Beauxart Gardens resident protest foster group home

By Sherry Koonce
The Port Arthur News

April 02, 2008 08:21 pm

— By Sherry Koonce
The News staff writer
In a month designated to bring awareness to abused children, signs posted in the front lawns of Beauxart Gardens residences this week delivered a message from the homeowners: Not in my neighborhood.
Roughly half of the homes along winding North Garden Road displayed signs protesting a Nederland church’s plans to establish a foster group home in the neighborhood.
“My heart is very heavy. Never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate people fighting against helping children,” the Rev. Joe Roberts, pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church in Nederland, said.
Roberts said the church recently purchased a large brick home in the Beauxart Gardens neighborhood between U.S. 69 and FM 823 for $230,000. The home will be utilized as a foster care facility for elementary school-age children who have been taken from their parents.
A foster parent will be on-site at the church group home at all times, and church members who have been trained by the state will be available to help the foster parent.
“We are specializing in kids that have been abandoned, mentally, physically or sexually abused, or have been neglected,” Roberts said.
The home, which sits on a 2.5-acre lot, will be licensed for up to 12 children. The church hopes to add another group home on the property in the future, he said.
Those plans have neighbors worried about safety issues and property values.
“My family is my number one concern to me,” Lance Sheppard, 36, said. “It’s not that we don’t want these children to get the help they need, we just believe a rural setting would be more beneficial to the children.”
Sheppard’s home is directly across the street from the proposed group home.
He said he worried about the type of children that would be housed there and the effect those children might have on his 9-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter.
“We were told they wanted to put a couple of trailers behind the home with the goal of eventually housing 120 kids in a centralized place,” Sheppard said. “The picture the church painted for us and the real picture I think are totally different.”
Roberts said the group home applied to take children in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades who have been designated by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to be at a basic care level.
According to the department’s Web site, a basic level child is the lowest of four levels. Characteristics of a child in need of basic care services may include transient difficulties and occasional misbehavior, briefly acting out in response to stress; display behavior that is minimally disturbing to others, but typical of the child’s age and can be corrected.
Rick Jones, who lives across the street from the proposed group home, said the basic care designation can be deceiving.
Jones, 52, is an instructor at the Al Price State School, a Texas Youth Commission facility between Beaumont and Port Arthur. Jones said he has a total 25 years experience working with troubled children —some of those years at facilities similar to the church group home.
“I’ve worked with every level child from intensive care to basic care,” he said.
Jones said children sometimes were at higher levels, but are reclassified —sometimes just prior to being placed in a group care facility that only takes better behaved children.
“There’s a good possibility that their needs could be greater. Kids’ behavior changes all the time,” he said.
From his experience, Jones said he had never known a facility where children did not escape, or get into fights.
Another concern, he said, was that some of the children were victims of sexual abuse, with the possibility of becoming sexual abusers themselves.
Jones said therapeutically, it is much better for foster children to live in rural settings.
“I hate to say, ‘not in my backyard,’ but I’ve lived in their backyard before. This has been my life’s work and I know what type of programs work, and what doesn’t,” Jones said.
Since the church purchased the home, Roberts said Beauxart Gardens residents had been invited to a meeting at the home, then a town hall meeting Thursday at the church.
Prior to the town hall meeting, many of the church’s 800-or so membership received hand-delivered letters from the Beauxart Gardens residents the Saturday prior to Easter.
“The letter asked our people not to give to the Easter offering that was going toward this ministry,” Roberts said.
Instead of detracting from the offering, church members rallied for the cause and gave generously, Roberts said.
Therapeutic Family Life’s Orange office will be in charge of child placement. The group contracts with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to find homes for children who have been removed from their families by the state agency.
Currently, Therapeutic Family Life serves about 75 children placed in foster care in Southeast Texas. Twenty-four of those children were placed in the company’s two Orange facilities, Thad Smith, foster care specialist from the Orange office, said.
Smith and Shari Pulliam, spokesperson for Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Beaumont office attended the church’s town hall meeting.
Both said they appreciated the Beauxart Gardens residents concerns, but believed there was a lot of misinformation.
Some, said Smith, were worried about their property values decreasing.
“They threatened that if this goes through, I’m moving,” he said. “I understand they have concerns, but (the church) has requested basic care elementary-age children. These kids are just like any other child, except that have been taken from their homes because of something their parents did.”
Pulliam said many of the residents had voiced concerns that the children would be sex offenders themselves, or have criminal backgrounds.
“I had hoped we put all those myths to rest, but judging from the signs, I guess we didn’t,” she said.
Contact this reporter at skoonce@panews.com

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