What Kind of Society Fails Its Most Vulnerable Children - and Call It Care?

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Amira Therese: Hey there, Foster Fierce Family. I'm back with another episode of Interview with a Foster Kid, and today we have an amazing guest. Sharon Dunlevy has dedicated her life to foster children, from advocating for us to training people who are interested in foster care. She's bringing awareness to the educational needs of children in foster care through speaking, writing, and collaborating.

And today she's doing it on this podcast. I couldn't be more grateful. Sharon, welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sharon Dunlevy: Thanks, Amira. I'm really excited to be on here. You and I had a conversation via email about how few podcasts there are that are not just focused on foster care, but run by former foster students. And  I'm really excited that I get to speak with you from your lived experience. I am not a foster care alumnus, but I have been doing this for about seven years. I saw a job opening for an educational advocate at a foster care licensing agency here in Indianapolis. And found my heart! I just fell in love with the kids. I fell in love with the process of helping them get through school and have good outcomes. Or get their GED if school was not working for them.

Amira Therese: Yeah. Honestly, I want to let all of you out there who have gotten your GED, I did it just to get out of the system. When I was 16, I dropped out of high school forcibly and with a lot of attitude, but went and scored in the top 90th percentile or above on my GED.

Sharon Dunlevy: Sometimes, traditional school is not the appropriate place for a child in foster care because school staff don’t understand trauma. I had to open doors for alternative schools. Several of the school systems around here do have an alternative program where you can be in a smaller group doing more stuff online, things like that, or going to Job Corps and getting your GED and job training at the same time, or going into a high school that has a vocational program.

A lot of foster kids are not going to go to college, and that may not be a reasonable expectation anyway, because again, college is stressful. If you haven't been able to overcome all your trauma symptoms, college can feel overwhelming. And again, colleges don't understand trauma. They don't necessarily have programs specifically for foster kids to help them transition.

I'm training other people to be educational advocates for children in foster care. We talk about trauma and everything else, but we don't talk about how that affects their educational outcomes. I was just reading an article yesterday that reinforced the numbers that I've been quoting. 20 to 25% of foster care alumni will experience homelessness sometime before they're 21.

Amira Therese: I'll say something about the statistics because they've increased in the last four years, and now we're at 46% aging directly into homelessness, and then by the mid-twenties, about 50% of that, of the 46%, are still experiencing housing and stability issues. And it does go back to education.

I'll tell you a little anecdote about me. I went through those alternative schools, those night schools. The irony here is that the same people who couldn't handle me and my education were calling me a genius, but they were attaching it to negative connotations. Like, I wasn't a genius. I was Jeffrey Dahmer, who apparently was also a genius. They would say my genius was rooted in evil, basically.

I was bored of school, absolutely. The other students there? They were boring, their problems, their issues. I couldn't relate to somebody who was yelling at their mom on the phone because she didn't bring her pompoms to cheer practice. I'm like, if my mom answers I'm having a great day. I had no relationship with the kids my age, and to give myself a little bit of benefit, I was far beyond my grade level.

My problem was the truancy consistency, because I'm going to different schools. After I dropped out of eighth grade to get a job, I talked my way back into the ninth grade for social reasons. I just missed a whole year of school, but talked my way right through it. I didn't have any respect for any educators because why are you moving me? Why am I an ISS? Because I gave a teacher who said something negative to me a bit of a mouthful, but they're chastising me for being in foster care, and now I live in ISS.

Those kinds of things, behavioral issues, are taken out of context with foster kids. We're not crappy people who are trying to ruin your day. We just get looked at even by teachers as the one who probably will get in trouble.

Sharon Dunlevy: What disturbs me about that, and I've said this to a lot of different people, they’re blaming the victim for being a victim. We do this in our society a lot. If you ever look into stuff about sex trafficking, the reason that children who are sex trafficked don't come forward is because the laws are written in such a way that if they come forward, they're jailed as well as the trafficker.

Amira Therese: Not only that, if you come forward, CPS won't take you back. They won't let you back into the homes. I experienced that. I got back, but I had to have a lady who found some sort of compassion within her take me to the CPS office after they refused. I was homeless for four months at 17 because they refused to have me back until I got somebody else involved.

Sharon Dunlevy: And that's ridiculous. Why are we blaming the victims?   When you go into a school and you're a foster kid, what I've heard is that the teachers automatically think, “Oh my gosh, this child's going to be a problem.” They are going to be a problem because you, the teacher, don't understand trauma. A teacher can own what their behaviors are and what their actions are. They're not going to be able to change the child. Absolutely. The child is who they are. You have to accept the child for who they are and then meet them where they are. I am not going to denigrate teachers because obviously I was a teacher and I have that background, but they don’t have the training to handle kids with trauma.

Amira Therese: It's not their fault; legislation is to blame. I don't even blame foster carers because of my bad experiences. Why were they allowed? I don't blame anybody for a lack of education, but as soon as we lift that veil of ignorance, then the onus becomes theirs.

Sharon Dunlevy: Let's get trauma-informed care into our schools because it's not just foster kids. We live in a world where kids are exposed to too much on social media, so every child now has a CANS score. It may not be as high as a child who has experienced foster care. But because of school shootings, because they are exposed to this, because of COVID. All of those things. We have all this trauma that we have been exposed to.

Our teachers are overworked. They have too many kids in their classroom. There are no more instructional aids because they've had to cut those costs. There's all of this other stuff, and then higher education programs might have a teacher take a three-credit course on trauma-informed care. That's not enough.

Amira Therese: What I want is for there to be a clear way for people to get hold of services. I didn't have to be homeless. I didn't have to fall into the arms of the first drug dealer, who was the cutest guy on the mountain. I didn't have to be pregnant by the time I was 18, and I certainly didn't have to have a felony conviction before I was 19.

I didn't need any of those things to happen. I was an intelligent, creative, ambitious, and not the sociopath that people labeled me as. I wasn't violent unless you started the fight, and then I wasn't going to die. I needed a resource. That would've given me a more positive path than the one I took that plagued me for the next 20 years.

Sharon Dunlevy: I know of a group called Foster Greatness. They are creating an app that’s like a 211 for foster kids, and it's specifically for former foster kids. Scott Henderson started a program where he was training foster kids in order to be able to get a job after they age out. What he found was these kids kept coming back to him. They kept getting fired, and it was because of where he was sending them, even though those places were saying, “yes, we'll be trauma-informed, yes, we will treat them differently,” they didn't. They didn't understand trauma.

The article I read the other day says that every foster care alumnus actually costs $300,000 a year because we don't support them.

Amira Therese: There's your incentive. People, there's your incentive for the other side of the aisle that could give a crap about social issues. Okay? I'm not trying to be mean, but there's your incentive. You want to save some money, save some kids. We don't need to be the struggle of society. We don't need to be on welfare, but we are. We need every social service out there because we have no way to navigate this life ourselves.

Like I said, when I was in care, I had this little bubble I lived in. I didn't even know another race other than mine struggled. Then you sent me out. You think I know financial crap. Do you think that they gave me job services? Do you think they prepared me for a life outside of the walls? No. They were hoping that my life outside of the walls would be in prison because they were afraid of me.

Sharon Dunlevy: You were talking about the social aspect. I actually just uploaded this class into my membership site, where I talk to my foster parents about raising compassionate kids, because let's be real, we don't live in a compassionate society right now. America's the absolute opposite of compassionate right now, and it's just getting worse. It really is. Hopefully, this next generation will learn, but we have to teach them. Compassion is ingrained in us, but if it is not taught and not encouraged, we lose compassion as we grow older.

We start to look at everybody through our own lenses. Implicit biases all start to play in. We are not in an emotionally intelligent society. We are not a society that likes to look at our own feelings and thoughts and say, “Why am I reacting like this? Why am I getting angry at this? Why are we all triggered?” Foster kids, in some ways, are better equipped to deal with triggers.

Amira Therese: I want to say real quick to our audience, you guys know I just had Tristan Smith, the author of Against All Odds, on my show. And Sharon just said something that he said, life is about 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. You just fell right into that. Buy that book if you want a blueprint of how to deal with foster kids and really how to deal with your own emotions.

Sharon Dunlevy: It all becomes about us. And in fact, I'm reading a book by a man called Dr. Cloud, and he writes a lot of really good books about thinking, but right now I'm reading a book about bonding and boundaries, and he talks about how the only thing we can own is our own reactions, right? We can't change our children, as much as we'd like to, but all we can do is not react.

Now, am I good at this? Absolutely not. If you talk about fight, flight, or freeze, I am a fighter. That's why I'm here. We fighters tend to be vocal, and we tend to get out there. I love doing these podcasts because I'm fighting and I'm seeing what's going on, and I'm seeing what's happening.

If you take nothing else from this podcast, let's quit blaming the victim. Let's look and see how we can support the victim. Look at our society, what is something that we can change in our community that would cause things to be better?

I was on the board of a youth assistance program here in my town outside of Indianapolis, and what we did was we worked with the schools and the police officers and the school resource officers to identify kids and families that were in danger of getting into the system and got them services before their children were taken away or taken to jail, or the parents fell into poverty or the parents fell into drugs and alcohol. We provided those services.

Amira Therese: I want to comment on that because that's important. Like I always look back at my mom as irredeemable, like she could not have been helped, but could she have? She was stressed. In those moments where she wasn't a demon-possessed monster, she was amazing. She was creative. She was a beautiful singer. She was an amazing musician, and could play the guitar like nobody else. My dad was a music manager, and he thought she was just like Stevie Nicks, whom he knew personally. And if you hear her sing Stevie Nicks songs, you'll think Stevie's in the room.

I often wonder how somebody with that much creativity, talent, and beauty inside of them could turn into the monster that I experienced, because I experienced both ends. And let me tell you, it took me becoming a mother to realize how very on the edge we always are when you are a single mother. I do think that what she needed was financial support. That what she needed was help. And I do remember her struggle, her stress, and you bring up a good point there. Prevention is possible. I like to fantasize that my mom could have been saved because I've seen the parts of her that were worth saving.

Sharon Dunlevy: Yeah. And we're all human, right? We all have human fallacies. And your mom grew up in a generation where they didn't talk about mental health. It's that idea of, yes, you want to forgive, but you're never going to forget. And for your own mental health, forgiveness may come.

But just know that you're not your mom. You're not. That's not who you are. And anybody out there, you're not your parents. There is a sense sometimes of, if they were bad, I'm going to be bad too. There's always that fear of am I going to become like them?

We're all made up of different behaviors. Nobody is all good. Nobody is all bad. We all have things that are weaknesses and strengths. But you can look at what their strengths are, what they were good at? Your parents were good at music, and obviously that's something they passed on to you, something that you inherited from them, and you would never want that to go away. There are good things that come out of your parents, but that doesn't excuse the fact that they abused you.

Amira Therese: One of my most impressive talents, because I like to really build myself up now, is my writing. And they came from my mother. She can write a letter that will both lift you and cripple you. She is good with words.

It's hard for foster kids. The separation from your parents when you're a bio kid is college. You go to college hating your parents, you come back, their best friend. I'm experiencing it myself, and that's the normal way of things.

But we don't get that. In fact, after foster care, we've been separated from our parents, and we will seek them out, and it's not the healthiest choice. Let's talk a little bit more about that from your perspective.

Sharon Dunlevy: Sure. I have a student who's my success story. He was in residential care from four years old, all the way up to ninth grade, and he came out and was put into a foster home. The residential center had lost his ninth-grade credits, so he had to redo his ninth-grade year, but we got him graduated half a year late. In Indiana, you can stay in foster care until 23 under what's called Collaborative Care. They used Family First Prevention Services Act funds, which helped him as long as he was working or in school, at least half the time. He's going to turn 24 this year, and has a full-time job, his own apartment, he's got a dog, all of these things. But when he first graduated from high school, he went and lived with his dad. But his dad was still using drugs. So he called up his caseworker and said, “I want collaborative care because he's still using drugs.”

Family First is a national program, but grossly underused because foster parents and kids don’t know it exists. Many caseworkers don’t know about it either because caseworkers are often only there for a few months, maybe a couple of years, and then they're going on to something else. Case managers under the state foster care departments are often entry-level jobs.

Amira Therese: Can we talk a little bit more about that? Because I want to hear a little bit more about that being an entry job. I want to let you know the reason behind this is that I was not treated well by caseworkers, and they did seem to have a certain amount of dissociation. They didn't care. They always seemed to be doing something else. Something was more important. Do you mind just unraveling that just a little bit?

Sharon Dunlevy: It's a fallacy in our society, again, that we underpay jobs that involve children, teachers, caseworkers, all of that, right? We want to be this great nation, but we rank 36th among developed countries in how we care for children and in the protection of children. We are very low on the list of developed countries, and when you are talking about child welfare workers, we underpay them. Plus, they're not ready. Often, social work students tend to come out of college thinking, “I'm going to save the world and work with families.” And they're not told when they take the job that at least 50% of that job is going to be paperwork.

And a lot of that is because legislators don't understand. This is what happens here in Indiana. We had a big blow-up with our director of child welfare and our governor, who did not like each other. The director said that children were going to die. The legislators’ response was, “We need more data.” Now, all of the caseworkers here in Indiana have to spend 70% of their time doing paperwork so that legislators can understand what's going on, rather than the legislators getting off their butts and just going out into the field and see what's happening.

Amira Therese: I'll just say, you put to rest something I've been holding on to, my anger. And I know a lot of my foster alumni out there. You're probably thinking, “Oh, that's why my caseworker didn't seem to give a crap about me.” I really appreciate this story because I remember my caseworkers and they sucked, but now I get it. I understand why.

Sharon Dunlevy: Again, it all goes back to what we were talking about earlier. We only see half of the problem. We only see our perception when we look at our case managers is that they don't care. And I've had that perception too, because I watch them walk in late to meetings or not show up to court. I've watched them sit back during those child family team meetings and not say a word. And a lot of that time is because they just got the case and they don't know what the hell's going on.

Or I would be emailing a case manager, not realizing that person had quit, but their email address was still live. Nobody took the time to say this case manager left, and now this is who you call for an emergency. They told us nothing. How does that happen? It's because the system doesn't give them enough money. It doesn't give them enough resources or education. Anything that has to do with children is underpaid in this society, and it's tragic, and it's just getting worse.

Amira Therese: Right now, it's confusing, what's protected and what's not.

I can't imagine it getting worse for kids, but I wanted to bring up a little bit more about legislation because I find myself running in a hamster wheel. You know what I mean? And I'm like, I'm running toward that progress, but I don't really know how to apply it. I'm using my voice. I'm bringing amazing people like you together and onto a platform, sharing resources. But it seems like we are facing a boulder that we must push up a hill, and it's legislation.

Let's focus on making the generation ahead better. If you want a good generation, if you want to talk to a kid who's not part of the worst generation ever, change it for them because you sure haven't paved any pathways for them to walk.

Sharon Dunlevy: I say that all the time, and I make people mad. I'll see a post and it'll be something negative about “millennials today,” and I will respond that the poster raised those kids or those kids' parents. They hate that. But honestly, what did they teach those kids to be the worst generation? Where did all of this individualism come from? It came from the Boomers. We lost a sense of society in the Boomer generation when everything became about pulling ourselves up from the bootstraps and individual rights. They never talk about the responsibilities that go with those rights.

Let's be real. We are all responsible for what happens each day in this country. And if we don't take that responsibility and we blame something else, then we're not doing what we're supposed to do. We've got to start thinking about how every action we take affects other people, not just ourselves.

I’ve heard people say, “I had to suffer, I had to pull myself up by the bootstraps, everybody else needs to do it.”

And my thought is, If you had to suffer, wouldn't you want others NOT to have to suffer like you did? Why do they have to have the same bad experience as you?

My experience with the foster care alumni that I talk to is that you guys are out there trying to change the world. You are doing podcasts, you're creating groups where other foster kids or former foster kids don't feel alone. All of the kids I was working with had really high goals. They wanted to be therapists; they wanted to be neuroscientists. They wanted to change the system.

Amira Therese: I love these conversations here. I love that we are going to reach my foster siblings still in care and our alumni who have aged out because they have the damn internet. I wish I had it.

Sharon Dunlevy: All of a sudden, you have this community that you never knew about, because you were isolated. Many of you do feel like you're the only one. And you're not the only one. But how do you ever get to know that? By connecting with others with the same lived experience.

I can't say I understand what you're going through. I can say that I'm going to listen and I can tell stories about other kids that I've heard from. And I will say I think I'm a good listener. Not listening to respond, but just to listen, to hear the stories and my kids. I do feel like when I was working for that licensing agency, because I was a better listener than a lot of the care workers, I heard things, and I would have to report things to the care worker that they were never told because they were too busy filling out their paperwork.

Amira Therese: Before we go, I've had been curious this whole time. You and guitars. Tell me about your musical experience.

Sharon Dunlevy: I'm a singer. I took the guitar in high school and I play a little bit, but not well. I just like the look of guitars, but I am a singer. I took voice lessons in high school.

I was a very privileged child. I very much owned that. I was a privileged child. I lived overseas for four years when I was in fourth through eighth grade. Most eye-opening experience you can ever have. I have had a lot of experience in my life, and I'm emotionally intelligent enough to recognize that those things have really shaped who I am.

There are bad experiences too, but I've had a lot of support in my life that has helped me grow and be who I am and to be able to speak out and speak for people who don't feel like that voice.

Amira Therese: And what support looks like. You are a perfect person to teach us; we do need mentors who are not in survival mode. We need mentors who know what real support looks like. You might not be able to serve your purpose had you been a foster fierce alumni, because a lot of us don't know what it looks like to be supported by people like you. You need to help us because we don't have another perspective.

Sharon Dunlevy: And we should be a community where you all feel safe enough to talk to somebody and have that support, and we just aren't. And that's sad.

When you do find somebody that really seems to understand, you latch onto them; that's good advice. Don't suffer in silence. Don't suffer in isolation. I only have a few really close friends. I don't have a big network of friends, but I have people who are very important to me and who support me and build me up. Don't feel like you have to stay connected to people who make you feel bad about yourself, including family. If you need to separate yourself from somebody who's making you feel bad about yourself, do it because you're worth much more. Everybody out there deserves to feel good about themselves.

Amira Therese: I absolutely agree with you, and just like I said, it's going to be impossible to ever truly forget the things that have happened to us. But the more that we learn about ourselves, the more that we learn about our own abilities.

I'm really reaching out to you guys as well. I want your ideas. I'm not the person who has all the answers. I'm the person with the platform where we can spread these ideas, we can share these answers, and we can maybe affect the right people, the policymakers, the people that we need to break their hearts a little bit, because right now their hearts are covered in an icy mass.

We have to rely on the generation that we are raising right now to be the change, and we can break that cycle, but we have to find our power to empower them, or it's going to keep happening to my foster fierce siblings out there.