It’s supposed to be a heartwarming story. The tale of a 10-year-old boy who went from living in a homeless encampment to attending his first day of fifth grade was featured on the “Today” show.
The boy, who was at first standoffish and even invoked his “Fifth Amendment right” not to speak to anyone when adults approached, now has shelter, clothing and a new backpack, and he looks forward to going to school. This is all thanks to the work of a nonprofit organization called The More We Love and the dedication of Jacki Schleppi, a case manager who went above and beyond to help.
The movie script practically writes itself.
Except, as Charlie Harger of KIRO News Radio reported last year of what is presumably the same child (his name has been withheld by both news outlets for privacy reasons), “This is not a story about homelessness. This is a story about fentanyl and what it does to children who get trapped in its orbit.”
The details of this boy’s life are apparently too gruesome for the soft glow of network television, but local radio was unafraid.
According to neighbors, “The boy is not enrolled in any school and has never been enrolled in any school in Washington. His clothes are filthy. His fingernails are caked with dirt.” They say “he has had bruises on his body and a hacking chest cold with green mucus in his nostrils.”
His mother is a prostitute and fentanyl addict and his father has a long criminal history. The boy “is left alone in the tent for hours during the day, and sometimes all night when his mother disappears on benders that can last a week at a time. When she is present, neighbors believe she uses the drug in front of her child,” Harger reported.
Photos taken after the tent was abandoned found “juice bottles filled with urine,” “fentanyl foil on the ground,” “rotting food gnawed by rats” and “children’s toys covered in droppings and bite marks.”
But what should outrage the public is not just the deplorable conditions this child is forced to live in, but the fact that the authorities knew about this situation and did nothing.
During the months before KIRO aired Harger’s story, Washington’s Child Protective Services and the Seattle Police Department visited the family multiple times, each time documenting the circumstances and each time finding the child was not in danger of imminent harm. After the story aired, though, 20 legislators demanded answers from the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families, or DCYF.
DCYF Secretary Tana Senn explained that the Keeping Families Together Act was to blame. Passed with a bipartisan majority, the law aimed to prevent more kids from going into foster care and specified that “poverty, … inadequate housing, substance abuse, prenatal drug or alcohol exposure, mental illness, … or nonconforming social behavior does not by itself constitute imminent physical harm.”
It is true that, as the story on “Today” chronicles, nonprofit workers did step in. They tried to offer the family shelter, a place for the boy to shower, a way for him to go to school. But the parents turned down these efforts repeatedly. These are the kind of “voluntary services” that Keeping Families Together (and similar efforts in other parts of the country) offer as the solution. But the truth is that families like this one — keeping their children in tents with rats and no running water when alternative shelter is available — are suffering from a level of addiction and/or mental illness that requires government intervention. Ten-year-old boys belong in school with their peers and adults who can supervise them and teach them things rather than living in a public park by themselves waiting for predators to come along.
Yes, the hard work of folks like those who work at The More We Love is an important part of getting these families on the right path. But the truth is that these families need a lot more than love. Only when the police became involved were the mother and son placed in a shelter. Only then did she get treatment for her addiction. Only then did he start to bathe. Only then was he allowed to go to school.
It would be nice to think that the only thing that this family was suffering from was a lack of goodwill and the right material resources. Those problems can be easily solved. But addiction is a powerful force and adults in its throes will often choose drugs even over the safety and well-being of their children. What’s needed to stop these terrible decisions is, sadly, the coercion of the state. Washington legislators, though, are loath to admit that, and you won’t learn this by watching the “Today” show.