EAGLE MOUNTAIN — Detective Earl Rose is in the middle of his drug presentation — the part where he shows the picture of a heroin addict whose arms are covered with oozing sores — when a girl in the front row turns pale, stumbles out the door and faints.
Good, he thinks. Let the students see what drugs can do to you. Let them see how your arm can smell like death, how a 40-year-old addict can easily look like she's 70. Let them see how innocent the toddlers look in the video, how filthy the houses are when police officers come to take the children away. He hopes the images will stay with the students for the rest of their lives.
Earl Rose has been a Salt Lake City undercover narcotics cop, so he's seen a lot of drug users up close. Now he works as a resource officer at Highland High in Salt Lake City. A drug addict, he tells the students, can leave behind a trail of victims, including children who struggle to recover from their own early childhoods.
Look at my own family, he says.
The first two foster boys who came to live with Earl and Tifiny Rose were 5- and 7-year-old brothers. They looked like prisoners of war, Earl says. Like a lot of meth users, their mother was often too strung out to eat, much less cook, so the boys had to look through the neighbors' garbage cans if they wanted a meal. For family fun, the mother and her boyfriend let the boys watch pornography.
Earl and Tif have since adopted the boys, plus five other siblings who also came from a meth home. Together with their own three children, and two more foster sons, that makes 12, ages 2 to 17.
When she was younger, Tif vowed she would never marry a man named Earl. And never drive a Suburban or live in Tooele. Later, when she and Earl were living in Tooele and driving a Suburban, Tif realized how silly — maybe how tempting to the Fates — it is to say "never."
"I've kind of changed my wording now to I'd rather not," Tif says. As in I'd rather not drive a 15-passenger van.
She mentions all this because the other thing she said she'd never do is take in foster children. But then late one night nine years ago, after five miscarriages and the birth of her daughter, Tif was home watching a movie and the movie happened to be about foster children. She cried through a lot of it, and as soon as the final credits started rolling she called Earl, who was working the night shift. She said, "We're going to do foster care." And Earl said "OK."
That's how it is at the Rose home: Tif says "let's" and Earl says "sure."
If you're going to be a foster parent of children from drug homes, Earl says, you need to know that the children often arrive with lingering behavioral and health problems. The children he and Tif have raised have anger issues, attention-deficit hyperactive disorder, reactive attachment disorder and depression. Some of the children were exposed to pornography in their original homes, some were sexually abused. One son has a brain injury caused when his mother's boyfriend threw him into a wall.
In Utah, 52 percent of all foster children come from homes where there has been substance abuse— roughly 2,361 children in 2009. (The state could use 100 to 200 more foster parents, says Child and Family Services director Duane Betournay, so that the appropriate family can be matched up with children with special needs. For example, a child who is "sexually reactive" shouldn't be put in a home with young children).
How much of a child's behavioral or health problems is due to drug exposure in the womb and how much is due to growing up in dysfunctional families is hard to parse out, says Dr. Karen Buchi, professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah, who hopes to help conduct a study of drug-endangered children in foster care.
"What I can tell you," she says, "is that people using meth seem to be many degrees more dysfunctional than people using other drugs."
The slightly encouraging news is that meth use is down in Utah and the number of meth labs has dropped from nearly 300 a decade ago to just a handful now, says Marjean Searcy, project coordinator with the Salt Lake Meth Initiative. The bad news is that opiate abuse — prescription painkillers and heroin — is up, she says.
For children brought up in drug homes, criminal activity is the norm, she says. "These are kids who take bongs for show-and-tell."
At the Roses' home in Eagle Mountain, Tif has planted 10,000 tulips in the yard. Children come home after school to hugs and chores, snacks and boundaries. When they behave well they get one of the colored beads in jars that line the kitchen counter. When they get enough beads, they can play on the Wii or have a soda.
"Normalville," says Tif, who always sounds like she's smiling.
The children know that the teenage boys can't go upstairs where the little kids' rooms are, and the little kids can't go unchaperoned to the basement, where the oldest boys sleep. There is a trampoline in the backyard, and the bigger boys have to wait their turn. There is a lock on the refrigerator, because early deprivation has its consequences (one foster son ate 23 pounds of bananas the first day he came to live with the Roses).
Tif's parents live in an apartment in the Roses' basement and help take care of the kids. Because the youngest foster son has cerebral palsy, there is a night nurse, and a therapist and a social worker come in every week to work with the other children. So life in the stucco house is relatively calm. Still, there are always challenges: kicking and biting sometimes, sullenness and anger. One of the older boys recently spent some time in county detention.
In the beginning, when they took in the first two boys, Tif would bristle when they told her what their mom had done to them. But she understands now that foster children never stop loving their birth mothers. "I don't want my kids to think bad about them," she says.
At Highland High, detective Earl Rose is the go-to guy when there's school mischief or crime. He's a likable, soft-spoken man who looks a decade younger than his 38 years. His anti-drug presentations, which he gives at the invitation of teachers, are low-key and matter-of-fact. He calls himself "boring."
But it is perhaps the very deadpan nature of his delivery, and the honesty with which he describes his own family, and the way he quietly tears up during the part of the video where a little girl is carried away from a home filled with drug paraphernalia, that makes students lean forward and listen.
"Hopefully I can steer one or two kids away from drugs," he says. Then he reconsiders, as if maybe that was too grandiose a boast. "One would be great."
e-mail: jarvik@desnews.com