June 4, 2004, was one of the most glorious days of Chrystal Williams’ life. Zipped into a robe the color of sunshine, grinning radiantly, she became the first person in her family to graduate from high school.
But only one relative, an uncle who once served as her foster parent, congratulated her after the ceremony.
The people who clustered around Williams with balloons and flowers had come into her life because she had grown up as a ward of the state: a caseworker, a court-appointed guardian ad litem and her best friend, who had lived down the street from the 18th of Williams’ 19 foster homes.
Williams is among the state’s estimated 858 foster children who will turn 21 this year. Then, their substitute parent — a labyrinth of legal courts, social service agencies and government bureaucracies — will cast them adrift.
It’s because of this ticking clock that Williams found herself twice last summer and again in November in the audience of Judge Patricia Brown Holmes.
In a style both tender and stern, Holmes, 43, runs a little-known Cook County Circuit Court program called Benchmark Permanency Hearings. The hearings are designed for older teens in foster care who will “age out” of the system without the family support and guidance many other young people take for granted.
Novel because of their informal, one-on-one approach, benchmark hearings are being replicated by family courts in Buffalo and Washington, and officials at New York City Family Court are considering a pilot program this year based on the Cook County model.
Like others in the benchmark hearings, Williams, 20, is still too young for official adulthood, too old to be adopted. She has a child of her own, 1-year-old Maurice.
She has made it this far with the help of people who believed in her, but mostly thanks to her steely will.
She shares this lot in life with Kyle Knepp, a teen she has never met, but who, like Williams, was taken from a troubled parent and raised by strangers through a turbulent youth.
Both long for a stable adulthood. Education. A job. Their own share of happiness.
But so far, life hasn’t been easy. And complete financial and family independence, which for most young Americans is not declared on a particular date, is coming fast.
“For them, it’s sink or swim,” Holmes observed. “Chrystal turns 21 in July, and her present is — nothing.”
Foster youth in Cook County officially age out of the system at 19 but can remain in Illinois Department of Children and Family Services care, and have their living expenses paid by the state, until age 21 if they remain in school or show they are taking other positive steps toward independence. In most states care ends at 18, an age at which few young people, even in intact families, are left to fend on their own.
The minute the state stepped in to take these children from their parents, they became “society’s children,” said Mark E. Courtney, director of the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, a research and development center that focuses on understanding the challenges children face.
Across Illinois, an emphasis on finding a permanent home for younger children, either with biological family or adoptive parents, has cut caseloads dramatically, leaving DCFS officials more time to focus on older youth, deputy director Cynthia Moreno said.
“There has been a population shift,” she said. “In 1997, there were 50,000 in care. Today there are less than 19,000. … Forty-five percent of children currently in care are over 14.”
DCFS is working to integrate services for older wards, Moreno said.
“There’s a change in the focus of looking at lifelong planning and not just looking at one point in the life of a child,” she said.
Benchmark history
Benchmark permanency hearings were created in 1999 by Patricia Martin Bishop, presiding judge of the Circuit Court’s Child Protection Division. Her staff, she said, had concerns that not enough was being done to help foster teens prepare to live on their own.
In 2000, Bishop assigned Holmes, who had been appointed an associate judge of the Cook County Circuit Court and assigned to the Child Protection Division in late 1997, to the hearings.
“I looked for someone who could relate to kids,” Bishop said. “Not who would come in wearing hip-hop clothes, but who could look kids in the eye and ask how they were doing, and they would tell her.”
Benchmark hearings are held not in a courtroom but in a long conference room in the Cook County Juvenile Center, overlooking Chicago’s near West Side.
The table is ringed by mostly silent attorneys, social workers and representatives from DCFS, the Chicago Public Schools and occasionally a relative or other mentor chosen by the teen. A court reporter documents the proceedings.
But when Holmes peers skeptically over her wire-rimmed glasses at a young client — sitting to her left, in what the judge calls “my special chair” — or slides into street slang for dramatic effect, it is as if she and the teen are sitting at Holmes’ kitchen table.
Talking points
Williams, 20, now lives in an apartment of her own, with the rent paid — until she turns 21 — by an agency contracted through DCFS. Through much of her life, judges have made pivotal decisions about Williams’ fate. Holmes, however, is the first judge she’s actually sat down and had a conversation with.
At her benchmark hearing in November (her next hearing is scheduled for Jan. 26), the conversation ranged from a motherly chat about child-rearing to a heated talk about her reluctance to say goodbye to recreational drugs and the friends who push them.
“You don’t see eagles hanging out with pigeons, do you?” the judge lectured.
“When it goes bad, you remember this day,” she warned. “Because this was your chance to go the right way.”
The day after Williams graduated from high school, her 32-year-old boyfriend swiped her academic trophies, awards for Most Progress in English and Most Improved Academic Performance in History.
Three weeks later, he pushed her through a glass coffee table. She got up, Williams says, and was pushed down again. And again. Her legs were gashed and bleeding.
She got up one more time, and moved on. Now she holds a two-year order of protection against him. She does not want Maurice to grow up around a man who curses and beats his mother.
“I thought, `What good example am I going to be for him?'” Williams says.
“It took a while for us to help her understand that she doesn’t have to be in an abusive relationship” just because the ex-boyfriend is her baby’s biological father, said Missy Wilson, a caseworker. “That was hard because Chrystal grew up without knowing her father.”
Chrystal’s story
Williams landed in the foster-care system when she was 4. Her first foster home was “like the Cosbys,” she recalled. She adored her foster dad, a preacher. But he died unexpectedly; his widow couldn’t care for Williams alone. Eighteen foster homes and group homes followed. At 16, Williams was arrested for stealing a car. It earned her a felony. She showed up at her first benchmark hearing “reeking of marijuana,” Holmes said. “She started crying and said she did not want to be like her [drug-dependent] mother.” Holmes sent her into drug rehab.
When Williams attended a benchmark during her pregnancy, the judge warned the teen about another young woman “who was smoking weed, not eating healthy, [and] her child was born unhealthy,” Williams said. Hearing that “really changed my life.”
And so has her openness — a quality that has served her well, mentors say.
“Chrystal has survived because of her very outgoing and dynamic personality,” said Lisa Williams, her high school principal.
“Chrystal has been forward, honest, even when it involved too much information. It was all her — `This is who I am.'”
This fall Williams enrolled at Olive-Harvey College in Chicago, a once-unthinkable dream. She recently completed a City of Chicago Jobs For Youth program, where she learned special skills for working in retail or as a bank teller, and is now looking for a job.
Hearings part of journey
Holmes conducts up to a dozen benchmark hearings per week, each lasting up to two hours. Before each meeting she reviews the teen’s case file, looking for any new hopes and dreams the young person has expressed. At the end of each hearing, judge and client draw up a contract stating what must be accomplished before they meet again three or six months down the road.
“The idea is to get the kids thinking about the future,” said Bishop, who is planning a study to measure the program’s long-term impact. Judges, she noted, have the clout to speed up services that can help the teens stay on track.
Selected teens are now referred to the program by their hearing officers, caseworkers or attorneys, and the benchmarks have become so popular that Holmes’ calendar is full until May. Benchmark hearings have been only one stop on a journey lined with caseworkers, family counselors and educators for more than 820 foster teens so far. “I would never say that if it weren’t for the benchmark, [a youth] would never succeed,” Holmes said. “It’s everything coming together at the right time.”
Kyle’s story
In April, as his lawyer gave him a nudge to stop slouching, Kyle Knepp dug a square of paper — weathered, creased and undoubtedly precious — from the pocket of his baggy jeans.
He slid it across the conference table to the judge. It was his latest report card.
Holmes grinned. Knepp’s grades had moved out of the gutter into the realm of A’s and B’s. “Good job,” she told him, returning it to him. “That’s my man.”
But shortly after his 18th birthday in October, and three months before he again was scheduled to meet with Holmes, Knepp was suspended from school for five days for carrying a sharp comb in his pocket and mouthing off. His grades went into free-fall. He is still waiting to be placed into an independent-living program, a step toward autonomy that the judge agreed in July he was ready to make.
Knepp was 8 the Friday before Christmas when he was pulled out of school midday and told he’d have to go into foster care.
“That first Christmas, I got one toy,” he says. “At that time I still believed in Santa Claus, and I hated him.”
It was the first of 13 foster placements that sent him all over the place, including Waukegan, Blue Island, North Chicago, Riverdale, Dolton, Zion, Elmwood, Grayslake and Gurnee Mills. He bounced in and out of group homes until, at 16, he found a place he could stay — with Sharon Johnson.
Johnson, 48, become a foster mother after her daughter grew up and left home. She and her live-in boyfriend, Larry Watts, 45, became de facto parents for Knepp and a 14-year-old foster son. The boys share a room, household chores and a roster of house rules, including no facial piercings or tattoos. Unlike many foster parents, Johnson, who is African-American, didn’t blink at the idea of boarding two teenage boys. But Knepp was a surprise, she said, “because he’s white.”
Watts has given him lectures about keeping identification in his pocket and spending money wisely. Johnson has razzed him about his baggy hip-hop clothes and teased him about the lopsided pancakes he makes.
Dream of independence
With his quick wit and teen-male bravado, Knepp wants to be an architect and someday open his own group home for foster youth.
Meanwhile, he’s building an adult support network — the most important thing a kid in his situation can do, said Nick Youngblood, a lawyer in the Office of the Public Guardian and Knepp’s guardian ad litem.
“I didn’t know anything about how to budget my money, rent an apartment, prepare for an interview when I was his age,” Youngblood said. “You learn those things as you move into adulthood. [Most] young adults have had a significant adult support network, into their 20s and 30s, and even beyond.”
Youngblood continued, “Right now, if I had to bet on him, I’d say Kyle is going to do fine. Kyle’s got a great personality; he’s very charismatic. He’s able to communicate his needs. He’s one of those kids who people meet and say, `This is a great kid. I want to help him out.'”
When he sits next to his foster mom on the couch, Knepp leans his head on her arm in a subconscious show of love.
“They didn’t have to take a 16-year-old kid,” he later says. “I have a lot of bad stuff that happened to me. But they don’t look at me differently than anybody else on the street.”
Still, Knepp’s dream is to live independently — not for the freedom, he says, but for the predictability. This fall, about the time his grades again began to slide, his foster mother moved to another apartment, the fifth home Knepp has lived in with Johnson.
“I’ll feel a lot more stable,” Knepp says, “when I’m on my own.”
This summer, Knepp worked as a gofer in the Cook County Public Guardian’s office as part of a program for youth in foster care. He was rehired late last month and is now putting in 10 hours of clerical work a week.
He vows to bring his grades up again — that’s the only way DCFS will let him move into an independent living program, he said.
And when his next benchmark hearing comes up this month, he’ll again have to account for himself in front of Judge Holmes.
“I guess,” Holmes said one day after returning to her chambers from a benchmark hearing, “the biggest thing with the teenagers is … there’s nobody who really touches them on a daily basis, who says, `I love you,’ who encourages them, who motivates them.
“And not that that has to be the court, but it has to be someone.”
