Stevenson High School senior Jenay Walsh is facing some steep, but important, expenses right now: college application fees of approximately $50 per school. She’s applying to four. Her grades have been great lately, and her hopes are high.
Last year, due to education budget cuts, Walsh was facing steep fees for school sports: $85 per sport. Plus expenses like equipment and uniforms. Walsh is a basketball and softball star at SHS.
None of those costs are chump change to this foster child and her family — a big group that includes several other foster kids, not to mention the birth son of parents Leah and A.J. Smith.
In both cases, Walsh talked to her caseworker, and the caseworker talked to Bridge the Gap. That’s a Vancouver-based charity aiming to sweeten the lives of needy foster children with some of the perks most of us take for granted — from Christmas presents to dance lessons, or, in Walsh’s case, from basketball shoes to college application costs.
It’s helped Walsh, 18, carve out some normalcy in what’s been anything but a normal life. Without Bridge the Gap, she said, she might be holding foster-youth fundraisers or otherwise hitting up others for help.
“That’s got to be pretty embarrassing,” she said. “This way, you can be part of community without having to broadcast you’re in foster care. You can just feel like a normal kid at school.”
Walsh wasn’t too embarrassed to venture over to downtown Vancouver on a recent Saturday to attend a fundraising concert for Bridge the Gap at a Main Street teen hangout called Pop Culture — where the bar sells soda pop and hot dogs.
“When adults think about foster youth, they think about babies and little kids,” she said. “Nobody thinks about teenagers.”
Aiming for normal
Tauni Hemminger has spent the past decade thinking about teenagers.
“Think about all the toy drives, all the toys that get collected — which is great,” she said. “But we have quite an influx of teens into the foster system today. Those teens get lost in the cracks around the holiday season.”
Teens have different wants and needs than young children, she pointed out. Forget giving stuffed animals and pencil boxes — teens want iPods and hip clothes, movie tickets and graduation gowns.
The product of a chaotic, abusive and constantly relocating household, Hemminger was never a foster child but surely might have been.
“Our life was always in upheaval and I was very protective of my two sisters,” she said. She had to act as a de facto parent from a young age.
Hemminger survived all that, and about a decade ago she approached Peggy Hays at the state’s Department of Children and Family Services to suggest a charity aimed at granting some wishes for foster kids whose names and wants missed the Christmas deadline for community help.
“I wanted to bridge the gap and bring some normalcy to these beautiful children,” she said. “They deserve to play soccer, they deserve to ride horses, they deserve the tutoring that brings them up to speed. They deserve to have the same childhood any other child can enjoy.”
Hays and Hemminger incorporated the group as a nonprofit organization, and Hemminger is its president today. Bridge the Gap provides everything from school pictures and birthday parties to field trips and camp scholarships. Beyond those “enrichment” items, a bedrock Bridge the Gap focus remains tutoring for kids who need to catch up.
“We’re trying to increase the tutoring program because we know about the loss of education — every time a child is moved, they lose four to six months academically,” Hays said.
Hemminger said last year’s program budget was about $36,000. Foster parents make requests of social workers, she said, and Bridge the Gap cuts checks that go directly to vendors.
“We don’t write checks to the foster parents and we don’t do reimbursements,” she said. “That keeps everything clean.”
Hays said Bridge the Gap started out aiming to grant “little wishes” at a time when the state was just plain broke. “It’s broke again now,” she said. “That’s why this is such a valuable program.” She said there are approximately 400 children in foster care in Clark County, and another 200 placed with relatives. There’s a serious need to spread beyond Clark County too, she added.
Hemminger said the group is always looking for greater volunteer involvement and board members, as well as donations. Call her at 360-518-3022 or visit http://btgcc.org.
Thumbs way up
Jenay Walsh’s story seems the very picture of a kid surviving a broken home. Right now, Walsh’s mother’s whereabouts are unknown.
But between age 6 and her mid-teens, Walsh spent some stretches living with Mom and others shuffling between other relatives’ places in Seattle, La Center and elsewhere; there were also periods of homelessness and months living in a shelter. She’s been in and out of Oak Bridge and Oak Grove, crisis shelters for runaway youths. Once she ran away from Oak Bridge, too — but called police to turn herself in after about an hour, she said, because she was cold and hungry.
Moving around so frequently wasn’t hard, she said. “It was my normal. Staying in one place was harder. It was easier to just leave if there was something or somebody I didn’t like.”
During these years of upheaval, she said, there were times she managed to make it to school and times she didn’t, and times she was a straight-A student and times she couldn’t give a rip.
Adult encouragement was, and is, crucial to keeping up her grades, she said. “If I was a straight-A student and nobody cared, where’s my motivation to do good?” she said.
There was a foster home placement that blew up after nine months. Finally, there was the placement with the Smith family in Skamania — which Walsh declares to be her last placement.
“It’s the family I was meant to have,” she said. “But I also needed to wait and go through all that other stuff. I needed to have this family later in order to realize how special it is to have a family.”
That’s a pretty broad-minded attitude for an 18-year-old with a painful past. But today Walsh keeps in close touch with her other relatives, she said, and she has let her mother know she wants to have a relationship — but only if Mom is clean and sober.
Meanwhile, Walsh and her foster parents are already planning her ideal college graduation present: legal adoption. They’d do it now, she said, except that she would lose certain state benefits if she became a legal Smith family member while still a minor.
And what does Walsh want to focus on in college? At first, she was thinking counseling would be a natural fit, but now her heart is in English literature and teaching. She’s busy poring through big fantasy novels, she said, and she just wrote her first movie review — of the latest Harry Potter spectacle — for her school newspaper. (Her verdict: a thumbs-way-up, because it hewed so closely to the book it’s based upon.)
“I want to be the person I needed three years ago,” she said. “I want to be the teacher who spends time to get to know you.”
Scott Hewitt: 360-735-4525 or scott.hewitt@columbian.com.
