November 13, 2000 Fifteen Years In Foster Hell BY TIMOTHY ROCHE Homer Bennett’s birth family was far from perfect.  His mom and dad paid the bills by peddling heroin and cocaine from the living room couch of their three-bedroom home on Chicago ’s South Side.  The parents had a sense of decorum.  In front of Homer and his brother Frankie, they would refer to the two drugs as “boy” and “girl.”  Homer and Frankie never learned which was which, though they knew it was dope.  Once, when the police came by, the brothers hid underneath a bed, emerging to beg the cops not to take their mom and dad to jail.  But it was Homer and Frankie who were eventually taken away.  One morning, as the boys played on the sidewalk in front of their home, a car stopped shy of the curb.  Two men dragged the brothers, screaming, into the car, then drove them to a clinic, where somebody gave them a tranquilizer shot.  Their kidnappers were supposed to be the “good guys,” rescuing Homer and his brother from drug-induced squalor and neglect.  Instead of entering the realm of Ninja Turtles and Popsicles, however, Homer went through a childhood of dependency-court hearings, social workers and frayed relationships.  Nobody preserved his family unit.  For the past 15 years he has been in foster care.  All told, Homer Bennett has lived in 14 different foster homes, seldom staying in one longer than a year.  At one point, he did get to stay with his maternal grandmother, but she was frail, elderly and unable to care for Homer and Frankie.  So the brothers went back into state care, where they were separated and placed in different homes.  Homer was sometimes beaten with belts.  “We didn’t know that beatings were against the rules in foster homes,” he says.  “We found out from another foster child.  One of his foster mothers, he says, threw a knife at him, cutting his forehead, then forcing him to say he had molested another kid.  “Because of foster care,” he says, “I didn’t really grow up anywhere.”  Now he’s an adult, and for the first time he’s facing the prospect of living on his own—a situation for which the system has never quite prepared him.  So many kids are growing up in foster care that social workers are beginning to worry about how they will survive after leaving the state’s care.  Studies show that former foster kids are at risk of becoming criminals, homeless or pregnant after being “emancipated” from the system, according to child-welfare experts.  Until a few years ago, many kids who reached legal age had no help to ease the transition.  Somebody would show up on the doorstep of their foster homes and tell them to pack their belongings in a plastic bag.  Homer, however, may be getting some help.  A few years ago, he wound up at New Directions, an independent-living program run by Hull House in Chicago .  Foster kids between the ages of 16 and 21 can rent an apartment with welfare stipends.  “When you are little, you don’t want people to know you are in the system, that you got taken away from your mother,” says Homer.  “When you get your apartment, then you’re set.”

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