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Embedded in the sidewalk along historic Greenwood Avenue, small bronze plaques describe the storefront buildings that burned during the 1921 Tulsa race riot.
Some of the plaques sit in front of vacant lots, where the businesses were never rebuilt. Others celebrate the survivors, buildings restored or replaced and still standing today.
One marks the red-brick façade that is now home to the Blow Out beauty salon.
Early one morning, with rush-hour traffic still funneling into downtown, Jerisha Walker sits in the corner to wait for a haircut, complete with color and styling.
Glancing at a price list on the wall, she knows it will cost at least $100, and probably more — an extravagant amount of money on her fast-food salary.
This is her 18th birthday, so she’s splurging.
“Everything changes today,” she says, “including my hair.”
As of now, for the first time since she was 5, Walker is no longer a ward of the state of Oklahoma. No more foster parents. No more group homes. No more court dates or case reviews.
She’s aging out of foster care.
“I’m not on drugs. I’m not in jail. I’m not pregnant,” she says. “I’m not in the kind of trouble that a lot of girls get themselves into.”
Like the buildings on Greenwood Avenue, she has survived when others have fallen. And she wants a new hairdo to be her bronze plaque, her testament to the world that she has endured. She’s still standing.
Like Jerisha, about 500 teens age out of the foster care system when they turn 18 each year in Oklahoma.
Only about one-third of them have a high school degree or a GED. While the state has a few transition programs, many former foster children do not take advantage of them and are at risk for winding up in poverty or other outcomes that cost taxpayers in the long run.
Walker lives in a second-floor apartment across the street from a welding shop, where the grinding and hammering begin early every morning and keep going until late at night. She learns not to notice, the way people who live next to railroad tracks can’t hear a train whistle anymore.
Sitting at the end of her sofa, in a voice so soft that some words almost disappear, Walker matter-of-factly remembers the day she went to school and told her teacher about watching her mother’s boyfriend molest one of her sisters.
It wasn’t the first time the Oklahoma Department of Human Services investigated the household. Neighbors had complained before about Walker and her four young sisters being left home alone.
Her mother would eventually regain custody of the other children, but Walker would never again have a permanent home.
She can spend half an hour listing the places where she stayed — 26 foster homes in 13 years, plus two group homes and she can’t remember how many shelters.
In the middle of all this, Walker mentions one incident when she was 15 years old and a foster mother tried to grab a phone out of her hand.
“I swear, I did not hit that woman,” she insists. “I just tried to jerk the phone away, and that was the first time I was arrested.”
Wait a minute?
Arrested?
More than once?
This quiet teenager in a pink polka-dot tank top, who apologizes for her apartment’s being messy when it doesn’t look messy at all, and giggles when somebody compliments her new hairstyle?
This polite young woman has faced four assault charges in the last three years?
The second and third incidents involved fights with other girls at group homes, and the fourth included allegations that she hit a group home staff member.
“I was a very dramatic teenager,” Walker explains. “But that’s all in the past now. I don’t want any more drama.”
Of all the foster mothers she has known, Walker still calls Stacey Woodson “Mom.”
They lived together for only six months during 2003-04, when the family lived in Lawton while Woodson’s husband served in the Army at Fort Sill.
It wasn’t an easy six months.
“She got into fights,” Woodson remembers. “Got kicked out of school. Ran way from home. She did everything she could to push us away.”
But Woodson refused to give up on Walker.
“These kids miss out on a lot in life,” Woodson says by phone from Colorado, where her family lives now. “But the biggest thing they miss out on is unconditional love. That’s what I wanted to give her. 'You can’t make me stop loving you’.”
When the Army transferred her husband to South Carolina, Woodson would’ve taken Walker with them. But as a ward of the state, Walker couldn’t leave Oklahoma. They haven’t seen each other since.
“But we talk all the time on the phone,” Woodson says. “I still call her my daughter, and I tell her that she’s always welcome in my house. And I mean it.”
Woodson likes to think that she had something to do with Walker’s blossoming into the well-mannered adult that she appears to be today, compared to the raucous teen she was only a few years ago.
“I don’t want her to think of herself as a victim,” Woodson says. “She’s in control of her life.”
A thousand little choices in day-to-day life eventually add up to one momentous decision. “Do I do what’s right,” Woodson asks, “or do I rebel against what’s right?”
As a teenager, Walker rebelled as a defense mechanism.
“I didn’t want to risk getting attached to anybody,” Walker says. “I’m so used to getting my heart broken by people who are supposed to love me.”
Now that’s she an adult?
“There’s no one left to rebel against,” she says. “I’m on my own.”
Moving more than two dozen times in less than 13 years, crisscrossing the state from Tulsa and Oklahoma City to Lawton and Bristow, Walker hardly ever went to the same school for two semesters in a row.
Between one school and the next, she usually missed weeks of class. And her transcript is so incomplete that, if she enrolled again now, she would still rank as a freshman.
“I had two goals for turning 18,” Walker says. “To have a place of my own and to have a GED. And I guess I’m disappointed that I only have one of those things.”
Enrolled in a privately funded transitional living program, she lives in an apartment complex owned by Youth Services of Tulsa, where the rent is set as a percentage of her income.
But the rent is really just a forced savings plan because she’ll get a full refund when she moves out.
In the meantime, a caseworker comes to visit every week, helping with the budget, making sure Walker keeps a job and encouraging her to keep working toward a GED. It’s not DHS custody. But it’s not really independence, either.
In hindsight, maybe turning 18 wasn’t such a monumental occasion, after all, Walker decides.
“I’m kind of stuck, like nothing major is happening. I just get up and go to work and come home, and I don’t see how anything is going to change anytime soon.”
When teenagers turn 18 and age out of foster care, state officials offer them a toll-free telephone number to call if they ever need help.
“Some walk away and we never hear from them again,” says Cathy Connelly, the independent living coordinator for the state Department of Human Services. “But the majority call.”
And when they do, state officials can suggest a number of programs to help with the transition to adulthood and independence.
The Oklahoma Foster Care Tuition Waiver will let former foster children enroll tuition-free at state colleges if they remained in DHS custody for at least nine months after turning 16.
Until at least age 21, former foster children can also qualify for various types of cash assistance to help pay for education, housing and other expenses, even cars and clothing. Even with all these programs available, however, most foster children still receive little, if any, help after they turn 18, Connelly says.
“They’re adults now so they have to take the initiative to ask us,” she says. “We’re doing a better and better job of reaching out to them and letting them know they can call us if they need us.”
Indeed, observers say DHS has improved since the 1980s.
That was the decade when Congress began funding transitional living programs, and when most states began to offer them, says Jim Walker, the executive director of Youth Services of Tulsa, and no relation to Jerisha Walker.
“They used to send 15 or 20 a year to college, mostly athletes,” Walker says. “Now, if they’re sending one out of three to college after they age out, that’s a big move in the right direction.”
Funded entirely with private donations, the Youth Services Transitional Living Program is now housing 25 young adults, including Jerisha Walker, 18, of Tulsa.
Although not all of them are former foster children, these young adults are the ones that “slip through the cracks of DHS,” Walker says.
“They’re the hard cases,” he says. “By the time they’re 17, the system seems awfully tired of working with them and the system lets them slide out the door.”
Michael Overall 581-8383
michael.overall@tulsaworld.com
