Conference To Examine Special-needs Adoptions

July 25, 1993|By Ruth Richman. Special to the Tribune.

Once you've heard Shane Salter's story, you're less likely to roll your eyes when his telephone answering machine plays Barney the Dinosaur singing about happy families.

Salter, 29, is an expert on the sadness and trauma for children caught in the foster home system and an expert in emerging from the system in emotional health. He will speak at the 18th North American Conference on Adoptable Children Thursday through Aug. 1 in Milwaukee. Salter spent most of his childhood spinning through foster, adoptive and group homes.

His mother was a teenager who often left Salter and his younger brother alone in their apartment in the Harlem section of Manhattan, he said in a recent telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

"One day I walked into the street and caught the attention of a neighborhood policeman walking the beat," he recalled. "We went to foster care from that point on." Salter was 3 years old; his brother, 6 months.

After the boys spent a year in short-term foster care, Salter's mother released them for adoption, requesting only that her sons be kept together.

The boys spent seven years in another foster home before a family offered to adopt them. A month later, the family dropped them off in the lobby of the adoption agency.

"They decided we were too much," Salter said. "I felt like crap. They made it clear that I was the one who had ruined a good home and that one day I'd realize what I'd messed up on."

The boys were sent to another foster home. Soon after, Salter learned that his mother had died a few months before. He was crushed.

"I asked the agency why they didn't tell me," he said. "They told me they didn't think I could handle it."

After a stint in group homes, the boys were adopted by a minister in upstate New York. Salter couldn't adjust to the strict environment and kept running away.

The minister told Salter he could leave if he agreed never to see his brother again. He did, he said, because he wanted his brother to have a permanent home.

Months later the minister changed his mind about adopting the younger boy, and Salter learned he was in a children's home under a suicide watch. Eventually he was adopted.

Meanwhile, Salter moved among foster homes in New York City and spent time with his newly discovered father, a hustler who exposed him to drug deals and con artists.

"I decided that wasn't where I belonged either," Salter said. "I ran away and begged the agency to let me back into care. They put me into group home, and I graduated from high school as the class valedictorian."

His success in school eventually convinced his brother's adoptive family, who had written off Salter as a bad influence, to reunite the two boys. Salter went on to college, the Navy and his current job as interim director of nursing support services at Children's Hospital in Washington.

Now married and the father of three children, one adopted, Salter is working toward a master's degree in public education.

"I'm preparing to leave health care to go into public service," he said, "to go into programs that advocate and address the needs of children."

The Milwaukee conference, "Vision for Change in Adoption," sponsored by the North American Council on Adoptable Children, will bring together parents and professionals for workshops and programs.

The conference will focus on children with special needs, a category that does not refer only to the mentally or physically disabled.

"All kids waiting to be adopted are kids with special needs," said Joe Kroll, executive director of the North American Council on Adoptable Children, a national, non-profit coalition of adoption advocacy groups.

"If you had a kid in a neglected situation and then you put him in foster care for three or four years, you've got a problem," he said. "How many adults has he been with? How many families? Can he bond with adults? Can he trust adults?"

Salter agreed: "I was a special-needs child. There were two of us. It's very hard to place siblings."

African-American boys are particularly hard to place, he said.

Increasing numbers of children have long waits for adoption, Kroll said, because of a backlog in the nation's child-care systems.

"The kids don't get out," he said. "They don't get legally freed for adoption. You can pick your reason or excuse, but I think it starts with a system totally overwhelmed."

Agencies in most states must exhaust all efforts to keep children with their families, Kroll said, before they may be legally freed for adoption.

But a shortage of resources for family counseling and treatment often leaves kids in foster care, dangling between biological families and a chance for adoption.

The more time children spend in foster care, Kroll said, the harder they are to adopt.

"We've found families for real tough kids, and I think they're out there, but if we moved more quickly the kids would be in better shape," he said.