<p>NYMom, that was something that stood out to me. The shelter must be getting money to operate. Aside from the dysfunction going on in the families, why isn’t the shelter kept in a reasonable state? Seems the city or state could be doing more to stay on top of this situation.</p>
<p>Spoiler alert: I read all five sections the first day!!!</p>
<p>And I’m sure this family getting a new home had everything to do with a NYT reporter nosing around and asking questions.</p>
<p>I know, Youdon’tsay, the shelter has a $9M annual budget. And $10M has been spent in repairs and renovations since Bloomberg took office. Yet this family lives in a mice-infested room with rotting walls? Am I naive about how much it costs to run a place like this? </p>
<p>I am also saddened by the fact that Dasani’s oasis, the school, is about to lose half of the prime floor (the top floor with the dance studio, art room, etc.) to a charter school. It seems that the school is Dasani’s only hope. It seems to be staffed with devoted and competent people. I hope this doesn’t change.</p>
<p>I was very sad when I read that they had had a home in a decent area of Staten Island, which has truly excellent schools, but the parents couldn’t keep it. It was in a good neighborhood with a lot of community spirit and much less dysfunction. I don’t know what the answer should be, but I was so very sad about that.</p>
<p>I want to thank Jonri for posting the link to this article. I read it yesterday and it was haunting. I do think it may win some awards. It would be interesting to see a follow up in a couple of years after Deshanti enters adolescence. I bet by then her hope is gone. She already struggles with a violent temper. I hope I’m wrong.</p>
<p>Youdon’tsay, I also think that the family received a new shelter spot because the NYT reporter was nosing around. They apparently are in a temporary apartment with two bedrooms for ten people. In a functional city that would violate health and safety codes. But they are trying to nudge that family into taking some responsibility for themselves and move on soon. Frankly I don’t think the “parents” deserve any type of assistance at all. The daughter who is going blind should be in some sort of occupational therapy to help cope when the inevitable happens. It’s sad to think that foster care would probably not be better emotionally for the kids.</p>
<p>I saw that, too, zm. Apparently the mother had a windfall, a $49k inheritance, but it didn’t seem to last very long. I wish they could have stayed in SI, too. </p>
<p>I was also so sad that Dasani lost her grandmother, who was making such a difference in her life. </p>
<p>I’ve recently joined a facebook page for my elementary school, a parochial school in Detroit. When I lived there as a child, most families were very large. There were 10 children in my family and the largest family I knew had 17 children. The houses look small now, when I look at them on google. Mostly one bathroom, around 1500 feet. The neighborhood has really gone downhill as part of Detroit’s general descent, but when we were growing up it was a solid, vibrant neighborhood. No one had much money, but fathers worked, families were stable and the schools were run by nuns who managed to teach the classes of 60 kids despite the wild boys. There were some problems with alcohol, my father especially was an alcoholic, but somehow the kids were taken care of. Although it’s hard to compare such different situations, I feel confident that much less money (even after correcting for inflation) was available to families in my old neighborhood than is being spent on families like Dasani’s. Yet the sky was the limit for us.</p>
<p>The truth is that most money problems aren’t about money. Other stuff is going on.</p>
<p>My boys went to a highly rated school co-located with an under-performing school in a “bad” part of town. The host school is more than 95% free and reduced lunch. I was close with its former principal, and he said that if he could do anything to help his population it would be to take them out of their homes and have a residential setup. It’s rare the kid who despite the will and brains and intuition – all of which Dasani seems to have plenty of – can overcome the kinds of things they face at home.</p>
<p>I read the whole series, although I did not watch the videos. I thought that the reporter did a remarkable job of giving a full picture of the virtues and faults of all concerned, and the multi-generational challenges involved, as well as putting it in the social and political context of NYC.</p>
<p>It seems pretty clear that the untenable situation at the homeless shelter put the family in an environment that was extremely stressful, more than they could handle. The parents do not have the life skills to manage. It is useless to “blame” them, just as it would be useless to blame Dasani and her siblings when they do not magically turn into adults with middle class skillsets at the point when they become physically able to have children.</p>
<p>Of all the solutions put forth, I think that zoosermom’s solution of having the family live in a stable location with a responsible adult who basically acts like a parent may be the best. If the biological parents transgress, they could be barred from the house except for supervised visits with their children. If they keep going to the methadone clinic, they can stay. The children would have each other. They could learn the life skills involved with having a stable life. So could the parents.</p>
<p>A huge part of this problem is the simple cost of housing in NYC. In the 80s, I worked near the Empire State Building across the street from a welfare hotel. The families there lived in a proverbial food desert, god knows how far from any school or playground, not allowed to have cooking facilities, not near any of the amenities of a residential neighborhood. And the city paid a FORTUNE to the hotel owners. Far more than the rent on an apartment would have been.</p>
<p>BTW, the teachers at that school deserve medals, they deserve every accolade our society can bestow. Instead of the vituperation and scorn which is all too often their lot.</p>
<p>My kids also went to such a school and this story is so much more the norm than the exception. There are kids who as teenagers recognize the situation for what it is and become 100-percent committed to self-improvement. Throwing more money at is useless.</p>
<p>It’s not a NYC problem. This happening everywhere.</p>
<p>Dasani’s mom seems to be good at getting media attention:</p>
<p>[Rats</a> are coming through the walls and worms infest the bathrooms at city’s homeless shelters. But Mayor Bloomberg says they’re so pleasurable that no one wants to leave - NY Daily News](<a href=“New York News - New York Daily News”>http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/rats-coming-walls-worms-infest-bathrooms-city-homeless-shelters-mayor-bloomberg-pleasurable-leave-article-1.1143270)</p>
<p>You know, people will throw bricks at me, but there are times I think we should bring back the orphanage. The bond among the kids in this family is strong. No foster family is going to take all 7 of them. An orphanage would and orphanages used to allow parents to come visit. Many very poor parents used the orphanages during crises and reclaimed the kids when they were able to do so.</p>
<p>It’s ridiculous though that the City is paying so much money for such awful living conditions at the shelter.</p>
<p>I agree with you Jonri. A stable home is the only way to save the kids and the parents can’t provide it on their own. Which brings me to segue into the fact that as wonderful as the kids’ school is, it is doing so many other things that truly educating them is secondary. That is the case in a lot of schools, so it makes me crazed when the benchmark test scores are found lacking. In some cases, the only benchmark that matters is that the kid made it safely through another day or week or school year. Schools can’t educate AND parent unless they are residential.</p>
<p>I have to agree, jonri, as unpalatable as it sounds. The parents are unable to cope, despite good intentions. Even if a foster family is found who would take all the kids (and I believe there are 8), the foster care system may be worse than what they have now. </p>
<p>zm, you are so right about the school. They are coping with so many problems that it is not possible to really educate the children. They’re putting out fires all the time.</p>
<p>I have to agree, jonri, as unpalatable as it sounds. The parents are unable to cope, despite good intentions. Even if a foster family is found who would take all the kids (and I believe there are 8), the foster care system may be worse than what they have now. </p>
<p>zm, you are so right about the school. They are coping with so many problems that it is not possible to really educate the children. They’re putting out fires all the time.</p>
<p>At least in our state, what often happens is that kids are placed with a foster family while their parent receives services to try to get in shape to get the kids back. Family reunification is the focus. The parents get the kids back. Things fall apart again and the kids go back into foster care, but the family they were with before is no longer available, so they go to a different place. Rinse and repeat. Even if the foster home is great, they often do not get to stay there. I don’t think there are many people who have enough room for 8 kids. I’m sure there are rules about how many can share a bedroom in foster care, and so forth.</p>
<p>Just so sad and frustrating. I would love to see where the $1200/mo in food stamps went considering the kids get meals at school and they all get shelter meals. The writer didn’t come out and say it but I guess the parents are exchanging their benefits for drugs? The bogus therapy cash grab is also very sad. I can’t imagine splitting up these siblings though. The teacher deserves to find a million dollars in her purse.</p>
<p>Since this is a powerful story, I guess I should have expected this, but…</p>
<p>The Legal Aid Society has set up a trust for Dasani and her sibs since so many people want to help them. It is being publicized. I learned about if on the website of the Brian Lehrer show (for the other NYers out there.) <a href=“Profiling a "Girl in the Shadows" | The Brian Lehrer Show | WNYC”>Profiling a "Girl in the Shadows" | The Brian Lehrer Show | WNYC;
<p>
Googling that address with the at and dot replaced by punctuation got me to a twitter about the fund. Now, I suspect that the folks at Legal Aid meant well and just wanted to prevent the family from getting a big wad of cash that might be misspent. </p>
<p>Now, one part of me thinks that’s great. Another part of me thinks it stinks. I think it’s great so many people want to help, but part of me thinks that there ought to be a fund for homeless kids set up or if that’s too ambitious for the kids in NYC homeless shelters or maybe just for the kids in one shelter. I don’t think it’s wise to pick one child and have all the NY Times readers and others send her and her family a lot of money and toys. </p>
<p>Am I simply being Scrooge?</p>
<p>And my remark about bringing back the orphanage is precisely because I think there are kids who would be better off being in an orphanage with their siblings and some visits from their parents than being split up among a # of foster homes.</p>
<p>
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<p>The article reported that the parents participate in a methadone clinic. Methadone is a drug that blocks the craving for heroin, and so functions as a way to wean off of heroin. </p>
<p>As noted in the article, methadone also makes them feel lethargic. </p>
<p>Since it’s free, they don’t have to use their benefit monies to obtain it. </p>
<p>The government runs and administers methadone at a hospital or neighborhood clinic.</p>
<p>Relapses are the norm, not the exception.</p>
<p>
What do u think about public boarding schools instead of orphanages? The distinction being: the kids learn in the place where they live. The model works for rich kids.</p>
<p>What about these parents who may still be fertile and still planning on having more children, in addition to the many they currently neglect? This is a HUGE part of the problem, especially when these families start very young to parents who are ill-prepared to handle responsibilities and have few resources to offer a young family.</p>
<p>There was a Hawaii public health program, trying to educate young women and men about the effects of having children at a young age and many children as to what that did to family finances. I’m not sure how successful it was, since it was contrary to the customs of the cultures they were trying to reach out to who traditionally started very large families from very young ages.</p>
<p>Jonri - I can’t stop thinking about this story.</p>
<p>Re orphanages - my great grandmother was, shall we say, a little wild, had my grandmother out of wedlock, couldn’t afford to keep her, and put her in an orphanage when she was little then came back and got her. It was both emotionally scarring for my grandmother, and probably the best thing for her at the same time. My great grandmother later came and got her. But she had a skill - hairdressing -and could run a hairdressing place out of her home and get by and lead a working class life. Chanel in the story doesn’t appear to have skills. </p>
<p>I’m really, really touched. Again thank you for posting this.</p>