduate from a four-year college.
Part of the problem is that foster children often stop getting support when they turn 18, which can make college a near-impossible goal.
“Most people don’t understand that for a child in foster care when the dorms close, they can become homeless,” Loftis said. At Crossnore, residents can stay until they’re 21 and often come back from college for spring and Christmas breaks. “They can come back and stay with us. We’re their home.”
[sponsor]Transportation is another issue for foster kids going to college. For years, Loftis has struggled with the fact that Crossnore teenagers would save up a few thousand dollars for old cars, which would then break down before they finished college. This new program solves that problem.
“Our kids get off to college and they get stranded, and then they don’t go to work and don’t go to class and then everything kind of unravels from there,” Loftis said. “That means that all this success they’ve had gets derailed by a car.”
Close knit
While foster care is meant to be a temporary placement for children before they are adopted into their “forever home,” many never get adopted. Loftis listed some reasons that a resident would stay at Crossnore through adulthood: courts sometimes don’t fully terminate parent rights, teenagers may not want to be adopted and older children and sibling groups are often harder to place.
One of 13 group homes in North Carolina, Crossnore organizes its 162 beds into 20 cottages of six to nine kids, each living with a cottage parent, across two campuses in Avery County and Winston-Salem. The cottage system keeps siblings together, which can be difficult in the foster system.
“If you have four siblings, chances are they would be in two or three foster homes,” Loftis said.
“Most kids in foster care, once they’re separated, they never get back together.”
Dula lived with his sister in a Crossnore cottage before she headed out for college. She’s now a junior at Appalachian State, and “doing really well,” according to Loftis. Crossnore has a thriving and close-knit alumni association; the oldest alumnus at last year’s homecoming was 94.
Both young men talked about considering Crossnore “home” and coming back there during their college breaks and for holidays.
Making something of themselves
“Something really crazy that I think about every now and again is if I had never came here,” Dula said. He talked about the offhand comment that started a Child Protective Services investigation.
“I got my teachers’ attention based off a little joke that I made,” Dula said. “I was like, ‘Sorry, I wasn’t able to do my homework, mom got too drunk to help me,’ or something like that.”
Loftis said that in recent years, the system has seen “record numbers of kids” because their parents or guardians end up using opioids or methamphetamines.
“Some days I’d make the excuse that I missed the bus, so I never went to school,” Geough recalled. “One day, one of the teachers asked me and I was like ‘Uh, my family does drugs and it keeps me up all night.’ The words just slipped out of my mouth.”
After investigations and attempted placements with family members or family friends, kids such as Dula and Geough end up at Crossnore, where they live with a cottage parent, go to a school where they join clubs and participate in sports and do chores as they would in any other home.
Before receiving their 2016 and 2017 Kia Souls, which still fell under 100,000-mile warranties, Dula drove a 1997 pickup truck and Geough a 2007 Scion TC which barely fit his 6’1” frame. They’re both happy that they don’t need to worry about their cars breaking down in their future plans.
“I was told at some point in my life, that I would never do anything with it, that I would be another statistic,” Dula said, recalling his valedictorian speech. “I wouldn’t make anything out of myself.”
“We all have the ability to do something great in us. And we all have the ability to keep going forward, no matter how many times we get hit down. Just tell yourself every day that you will do something great.”
Rose Hoban contributed reporting to this story.
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