John Update (not because I want to)

(The picture above is of John when he was 12. Wasn't he sweet? Still is, by the way.)

I need to update you on John. Not because I want to, but because I need to share how things have gone. Knowing that some professionals involved in his case read my blog has made me a little hesitant, but I will simply present the facts and try not to share much emotion (yeah, right, you're all thinking, good luck with that).

Here are the details up until January 29th.

Well, now, as you know, it is April 10th. The plan we were told back in the fall was, "If john screws up, which he probably will, we will put him into ______ (a secure detention facility which also is a residential treatment program) for a couple weeks and teach him a lesson and then put him back into foster care." And so John screwed up and they put him in ________.

And he

is still

there.

Yes, January 18th he was asked to be removed from his foster home and a few days later was sent to learn his lesson for a week or two. And it has been almost 3 months. He is now 3 months from his 18th birthday, not sure what happened to his stuff or the money he had earned last year (he had it on a card that he thinks was left at the foster home). He cannot work, most likely will not graduate, and has no plan for the future.

Furthermore, charges were pressed against John for 5th Degree Assault for the incident in his foster home before he left. I was not there, so I do not know what happened. But what i do know is that he should not have been there in the first place. He was unmedicated, frustrated with a situation he did not create, and in the wrong setting, as we had tried to make clear for months.

To top it all off we received a bill to pay for the public defender... which I am, on principle, going to attempt to refuse to pay. I could write an angry paragraph about this, but remember, trying to leave emotion out of this.

John happily reported that his new psychiatrist agrees that he does not need medication. However, on Friday night, in a secure detention/residential facility, he had to be restrained. I do not know how to put those pieces together and feel at all positive about his prognosis for the future.

I'm still working on a plan -- have a meeting tomorrow -- to transition him to adulthood with supports, but time is running out.

So, those are the facts about John. And you all can mentally add any emotion to the post that I purposefully left out.

But my final question is this: If John is an adopted child, with parents who are fairly strong advocates, and this is his story, what are stories like for the 17,000 seventeen year olds who will age out of the system in 2008 who do NOT have adoptive parents who advocate for them?

I think the answer to that question is far too depressing to even begin to contemplate. And that question alone motivates me to be sure that that number goes down every year.