Photography by Whitney Curtis
Cari Hill, a graduate of Webster Groves High School, is a recipient of an Ava’s Grace scholarship.
As Stephanie Regagnon waited for her mother in the visitors’ area of a minimum-security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, several kids banged on a nearby vending machine. A snack was stuck. Others quickly gathered around. What’s the deal? Regagnon thought. We have all day. Regagnon quickly forgot about the vending machine, though, as prisoners began walking out to see their visitors. She was relieved to see that her mother still looked the same as she had a few weeks earlier, except for the prison khakis.
Regagnon still remembers the worried phone calls that started it all. It was New Year’s Day 2005. There had been a small fire at the family business, Too Tall’s Two Eatery and Spirits in Kirksville. It wasn’t long before investigators determined that the fire was arson. Regagnon’s mother, Deborah Masten—the former mayor of Kirksville and a one-time Truman State University professor—was the primary suspect.
During the trial, the prosecution showed that Masten had motive: The restaurant had operated at a loss since 1998, and Masten had allegedly bounced more than 1,400 checks over six years. She was convicted in May 2007 and sent to federal prison that September to serve a 63-month sentence for “interfering with interstate commerce by way of arson.” (Masten maintains her innocence and is still fighting to overturn the conviction.)
Masten’s first visitor was her daughter. “We were all pretty angry,” Regagnon recalls. “But my mom said, if we’re all going to be miserable and upset, we might as well all be in prison with her.” Looking for a silver lining, Regagnon hoped to channel her anger in a positive way.
In 2010, at a friend’s wedding, she started thinking about those children who had swarmed the vending machines at the prison to buy their mothers’ favorite vending-machine snacks. “They wanted to have everything that their moms wanted,” she says. “As soon as their moms came out, they didn’t have to spend any time at the vending machines—they could just soak up their moms.”
Many children with parents in federal prison don’t get to see them at all, Regagnon explains, because most federal inmates serve their sentences far from home, and the cost of travel can be expensive. Those who can visit are able to see a relative only once a week at most. Children with incarcerated parents are also more likely to drop out of high school and to end up incarcerated themselves.
Hoping to help kids avoid that mistake, Re-gagnon researched the idea of a scholarship for children with parents in prison. She soon discovered that no such financial aid existed in Missouri, where 44,000 children have an incarcerated parent. So that April, she created Ava’s Grace Scholarship Foundation, named for her own daughter. Each year, it provides two students with renewable $5,000 college scholarships.
While Regagnon was researching the scholarship, the head of the Family and Corrections Network said availability of college scholarships for children with incarcerated parents was “like the second-most-asked question that she got,” recalls Regagnon. “I was shocked no one was doing it. But the overwhelming majority of the funding is aimed at getting kids through high school.”
The first application was submitted by a high-school student from small-town Missouri named McKenzie Lockett.
One morning in 2011, as Lockett was getting ready for school, she received a call from her eldest sister. Police had raided a local meth lab, and their mother was in the county jail. “Mom’s not going to be getting out,” her sister explained. Until that moment, Lockett had no idea her mother was using methamphetamine. “There’d been a lot of signs, now that I think about it, but I was really oblivious,” says Lockett. “I’d find random little 4- by 6-inch squares of foil and wouldn’t think anything of it.”
Lockett went to school, stunned. As she confided in the principal, she broke down crying. “I had no idea what I was going to do,” she says. At the time, Lockett was a junior in high school and lived alone with her mother. Her three siblings, all at least seven years older, lived in other towns, and her parents weren’t married. “I’m going to be honest: I was very depressed before my mom was arrested,” Lockett says. “And afterward, there were a couple of very hard months.”
Her brother and his two young daughters moved in to help out. Between his salary as a baker and child support from Lockett’s father, they were able to squeak by. Slowly, things improved. Lockett devoted her time to school, which she loved. She managed the track team, volunteered, and ran a blood drive at school, all while maintaining a 4.0 grade-point average.
With encouragement from teachers and counselors, she decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree. As she began searching for scholarships, Lockett learned about Ava’s Grace. “My high-school counselor told me about the scholarship,” she says. “She knew about my situation, that my mom had been incarcerated.”
Lockett is now beginning her sophomore year at the University of Missouri. “Knowing that Ava’s Grace is going to be here for me, financially and emotionally,” she says, “has given me a calmer mind-set.”
The same year that Lockett was awarded a scholarship from Ava’s Grace, Cari Hill received the foundation’s other scholarship. A petite young woman often described as “bubbly,” Hill was her school’s homecoming queen and was crowned Miss Webster Groves 2011. She was also the drum major for her marching band and played clarinet.
But only a few years earlier, on a Sunday afternoon in July 2006, when Hill had just turned 12, she was nearly suicidal. She hadn’t planned to say anything, but the words tumbled out: Her father had sexually abused her, she said. The announcement was so unplanned, her father was also standing in the room as she told her mother. “You know this means we’re getting a divorce, right?” Hill’s mother shouted. “I’m calling the police!” Her father was soon apprehended and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Soon thereafter, Hill began seeing a counselor. For support, her mother also told a few key school administrators about what Hill was going through. Hill eventually decided to tell others as well. She shared her story in a YouTube video created by Youth 2 Youth: Stories of Help & Hope, an initiative that helps teens who are dealing with everything from abuse to homelessness.
In 2011, the year Hill learned about Ava’s Grace, her father had his first parole hearing. “I felt the need to go and to let the [parole board] know I’m still suffering,” Hill said. “This is still affecting me, and it will affect me all of my life.” Hill was so emotionally drained afterward, she had to push herself to finish the scholarship application.
When she attended the annual scholarship dinner in June 2012, she met Lockett. It was the first time that Hill had met someone else with an incarcerated parent. “It was a relief,” she says, grasping for the right words. “I can’t really explain the feeling that I had, but it was like borderline you want to cry. But at the same time, you’re so happy, because you’re meeting people who know how it feels.”
In the process of launching Ava’s Grace, Regagnon, now 36, has come to terms with her own story. Before she started the organization, she says, “I was living a double life.” In 2009, when a friend asked her how long her mother had stayed with her after Ava was born, Regagnon fibbed. “I said, ‘Oh, about a month,’” she recalls. “I had to blatantly lie to someone because I was too embarrassed.”
When she publicly announced the foundation, on her daughter’s first birthday in 2010, she shared her story with everyone. “People were shocked,” she recalls. “But it instantly turned to understanding and support; I can’t think of one person who was anything but wonderful to me after that.”
The Ava’s Grace scholars are also moving forward. Lockett now has a good relationship with her mother, who has been released and has kicked her drug habit. Hill, who is starting her sophomore year at William Jewell College, has forgiven her father. “I love him, but I don’t want to have a relationship with him—I feel like he gave that up,” she says. “But I love him for the good times we had.”
This year’s two new scholars, twin sisters Deionna and Dewonna Ferguson, will both attend Saint Louis University this fall. Their father has been in and out of prison since before they were born, though Deionna says she doesn’t know why he’s currently in prison. One of her few memories of her father is of when she and her sister were 13 years old, when he showed them how to make candles and write poetry. “He’s an artist type,” she says.
“I hope that he comes to see us [in college],” she adds, “and that he’s more in our lives than he has been.”
“Major funders are going to say, ‘You impact two kids a year,’” says Regagnon. “We thought about offering smaller scholarships and serving five to 10 kids. But as it evolved, we realized what is needed is true investment and support.
“At our events, there’s such a feeling of hope,” Regagnon says. “It’s like a family. We support each other.”
