Effort fuels kids’ hopes for a home

Robert Schaffer is a believer. Despite a very difficult childhood, the 13-year-old boy from Dedham believes that life occasionally can toss you a dose of good luck and that fate can be as kind as it can be cruel.

Most importantly, Robert believes in his new mom.

“I know that even if I misbehave or act up, she’s going to let me stay,” the young teen said this week after reluctantly interrupting a video game to speak to me about his adoption. “I know that I’m safe.”

Robert was removed from his home by the state when he was 9 years old. Today, however, he is one of the lucky ones.

Together he and his new mom, Melissa Schaffer, a 54-year-old teacher at Hampden Academy, are building a new life. For Robert it means a sense of security he’s rarely ever had and opportunities such as taking guitar lessons. It means a life far from the state-sponsored group home where he spent three years of his life.

When Melissa first looked into adoption, she was thinking of a younger child, perhaps between the ages of 6 and 10. But she spotted Robert at a “meet and greet” event for potential adoptive parents and foster children and took an almost immediate interest in the easy-going and active boy.

Robert’s caseworker saw a good fit, and after months of getting to know one another, Robert and Melissa mutually decided they could make a family.

Earlier this week, I talked with Pat O’Brien, the founder and executive director of You Gotta Believe! The Older Child Adoption & Permanency Movement Inc.

O’Brien will be in Bangor next week to try to convince community members and caseworkers that it’s not too late for older foster children to find good homes.

“Hey, a lot of these kids don’t believe in themselves anymore,” O’Brien said. “They’ve been passed over so many times and moved from one house to another that they have lost hope.

“If we as community members and caseworkers don’t believe they have a chance, well then, they probably don’t.”

You Gotta Believe is based in New York City and is one of the few placement agencies in the country that limits its practice to finding permanent homes for teens in foster care.

There are way too many kids in this country “aging out” of foster care, meaning they stay in state custody until they reach the age of 18 when they are then considered adults and left to their own devices. Many of them lack the life and job skills necessary for success and end up homeless or in prison.

“Trust me, these kids desperately need families. Eighteen- and 21-year-olds can’t make it without a support system, and kids who ‘age out’ don’t have that,” O’Brien said.

Each year more than 20,000 teens age out of foster care in this country, 200 of them in Maine.

I don’t know about you, but the Maine-ly Children column that runs every week in this newspaper generally tears my heart out. Go to the A Family for ME Web site and you’ll see dozens upon dozens of kids, most of them teenagers, basically “advertised” for adoption.

Robert was once one of those kids.

“Once you get to be my age, you really start to believe that it’s too late for you to find a home,” the articulate young man said to me. “Everyone wants babies or little kids. I would like other foster kids out there to know that it isn’t too late. If it can happen to me it can happen to them.”

Robert believes.

Pat O’Brien will be speaking from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 28, at the Spectacular Events Center on Griffin Road in Bangor. The event is free, but space is limited. You can register by contacting Evelyn Ricker at 561-4158 or by e-mail at Evelyn.Ricker@maine.gov.

Renee Ordway can be reached at ROrdway@bangordailynews.net.