Advertisement
“There’s always a need,” said Keith Keller, foster care coordinator for the Human Services Department.
Maxine and Tom Jacobs of La Crosse have answered that call twice.
“If you go into it with your eyes open and your heart open, it will be a very positive experience for you,” Maxine Jacobs said. “We did foster care when we were young. We were in our 20s when we started and mid-30s when we stopped. Now we’re in our 50s, and actually this is a nicer time because we have more patience.”
Jacobs said her parents took in foster children when she was growing up, and now her daughter also has become a foster parent.
A year ago they took in a pre-teen boy, who Jacobs describes as “a delightful child. He’s engaging and happy, and is doing very well. He likes to swim and ride horses and be very active. He’s a very gregarious child, and we feel very blessed to have him in our home.”
While the couple expect to have the boy for quite a while, they also maintain a good relationship with his birth family “and make sure his family knows what’s going on and can see him and be with him.”
“It’s not that these kids are bad kids,” Jacobs said. “It’s just that there’s something that’s not working out in their home. The parents aren’t bad, the children aren’t bad. It’s just that something isn’t working out for them.”
La Crosse County has about 100 homes licensed for foster care serving 130 to 140 children, Keller said. There’s significant turnover in foster families, he said, meaning they need to continually recruit new ones.
About 20 percent of the foster families are looking for a child to adopt, Keller said.
“We are not in it for the adoption,” said Mike Heal of the town of Onalaska, who with his wife, Suanne, have been foster parents for about 10 years. “We’re like the peanut butter between the two pieces of bread,” he said, a connection between the child’s birth family and reunification, or a future adoptive family.
Some of the 15 foster kids the Heals have taken in were reunited with biological parents, which is their main goal — to work with them and the child to reunite them.
“That’s a key role of reunification. You don’t want them to have the feeling you’re taking over,” Heal said. “We always just make sure and reiterate that the child loves the parents and the parents love them. The children are here because mom and dad are having problems at the time. You never badmouth parents, ever.”
The Heals now have two boys, a 6-year-old who will be moving on in a week, and an 11-year-old will be with them for longer. When the 11-year-old is reunited with his family or adopted, the Heals will probably take a break from foster parenting, he said. Their 17-year-old daughter, Kari, just graduated from Holmen High School and is headed for college in Madison this fall, so they’re going to “explore what it’s like to not have children.”
Heal, who with his wife teaches a class once or twice times a year for new foster parents, offered this advice for anyone thinking about becoming a foster parent: “You’ve got to have thick skin. You’ve got to have the love for doing this, because you’re in the trenches 24/7. You’ve got to have a lot of discipline.
“You have to have a caring heart for these children because they’ll walk all over you,” Heal said. “You may not see it for months down the line and all of a sudden something will happen and it will make (up for) all the bad things that have happened and all the heartaches with these children. And it will be like,” he said with a sigh, “it was worth it.”
Keller urged anyone with an interest in becoming a foster parent to call Rhonda Rude of the Human Services Department at (608) 789-4834.
“We’re willing to take families of all ages,” Keller said.
They also accept some people with disabilities.
Heal, 49, has been a quadriplegic for 32 years as the result of an accident. He uses a motorized wheelchair.
When they first applied to be foster parents, county officials discouraged them because of Mike’s disability. They applied again a year later, this time to provide respite care for other foster families on weekends.
“A month later they started giving us kids to take in,” Heal said.
“People would look at us and say there’s no way you can take care of these children. She works full time. I take care of the children at home. People say, you’re in a wheelchair. What can you do?” Heal said. “You do the best you can. You give them a roof over their head.”
Reid Magney can be reached at (608) 791-8211 or rmagney@lacrossetribune.com.
longarmer wrote on Jun 1, 2008 9:27 PM:
My Husband was in foster care, and 32 years later is a wonderful husband, father and now papa. IT WORKS!!! "