Teens Wanted

Monday, Mar. 28, 2005 By ROSEMARY ZIBART
MICHAEL, 18: His new parents wanted to adopt a younger child, but a photo of Michael sitting alone on a basketball court touched them
JASON GROW FOR TIME
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The result has been some aggressive new strategies to recruit families, even for kids in their late teens. Televised videos like the one Amber prepared are just one of those strategies. Wednesday's Child, a nonprofit organization that places teens in Oregon and Idaho, helps create videos, which air as a weekly feature on the local news and on a website. The technique worked for Jason, 18. Jeri and George Soulier of Weiser, Idaho, saw a profile of Jason on the Wednesday's Child website last summer and quickly arranged to meet him. They have since taken him into their home and are planning to adopt him. "Parenting is stressful," concedes George, an engineer for Hewlett-Packard and a first-time father at age 50. "But when we have breakthroughs--and we have breakthroughs every week--it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done." Jeri's maternal devotion shows in the melting looks she gives her big (nearly 6 ft.) new son.

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Some agencies use special events to recruit families. In Tampa, Fla., Hillsborough Kids Inc. whipped up a week of outdoor "camp" activities that matched waiting children with families who have had approved home studies--ultimately netting homes for 14 kids, ages 4 to 15. "Chemistry is important," says Alissa Moody, who assisted with the camp. "A couple thinking of a 5-year-old may switch to a 15-year-old."

Ron Hancock, for instance, was sure he wanted to adopt a young child. Told he would be great with teens, Hancock, 42, an unmarried Tampa title examiner, said, "You're not going to pawn off one of your older kids on me." But when a persistent caseworker showed him a photo of Steven, 16, who had been in foster care since he was 6, Hancock and his sister-in-law, who provided moral support during the process, were charmed by a certain family resemblance. "He's one of us," they concluded. When Hancock and Steven met a week later, they developed an instant rapport. Driving home later, Hancock phoned the caseworker to say, "You can close Steven's file. He's mine."

Drs. Joe and Marilyn Franzi of Philadelphia went through a similar change of heart. While looking into adopting a 12-year-old boy, they noticed a polite 17-year-old who lived at the same group home and who, Joe recalls, "always had a book in his hand." That was Truman, a college freshman, and the Franzis are adopting him instead. "Truman's got a good heart. He's very easy to love," says Joe.

Recruiters don't always have to lure strangers. In New York City, You Gotta Believe has developed a technique called mining the file. "The hard part is creating a connection to a teen, so we look for somebody who already has that connection," explains Jackson. Like sleuths on TV's Cold Case, adoption workers delve into each youth's history, trying to identify coaches, teachers or neighbors who have a relationship with the adolescent. Sometimes they discover a distant relative who wasn't regarded as a "fit parent" for a child in the past. Agencies invariably require adoption-training classes; Jackson's group holds them in the same tough communities from which the kids come. "Not all the homes we find look like Ozzie and Harriet's," says Jackson. "We're targeting people who know the difficulties our young people face."