Provo • Spanish Fork couple Rachelle and Davido Hyer had fostered young children in the past, along with having six biological children, when they decided to look into fostering again.

“My wife said, ‘Hey, they have two teens.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, are you crazy?,” Davido Hyer said.

But a short time later, in July 2018, they welcomed teenage sisters Madylynn and Hallie Kelsey into their home, and after several months, the girls officially became part of their family through adoption.

“We feel like these girls have been part of our family our whole lives,” Rachelle Hyer said. “They’re completely part of our family and I can’t even imagine life without them now.”

The Utah foster care system is facing a shortage of foster parents state-wide, with about 2,700 children currently in foster care, and only about 1,400 foster families, according to Dan Webster, nonprofit Utah Foster Care’s director of foster-adoptive family recruitment.

But in addition to the need of simply increasing the number of families, Webster said the Utah foster care system especially needs parents willing to take in teens and sets of siblings. Utah Foster Care also hopes to see a greater pool of diverse families stepping up to become foster families, in order to make better matches with the diverse pool of foster kids in the Utah system.

“Homes that are willing to take in teenagers and siblings, those are always in short supply,” Webster told the Daily Herald.

Struggling to place teens

“As you can imagine, the majority of foster families who are open to placement are primarily open to the 0 to 5 (ages),” Webster said. “And so finding a home for a 0- to 5-year-old is not necessarily a challenge.”

According to research by Utah Foster Care, nearly half of Utah’s children in foster care are age 11 or older. And, though teenagers represent about half of the state’s foster care population, this group accounts for only 14% of children adopted out of foster care.

People are automatically less likely to care for older children, because we remember what we were like as teenagers, Webster said.

“If you are like me, sometimes you gave your parents challenges or trouble, or attitude certainly (as a teenager),” he said. “And people generally think of helping a child who’s little, and they can help raise them. But the need for families to care for older children is even more pressing.”

Ten percent of children leaving Utah’s foster care system did so by aging out, turning 18 years old and becoming legally independent, and consequently being released from the custody of the state or any other guardian, according to Utah Foster Care.

Webster said research shows, and his own personal experience shows, when a child ages out of foster care, and they no longer qualify for services, they’re on their own, and they haven’t gained the life experience they need to be successful.

“So a lot of them end up going back into the same things they’ve seen their parents do, like substance abuse, domestic violence, and the numbers are pretty sad,” he said.

Utah Foster Care research confirms that children who age out of foster care are more likely to experience unemployment, early pregnancy, homelessness and incarceration than their peers.

Webster said those statistics don’t change regardless of which services the government tries to throw at the problem.

“The only thing that changes that is a stable family who’s committed to a child not just for their teen years but through their adult years and forever, really,” he said.

Davido Hyer said he wanted to give teenage foster kids a place to call home because he understood the consequences of foster children aging out of the system without support.

“Otherwise, they’d graduate out of the foster care system and they’re just on their own,” he said. “They have no support system. There’s some support, but they don’t have any family to call home, a place to go for holidays or weekends, or just a place to call for advice or to chat. So we just wanted to help out, and do what we can.”

Webster said a large factor in foster parents requesting only younger children is the hope of adoption; and when people think of adoption, they typically don’t think of a 16-year-old or even a 10-year-old, but rather an infant or maybe a toddler.

Rachelle Hyer said she anticipated teen foster kids to be more difficult than the younger children they had previously fostered. But she found a different experience than she anticipated with Madylynn, who is now 17 and who took the Hyers’ last name, and Hallie, who is now 13 and who kept her last name of Kelsey. Rachelle Hyer said she was able to do things like read and talk with them, and teach them in ways she couldn’t with younger children.

“(It’s) really exciting because they get to be your friends and have a lot of fun, and we have lots of game nights, and went on fun adventures, and got to show them a whole new world and fun new experiences,” she said.

Davido Hyer said one positive thing about teenage foster children is that they can advocate for themselves.

“When they knew that they weren’t going to get to go back home, they were able to advocate for themselves, and they had a voice, and they told their guardian ad litem and their parents ... what they wanted and what was best,” he said.

Madylynn said after being fostered by the Hyers for three or four months, she started feeling like she wanted to be adopted. So she started talking with her sister about it, along with all the people involved.

“(Now), we feel great, we just feel like we’ve always been a part of the family,” Madylynn said. “We’re super comfortable here like we’ve been here our whole lives.”

Davido Hyer said fostering and then adopting teenagers gave him the opportunity to see them grow, such as Madylynn improving her piano talent, and Hallie with her range of dance skills.

“It’s just really neat to see that come out, where (they) might never have had that opportunity if we hadn’t been able to help (them),” he said.

Struggling to place sibling sets

Webster said that while Utah’s shortage of foster parents open to teenagers is reflective of the national foster care landscape, Utah’s need for foster families open to sibling sets is higher than other states’ needs.

“In general in Utah, kids tend to have large families, more children, and that’s definitely the case in foster care,” Webster said. “We see a lot of siblings coming in.”

According to Utah Foster Care, 8 out of 10 children in foster care have siblings, and families open to siblings groups of three or more are in urgent need.

One of the biggest priorities of the foster care system is to preserve family connections, especially sibling connections, Webster said.

“That’s the one connection we’re going to have our entire lives,” he said. “It’s there when we’re born and it’s there long after our parents pass on, and so it’s something that is a big priority of the state, is keeping kids together.”

Webster said children tend to fare better throughout the foster care process when placed with a sibling.

“It’s somebody they know,” he said. “Everything else in their world is changing. At least they’ve got the siblings they know and they love and they trust.”

A need for diverse families

“We have kids from every neighborhood, every religion, every culture, every socioeconomic status, you name it, we see the kids in foster care,” Webster said. “So we need homes and families who are just as diverse as the kids they serve.”

Children in foster care do better overall when placed with families who can help them maintain their cultural and racial identities, according to research from Utah Foster Care.

The organization’s research also shows Latino children are overrepresented in the foster care system in Utah, making up 21% of foster children. Consequently, foster families fluent in both Spanish and English are in need.

The majority of foster families in the state are white, Webster said, with Latinos as the second-highest foster family demographic, which is representative of Utah’s population.

“The need to have more diverse families is very high, because we have a number of children who come into care who need to be placed in ethnically and culturally similar homes,” Webster said. “And if that’s not possible, then that’s another loss for the kids, something else that they don’t have that they did before.”

Webster said in meetings where foster care workers are deciding where to place children, they look for families they think will be a good fit for the child.

“It comes down to the personality of the kid,” he said. “Where will this kid really thrive?”

Foster care misconceptions

“I think that some people think that kids in foster care are crazy and messed up, so they don’t really want to go near them,” Hallie said.

Madylynn added that a lot of people think foster care teens do drugs, commit crime and other things because of their hard past.

“But we’re just like any other teen, we’re just normal kids who want to be normal kids,” Madylynn said.

Webster said one of the biggest misconceptions about foster care he hears is that people think foster parents are just in it for the money. But in Utah, foster parents’ reimbursement at the end of each month totals to about $17 a day.

“So essentially, we are reimbursing foster parents far less than what it costs to board a dog for a day,” he said. “So when I hear people say that foster parents are in it for the money, I just have to laugh, because most of the foster parents I know end up spending money out of their own pockets to help meet the needs of the kids, because the reimbursement from the state sometimes is not sufficient.”

There are various attempts in yearly state legislative sessions to get the standard foster parent reimbursement increased, but the process is difficult, Webster said.

He added another misconception is that Utahns generally tend to think child abuse, drug use, opioid abuse and other bad things don’t happen where they live, so they don’t recognize these happenings are putting a large number of local children in foster care.

“Utah is an amazing place to live, and the people, when they hear about a need in their community, in their neighborhood, they want to help, they want to respond, and they do,” Webster said. “But what I am finding as someone who recruits foster parents, is that not enough people know about the need.”

In fact, he said, the current phase of opioid addiction in the state is putting an increased number of children in the foster care system. So he hopes Utahns will try to educate themselves with regard to the local foster care situation.

“People can make a difference when they make a decision from a place of knowledge rather than a place of fear,” he said. He added that people can find out more online and at foster care events that happen often throughout Utah.

When Rachelle and Davido Hyer were considering fostering teens, they attended an event where teenagers who were in the foster care system and were then adopted spoke.

“We could ask them questions and they could tell us about their experience, and that helped me,” Davido Hyer said. “And after that, I was feeling really good about teens, I was fully on board.”