The first floor of the Samueli Academy three-story dormitory in Santa Ana is fully furnished and ready to house 16 teenagers from the Orange County child welfare system – girls on one side, boys on the other – for whom they will be home during the school days.
The plans include moving these students from 7th to 12th grade to their new rooms on the empty campus as soon as possible this year, even if the pandemic dictates that they, like all 650 students at the charter school, study remotely. Dorms are expected to become the kind of stable home that young people often lack in foster homes.
But students cannot change without another critical component in place – adoptive parents.
Although they live in university dormitories under the supervision of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation and its Youth Connected Program during school weeks, they also need “resource families” to live from Friday night to Sunday night and any other time when school is not in session. If things go well, they may end up spending more time during the week in the home.
And while time is limited, expected parents are not. The goal is to find individuals and families who want to be true surrogate parents, people who will welcome these teenagers into their homes and help them to lead their lives. The program cannot proceed until these resource families are identified and matched with the students.
“We have to have the foster family first, licensed and ready to go,” said Shay Sorrells, program director for the Orangewood Foundation, the long-standing nonprofit organization that serves young people in the county’s welfare system.
The goal is to have 20 resource families participating in the Youth Connected Program. From this group, the best fit will be determined for each of the 16 foster youths. The remaining four families of volunteers will serve as temporary caregivers or backup in an emergency.
“We really want to have as many families as possible to make the best combination possible,” said Sorrells.
Students have a say in the process. As things start to work and any problems are resolved, two more groups of 16 students each will gradually move to the dormitory’s second and third floor suites, which have not yet been completed.
Sorrells, 41, knows firsthand about the trauma that children with unstructured families face. She spent 13 years in the social assistance system in the bay area, jumping between relatives, homes and foster families. She started at 5 and emancipated at 18, when she put her belongings in the laundry basket and boarded a Greyhound bus.
“I can’t say how much a program like this can mean,” she said.
“Life would have been a lot easier if I had the support of a program like this.”
Not only on weekends
Enrolling that initial number of resource families may not seem like much, but Sorrells says they will need a group of about 200 potential parents to reach the 20 who will continue with the state’s Community Care Licensing Division verification process .
These families will not just be weekend hosts for students. They will be asked to cultivate a relationship with young people and to be co-parents with the dorm staff. They may also end up interacting with the biological family.
“We don’t want them to think they can check out from Monday to Thursday,” she said, referring to the time students will spend living in the dorm.
“Young people may need to call to talk about what happened at school that day,” said Sorrells. “We still want those connections.”
In some cases, resource families may be related to students who may or may not have already hosted them in their homes. In other cases, it will be individuals, couples or families, including those with their own children, who will perform. Some may have been adoptive parents in the past.
Lynn and Mike Young, from Mission Viejo, ended up adopting the young man they brought home six years ago. He was 17 at the time; they adopted him when he was 21. He is now in the Marine Corps, married and living in South Carolina. The Youngs, who still have two children at home, 18 and 5, are considering applying to be a Youth Connected family.
“We’ll see. I have all the boys, so I would love a girl,” said Lynn Young, a therapist who ran the ministry of adoptions and orphanages at her church.
“I feel like everyone needs to think about it. These are the children of our community. “
Young is particularly passionate about being open to adopting teenagers, the most difficult age group to relate to families.
“This is part of the reason why it worked so well for us,” she said. “He was 17 and was willing to work as hard as we did to make it work.”
What takes
Anyone interested in becoming a resource parent must be at least 21 years old and undergo a background check, a basic medical exam and other licensing requirements – a process that can take about 45 days. They don’t have to live in Orange County, but their homes must be an hour away by car in traffic from the Samueli Academy.
So far, four potential resource families have signed up and another 24 have asked questions, said Jami DeChaney Sheridan, who was hired about a year ago as director of the newly created Youth Connected Program. As a foster family agency, Youth Connected focuses exclusively on teenagers.
Sheridan said he could have someone who qualifies as a licensed family resource within 60 days of his first consultation.
As soon as they enter the program, resource families will be trained to help understand the unique ways in which adolescent development and behavior can be shaped by traumatic childhoods. This support will continue even after families are combined with students.
“They may be coming from a situation where their behavior was a survival skill,” said Sorrells, using an example of storing food in a drawer because, in childhood, they did not eat enough.
Just before Thanksgiving Day, Youth Connected started a recruitment campaign on social media and, in December, conducted a series of virtual tours in the Samueli Academy dorm and campus. Sheridan conducts group information sessions via Zoom on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. She will also hold individual virtual meetings.
She hopes to see students start moving into the dormitory in March or soon after.
“We are ready,” said Sheridan. “We are working hard to spread the word.”
To know more
For information on how to become a resource parent for the Youth Connected Program at Samueli Academy, contact Jami DeChaney Sheridan at 714-942-7475 or email [email protected]. Or go to orangewoodfoundation.org/ycp.