ALBION, Mich.
College student Stacey Kline was depressed and out of money, ignoring phone calls and staring at an empty refrigerator when she got a much-needed knock on her apartment door a month ago.
It was Lynda Naylor, a student services administrator at Wayne County Community College. Naylor and her husband stocked Kline’s apartment in Detroit with groceries and gave the 22-year-old money for the bus.
“She was the first person to believe in me,” says Kline, a victim of sexual abuse who was kicked out of a foster care home at age 14. She survived by selling drugs, working multiple jobs, living at friends’ houses and bouncing around countless high schools. “They’re like the family I never had.”
Kline is one of the 450 teenagers who each year “age out” of Michigan’s foster system when they turn 18. These teens are legal adults with neither an adoptive nor a blood-relation family to support them, financially or emotionally.
Kline hopes to beat the odds that face ex-foster children by graduating with an associate’s degree in counseling in June. She acknowledges she would have quit school if not for help from Naylor — who bought food and bus fare for Kline with her own money — and others. That makes Kline’s story important for state officials determined to see more foster youth with college degrees.
Social workers, college representatives and key advocates met last week at a special summit in Albion to hear from Kline, other foster alumni and experts. The state wants to remove the barriers that prevent 90 percent of college-age foster kids from going to college.
