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Sitting in her home with her partner, Donna, Tonya Campbell watches as Baby Girl says her first word. Since just a few days after her birth, Donna and Tonya have watched her first crawl and celebrated her first birthday. But as the family looks on with love and encouragement at the 14-month-old, Campbell can’t help feel a rippling pang of sadness.
Tonya and Donna feed Baby Girl, croon as they rock her, tuck her in at night—but she isn’t legally theirs. She is their foster baby, a child who went through withdrawal from the meth intake she experienced in utero. This is their fifth foster child since they earned their license in May 2017. As the couple approaches the year and a half mark, Campbell says she never expected to grieve as much as she has.
“We were prepared for a lot of things, but I was not prepared for the amount of grief that we would feel. We grieve all the time,” she says, her voice heavy. “We have our little one, so we see her do all these firsts, but my heart is like, Her mom is missing this. You grieve for their losses but also for the parents.”
The opioid epidemic sweeping the nation is not breaking news. Every day, more than 115 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. As numbers rise, an unsuspecting population is forced to face the facts: As the population of opioid users increases, so does the number of children needing foster parents. Of the five children Campbell and her partner have fostered, four have been affected by opioids.
“For the first time in 15 years, we’ve seen a rise in the number of children entering foster care due to the opioid epidemic,” says Summer Renne, manager of training and community engagement at the Foster & Adoptive Care Coalition in St. Louis. “Some children are born opioid-addicted, while older children endure years of neglect in the family home due to their parents’ dependency on morphine, painkillers, or heroin.”
To address the increase in children needing a stable home, the Coalition received a grant to initiate The Dennis and Judy Jones Family Foundation Foster Care and Adoption Program in 2017. It will train potential foster families, with the goal of licensing and retaining as many of these families as possible, so children in need of a stable home have someplace to go.
“In the last 10 years, Missouri has seen a 538 percent increase in babies born addicted to opioids,” Renne says. “We don’t have an adequate number of traditional foster families, making the need for quality recruitment and retention of families critical.”
Due to the understaffed facilities at most foster agencies, some organizations aren’t able to respond quickly to families inquiring about licensure. When Tonya and Donna started the process, they spent weeks sitting by their silent phone, waiting to take the next step forward. When they contacted the Coalition, they had a packet of information in hand that same week.
As they went through the process of licensure, they realized that the Jones Program focuses on reunification, meaning that every child is intended to go back to his or her biological parents once they receive the necessary help and resources to get clean, make better parenting choices, or both.
“I know whatever their situation is, kids fare better when they’re with their families,” Campbell says. “It may not be what we think is ideal, but that connection and desire is there. For many people there’s an automatic assumption that if a kid’s abused, there’s no way that they should ever be back with a parent, and the Coalition helped us see there’s a lot of good people that don’t have the parenting skills because they were never taught them or provided with those outlets.”
The foster and adoptive parents going through the Jones Program complete basic requirements and receive 14 additional hours of nationally recognized trauma training and specialized support services. It’s even part of the criteria of the Jones Program that these foster families must first and foremost want to be foster parents, and adopt if the situation presents itself. Throughout the two-year process, these families receive unwavering support from the Coalition to make their experience as effortless as possible.
Established in 2017, the Jones Program has recruited, trained, and prepared 43 of the 62 newly licenses non-relative foster families in the St. Louis area. So far, one adoption has been made, a number considered successful because it means other children have been reunified with their biological families.
“We want to have a really high fostering number and a really low adoption number,” explains Kyle Williams, developmental manager.
The one child who has been adopted is named Logan, and his new parents are Tonya and Donna. The couple have both worked with children who've had rough pasts and were open to taking in a child with higher needs or multiple placement failures, or a child thought only likely to succeed as the only child in the home. They found Logan, inquired about him, and fell in love with him before they even met him. He came from a drug-exposed background, but after working with Tonya and Donna, Logan now enjoys the accompany of Baby Girl, whom he considers his sister.
Photo courtesy of Tonya Campbell
Logan
Logan cuddles up to Maggie May as he plays on the couch. He was adopted by Donna and Tonya and welcomes new kids into the home as they continue to foster.
Now with Logan tucked into their new, larger home, Tonya and Donna continue to foster and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As of now, they have had two foster children at a time but expect that number to grow with new allotted space. The couple want to do everything they can to make sure that other children get the safe, stable home Logan now experiences every day.
