A sparrow’s feather tattooed on Sarah Janeczko’s forearm and a flock of seven tiny birds stretching across her back remind her to “fly away.”
From her mother’s suicide and her father’s death from a “broken heart.” From the foster mothers who tried to give her religion and manners. From the child welfare system she couldn’t wait to escape. And from the terrifying months afterward, when she bounced from couches to motels to boyfriends she used only so she would have a place to sleep.
“They couldn’t keep me in a cage,” said the tiny blond with perfect eyeliner, a can of Coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Exhale the past, inhale the future,” says another tattoo.
Sarah’s life as a self-described wild child began soon after age 12, when her mother killed herself by swallowing seven bottles of her bipolar medication. Not long after, as Sarah’s dad was drowning in sadness and mental illness, child welfare caseworkers showed up at their door in Lakewood. Sarah had hardly been going to school, was instead swiping her dad’s car keys and hanging with friends.
By her own account, she was out of control.
Her first foster placement in what would become a six-year stretch of six homes and multiple stints in juvenile lock-up was a group home where she had to ask permission to use the bathroom. After a month, Sarah’s caseworker sent her briefly back to her dad, but he had disengaged from life and Sarah couldn’t stand living in the house where she had helped drag her dying mother out of her bedroom.
She ran away. At 13, Sarah was living on Denver streets — until she hitched a ride to North Dakota with a man who hired her to sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door.
In all, Sarah can count 12 times she ran away, often jumping out the window of foster homes and group homes. She went to eight middle and high schools, although she managed to graduate from an online program. She lost count of how many times she was locked up in juvenile detention centers or jail. She was homeless three times. She had a baby at 16, and the system took her daughter away.
The time Sarah spent on the streets — months sleeping under an alleyway garbage bin near a Taco Bell along Denver’s tourist-packed 16th Street Mall or a cardboard “fort” near Broncos’ stadium — was the most free she would feel until age 18, she said. That’s when, in 2015, she signed her name on the paperwork that ended her status as a ward of the state.
Sarah was emancipated, officially done with foster care. “I cried, I was so happy. I felt like a feather flying away.”
No safety net
Emancipation is the worst way to exit foster care, aside from running away or dying.
It means a child wasn’t reunified with parents, wasn’t adopted and wasn’t set up with a legal guardian. Kids who emancipate are turned loose to figure out life on their own, often after years as wards of the state.
Over the past five years, 1,513 young people ages 17-21 have emancipated from Colorado’s foster care system.
Many call it “aging out,” a term the state child welfare division is loath to use because Colorado is among the states that allow foster youths to stay in the system until age 21.
But only a fraction of foster teens are choosing to remain in the system past 18. Among the 246 youths who aged out last year, the majority — 154 — were 18 years old, data received by The Denver Post under public records laws shows. Twenty were just 17, allowed to emancipate by getting married or joining the military.
“It’s a developmental task of young people in this age group to separate from authority figures and to go out on their own and take risks,” said Kristin Melton, youth services manager for the Colorado Department of Human Services. “What’s different is that this is a group of young people that doesn’t have family support to fall back on. They don’t have that safety net.”
In its most recent review, federal authorities found Colorado’s child welfare division had failed to meet national standards in efforts to find foster kids permanent homes.
The state received a score of 55 percent with a target of 90 percent in “concerted efforts” to return children to their biological families or find adoptive families rather than allow them to emancipate from the system, according to the Child and Family Services Review from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Half dead inside”
The day Sarah left foster care — with her belongings in two trash bags and two suitcases — she moved in with a girlfriend who had her own apartment. She had no savings account and no job, although she found one soon after at a dog day care.
That living arrangement lasted about a month, until the landlord found out Sarah was living there without permission.
So she moved in with a guy she didn’t like because she had nowhere else to go. “I used the hell out of him,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “He was gross, but he gave me what I needed at the time.”
When they broke up, she couch-hopped for months. She moved in with another guy until he was evicted from his apartment because “his roommate spent all his money on cocaine,” Sarah said. The two of them lived in motels or slept on friends’ couches for a while — until they broke up and Sarah was on her own again.
When she had money, she got a room at the Best Western or the Comfort Suites in Lakewood. “It was kinda terrifying,” she said of being alone, without parents to call. “It feels like you are half dead inside. It’s hard when I can’t just pick up the phone and text my mom. I don’t have my mom to call for advice. I don’t have my dad to beat up stupid boys like he was supposed to. It’s lonely.”
Next was a house with a girlfriend and her family, until a boyfriend took Sarah to North Dakota and Montana, where he was working in oil fields. When they broke up, another friend took her in, for a time.
And so on.
No lifeline to adulthood
For those who age out, there is no lifeline to adulthood — save for a patchwork of nonprofits with limited funds and an inability to connect with every kid at the moment they’re ready to accept it.
The state child welfare division and nonprofits, including Urban Peak and Mile High United Way, have ramped up housing, education and job skills programs for former foster youths in recent years after noting how many emancipated teens were showing up at homeless shelters. Even so, the odds of an easy path to adult life are low.
Foster youths in Colorado are more likely to end up incarcerated than graduating from high school on time.
The state’s four-year graduation rate for foster kids in 2017 was 23 percent. Compare that to the 53 percent of former foster youths surveyed by the National Youth in Transition Database who reported they had been incarcerated at least once.
Nearly one in five former foster youths in Colorado have been homeless, according to the survey. At Urban Peak, which provides emergency shelter and apartments for homeless youths, 34 percent of the 350 who sought help last year had been in foster care.
On the night in January when volunteers attempted to count every person in Denver who is homeless, they found 24 people in Denver County alone who told them the reason they were homeless was that they recently exited the foster care system.
“When somebody becomes homeless on the day they turn 18, what does that look like in 20 years or 30 years?” said Urban Peak CEO Christina Carlson. “Homeless youth who don’t have intervention can become chronically homeless adults.”
“I’m getting there”
Sarah met Anthony at the Grizzly Rose country-western dance club about a year and a half ago. She caught him staring while she danced. They have lived together ever since.
They have three roommates, an air hockey table, a pool table and a dirt-grass backyard that on weekends fills up with friends for barbecues, beer and weed. It’s a party spot, where the fridge at times has not much other than grape juice and frozen burritos. Last summer, they tarped the bed of a pickup truck and filled it with water to make a swimming pool.
Sarah is proud of their three-bedroom home with a basement in suburban Aurora, a neighborhood where kids ride their bikes down the streets and people plant tulips, and where her 1995 Jeep Cherokee without doors is parked in the driveway.
Sarah, 21, is petite, about 100 pounds, and fierce. Her knuckles are tattooed with “kiss” on one hand and “kill” on the other, and she will throw a punch when provoked, like the time at a car show last year when she slugged a guy who drove over her boyfriend’s foot. But she’s generous, too, and recently invited a former foster sister, who is pregnant, to move into their house.
Sarah has worked at Subway and Cold Stone Creamery, a car dealership and, now, a printing company where she posts social media ads. She recently received a camera through Dream Makers, a Make-a-Wish-type organization for kids aging out of foster care, and hopes to become a professional photographer. She’s also planning to get a license to operate heavy machinery in construction or the oil industry.
“It took a long damn time to figure out what I’m doing,” she said, sitting in her backyard surrounded by her three dogs, a tiny one named Tank, a mutt named Bubba and pitbull mix named Marley. “I’m getting there.”
She’s aware of the bleak statistics about foster kids ending up in jail or homeless. “It pisses me off,” she said. “It’s not our fault. We don’t know what we’re doing. We’re not like birds — you don’t push us out of the nest and we fly automatically.”
“They are our kids”
Youths emancipating from foster care enter adulthood often with less support than a recently released prison inmate, who is more likely to have relatives to help with housing and a job search.
“Once we take them from their families, they are our kids, in a sense. They are our responsibility,” said Amy Dworsky, a research fellow at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall. “When young people turn 18 or 21, parents don’t typically kick them out the door and say, ‘Goodbye, you’re on your own.’ It’s really ironic that the state, society, does that to foster youth. We treat them like they’re disposable.”
The key government funding dedicated to youths aging out of foster care comes from the Chafee Foster Care Independence Act, approved by Congress in 1999. It gives states flexible spending to help foster kids ages 14-21 who are likely to age out of the system or already have. It also provides Medicaid government health insurance until age 26 for aged-out youths.
The problem is that the program isn’t available for everyone who could use it. Creating a Chafee program is voluntary, and within Colorado’s county-run child welfare system, only 32 of 64 counties had Chafee programs last fiscal year, sharing $1.5 million.
The program helped 819 youths statewide, but that’s out of twice as many who were eligible.
“The number of kids who need our help hasn’t changed, but every year, funding for the Colorado Chafee program is cut,” said Derek Blake, the Chafee program coordinator for Colorado. “Even without the annual reductions, Chafee doesn’t have the capacity to serve all the eligible youth in Colorado.”
For youths ages 14-16, Chafee workers teach communication and organization skills. After 16, “that’s where you have your big push” to prepare a youth for adulthood, including budgeting, job skills, tutoring and help with financial aid forms for college or technical school, Blake said.
For young people who have aged out of the system, Chafee can fund housing deposits and apartment applications, even microwaves and vacuum cleaners.
For Sarah Janeczko, the closest thing she has to a parent is her Chafee worker. The woman initially was her caseworker and for nine years sat through court hearings and guided Sarah’s out-of-home placements.
Sarah called her the day her dad died. Called her to beg her to rescue her from the foster home where food was restricted and she wasn’t allowed to come up from the basement. Called her after she had aged out when she lost a job and couldn’t make rent.
Called her because she had no mom or dad to call.
“The reason why I still try”
Sarah’s child welfare and youth detention records are stuffed in a black, plastic file box that makes her angry. “All these pieces of paper, that’s what I was to the foster care system,” she said. “They read me like a piece of paper.”
Among her jail booking documents and foster placement records, though, is something else that cuts deeper: Sarah’s visitation rights to her daughter, Aubrella, who will turn 5 this month.
She was born when Sarah was 16. It was a year before her dad died, although Sarah already had been a ward of the state for three years.
The baby’s father was a high school boyfriend who is in prison now on drug charges. The child welfare system removed the little girl from Sarah’s care when she was an infant, after Sarah left her with a friend and didn’t return when promised. Caseworkers said the baby was malnourished, but Sarah disagrees.
The child was placed in foster care for three days before going to her paternal grandparents in what the child welfare system calls a “kinship placement.” They are now her legal guardians.
Sarah is determined to regain custody, an inch at a time, as she tries to prove to her daughter’s grandparents that she is trustworthy. She is allowed to pick up Aubrella and take her out for the day, but the little girl hasn’t been to Sarah’s house.
“I got her taken away. I want my daughter back,” Sarah said, her green eyes steely. “She’s honestly the reason why I still try.”
As much as it hurts her that the system took her baby, that the cycle was repeated, Sarah knows now that she wasn’t ready at 16 to take care of Aubrella the way she deserved. “I think it’s because I was just pissed in life. It wasn’t fair to me,” she said. “Then her getting taken from me just topped it off.”
She’s thinking about getting another tattoo: “I am not what I’ve been through. I am what I choose to become.”
Aged Out: A note about this series from reporter Jennifer Brown
This project began years ago with a phone call from a reader who knew an 18-year-old I had written about, a young man who had grown up in foster care.
The reader wondered whether I could help him find a bed, or even just a mattress, to save him from sleeping on the hard floor of his rented bedroom every night after work and school.
I had interviewed the young man for a Denver Post series about the overmedication of foster kids, describing how teenagers lined up in group homes and treatment centers for their daily doses of psychotropic drugs. Several of the young adults I talked to had recently left the foster care system after turning 18, no longer wards of the state and free to talk to a newspaper reporter.
What has stuck with me for years was how alone in the world they were.
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