Ervinnisha is a teenager with a goal: She wants to be adopted by her 18th birthday.
For that, though, she is running out of time.
“I know I am getting older,” she said one day last week. “But I’m not losing faith.”
She turned 17 in May. Two days later, she moved into another foster home, this one in Starkville. Since entering into the care of the Mississippi Department of Human Services in the fourth grade, she has lived in numerous of places. None worked out.
“I’m trying,” Ervinnisha, a junior at Starkville High School, said. “It’s been tough.”
Her last name is being withheld because Ervinnisha is one of more than 4,500 foster children in the custody of the state of Mississippi.
Her journey began when her mother’s then-husband abused her in New Orleans, where she is from. She moved to Philadelphia, Mississippi, then, to live with her grandmother. But her grandmother had addiction problems. That’s when the state stepped in.
Since then, she has moved from foster home to foster home. Philadelphia. West Point. Jackson. Columbus. Meridian. Starkville. She has called all those places home.
Ervinnisha, who rides the bus to and from school each weekday, admits that many of the difficult patches she has gone through have been her fault.
“I was aggressive in the past,” she said. “Physically and verbally.”
That’s not uncommon.
“Foster children experience social, emotional and behavioral difficulties because of abuse and neglect,” said Ryakko Williams, a family protection specialist-advanced in Starkville with the Division of Family and Children Services.
But Williams said Ervinnisha understands her situation — and herself — better now than when she was younger.
“She’s a totally different child,” Williams said. “She realizes she is getting older and she wants it to work.”
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Simply put, children enter foster care because they are not able to remain in their homes and be safe, according to Leah Hill, regional resource area social work supervisor with Region IV North, a nine-county DHS area that includes the Golden Triangle.
The region has approximately 190 foster children. At the same time, there are 88 resource homes and 10 adoptive homes in the area, according to Williams.
A resource home is a place where children can stay on a temporary basis until they can return home or there is a possibility that the family could adopt the child if they are freed for adoption. An adoptive home is a family that only wants a child if that child is up for adoption.
Region IV North is in “desperate” need of resource homes that will accept teenagers and sibling groups, Hill said.
“We need to bring our children home,” Hill said. “Children in foster care have no say in where they will go … foster children often feel helpless. Moving a child away from everything they know often leads to feelings of isolation, depression and loneliness.”
For foster children approaching the age of 18 who have not yet found a permanent home — like Ervinnisha — DHS prepares them to become self-sufficient through the Independent Living Program, which teaches basic life skills.
It is a program that is needed.
According to a recent Clarion Ledger newspaper story, the average age of a child adopted in Mississippi was 6.3 years in 2010. Only about 10 percent of children 13 and older were adopted.
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In the few months that she has been a student there, Ervinnisha has made a few friends at Starkville High. Her favorite subjects are physical education and child development. In her spare time she reads or watches T.V. She also thinks about her plans after graduating high school, which include attending a two-year college and entering a university.
But that stuff, she believes, will come with time. Her immediate goal is to find a family.
Her older sister entered foster care the same time she did. Her sister was adopted in November, three days before her 18th birthday.
“I was hurt,” Ervinnisha said, explaining her conflicting emotions, “but happy for her.”
Asked last week what she hopes to find in a family, Ervinnisha listed a few things: a stable environment, people to tell her when she has done right or wrong, a place to celebrate holidays.
Then she stopped, thought a moment longer, and said, “Just love.”
William Browning was managing editor for The Dispatch until June 2016.
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