ALL IN THE FAMILY

AN OKLAHOMA RANCH CULTIVATES CONNECTION FOR FOSTER FAMILIES

BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY

Desie’s eyes grow wide as she peruses the menu at Cattlemen’s Steakhouse, a popular destination for tourists and cowboys near Oklahoma City. The eight-year-old girl doesn’t get to go out for dinner often — with nine other children in her family, it’s logistically and financially challenging. But she’s anything but intimidated by the range of options.

Desie first came to stay with Ashlee and Matt Terry when she was eight days old, as a “Home for the Holidays” emergency placement. Child services brought her right after Thanksgiving in 2012, while they figured out what to do with her. Instead, she never left. She was the Terrys’ fourth foster child. Their first came in 2011 — sisters Evie and Piper — followed by their biological sister Bella a few months later. By 2014, with four daughters, three bedrooms and only one shower, they decided they didn’t have the space for more. “I said that when God provided more bathrooms, we would reopen our home,” Ashlee says.

God seemed to answer that prayer when the Terrys were offered a spot at Peppers Ranch, a foster community in Guthrie, about 30 minutes from Oklahoma City. The ranch harnesses an old-fashioned understanding of family, neighborhood and community to solve the problems of a new generation of displaced children. There they could live in a newly built house, paying only a couple hundred dollars in rent and receiving a small stipend in addition to what the state offered for foster care, if they were willing to open their home to at least five foster children.

So in 2015, the Terrys moved to a community set amid farmlands at the end of a dirt road that’s prone to flooding. The landscape feels sparse; each family has a backyard equipped with all the trampolines and play structures you would find in a typical suburban neighborhood. There are also a basketball court and a soccer field, a playground and a pool complex, a pond where the kids can fish, and a barn with 17 horses for equestrian therapy. Now the Terrys’ oldest son is 18 and just finished high school. But they haven’t stopped growing their family. Since they moved to the ranch, they’ve adopted another five brothers and sisters, and they’re fostering another boy. Dinner at Cattlemen’s with 10 kids is more serene than you might expect, even after we had to wait an hour for a table. They repay the setback with kindness, asking polite questions and making conversation. For Desie, the patience pays off. “I’m going to start with the shrimp cocktail,” she announces. 

MORE THAN 70 PEPPERS RANCH opened in 2002 as a home for

PERCENT OF abused and neglected boys, on 160 acres of donated SIBLINGS IN FOSTER CARE ARE SEPARATED. ONE REASON: IT’S land. After a few years, things seemed to be going OK for the boys, but their sisters were just being dropped off at a local shelter. More than 70 per-

HARD TO FIND cent of siblings in foster care are separated, even FAMILIES THAT HAVE though keeping them together generally reduces THE CAPACITY TO TAKE IN GROUPS OF SIBLINGS. behavioral problems and increases the chances both will adapt to their foster homes and perform better academically. One reason: It’s hard to find families that have the capacity to take in groups of siblings. So Peppers Ranch decided to try something different. Starting in 2009, the community adopted a family model, offering homes to couples who were licensed to do foster care. Today, there are 16 homes on the property (with plans for more), all larger than 3,000 square feet. The typical unit has four bedrooms, a large living area and an industrial-size kitchen and pantry. The newer ones even have hookups for two washers and dryers as well as larger garages for parking

CHILDREN ON A TRAMPOLINE AT PEPPERS RANCH FOSTER COMMUNITY, GUTHRIE, OKLAHOMA

super-size vans. The entire community has an annual budget of about $1.5 million, all from private donations and grants. Locals also donate furniture, clothing and other necessities. Hundreds of volunteers help maintain the grounds and run programs for the kids. Each family also pitches in, including feeding the horses when the trainer is not around.

Foster parenting can be overwhelming, especially with multiple children in the home. Weekly therapy appointments, visits with biological parents, and meetings with social workers and court dates can tax even the most organized person. But Peppers Ranch brings at least some of those services home, along with a learning center for after-school tutoring. The ranch also offers art therapy, dance therapy, a swim team and a variety of other extracurricular activities, each for a small fee.

The community requires at least one parent to work full time, but the subsidized housing often makes it possible for the other parent to stay home. With so many kids, some with behavioral and emotional challenges, it is hard to outsource child care. In families with older kids, mothers sometimes work part time from home during school hours.

The arrangement is a relief for parents like Dustin Burpo, a pastor at a nearby church. He and his wife have eight children. “We’ve got a house to stay in, a nice house that has plenty of space for our large-capacity living,” he says. “It’s a weight off my shoulders, knowing that I’ve got a place for my kids.”

Outside, most of the families give their kids freedom to roam. Matt Terry says that Peppers Ranch feels like an old-fashioned neighborhood. It’s certainly small enough for everyone to know everyone else.

Shelly Blankenship, who has fostered around 80 children at Peppers Ranch since 2011, compares it to the neighborhood where she grew up, across the street from her grandmother and down the street from her aunt. “You couldn’t get away with anything,” she

ASHLEE TERRY AND HER CHILDREN AT DINNER IN THEIR HOME AT PEPPERS RANCH

says. When she sees kids misbehaving at Peppers Ranch, she tells them, “I don’t think you need to be doing that.” They might ask if she is going to tell their mother. “Do I need to tell her? If you’re going to quit and act right, then I don’t have to tell her anything. We’ve already taken care of it.”

Still, foster and adoptive parents often make a more difficult calculation about giving their children freedom. Should you let a kid wander knowing they have been traumatized by other adults? Are there psychological and behavioral problems that could pop up if something scares them or surprises them? How will other adults respond? And will their fellow parents blame them if something goes wrong? “You have behaviors for a child and you think that something is wrong with me as a parent,” says Kristin Burpo, Dustin’s wife. “You just feel judged, even in a church community.”

Here, every family understands, and veteran foster parents often mentor the newer ones. The mothers meet at least once a month to talk about issues they are facing with their children, where to go for help, and how to deal with the emotional toll that fostering is taking on them, their marriages and their other children. Most research shows that about half of all foster parents quit within their first year.

Kristin Martinez understands why. Fostering can be an emotional roller coaster, from watching a child’s heart break at repeated court dates as their biological parents struggle to get their lives together, to letting that child go forever once they do.

Martinez, who has one biological child and six adopted children, remembers the day she took in a 16-year-old girl. “I never had a teenager before. I could immediately go to other neighbors, and they were able to provide me with great information and great resources.”

That doesn’t make fostering easy. Some days are overwhelming. “There’s somebody here to understand that,” Martinez says, “when you’re having a really hard day and you’re in tears” — because they have literally experienced what you’re going through.

PEPPERS RANCH does have an artificial feel. Current families meet with potential new families to decide whether they can move in. They can only stay as long as their homes are open to foster children, even on a temporary basis. Some of the kids talk about missing their friends from families who stopped doing foster care after a few years and left the community.

For the sake of continuity, there is a “Grandma” program in which older people, who have either moved on from fostering or who simply want to help out, can live in one of a few small apartments in the community. They form relationships with the kids, inviting them over to bake cookies or helping them with homework. They host play dates to give the moms a break and organize art projects for the older kids.

A GUTHRIE PUBLIC SCHOOL BUS AT THE RANCH AND ASHLEE TERRY WITH DAUGHTER DESIE

One of the new grandmas, Kim Magallanes, moved here from California after her son and daughter-in-law came a few years ago. She’s retired but energetic — and experienced with horses. She keeps a stash of carrots in her refrigerator in case one of the kids comes by and wants to feed them. Magallanes remembers when she was a child “going to my grandparents’ house, things that I now realize were chores, were fun. Hanging clothes on the line and picking berries and learning how to bake.” Being a grandmother at Peppers Ranch is “just being another person these kids can hang out with.” She’s taking a group of the teenagers on a trip to a camp a few hours away a couple of days after we meet. This is not an entirely original idea. For example, in an article called “It Takes a Multigenerational Village to Raise Foster Kids,” the authors de-

VETERAN FOSTER scribe communities where

PARENTS OFTEN foster families live in close MENTOR THE NEWER ONES. AND MOTHERS MEET AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH TO TALK proximity to older adults. The programs, funded in part with public dollars, ABOUT ISSUES THEY offer “intergenerational art

ARE FACING WITH and other classes, weekly

THEIR CHILDREN. community dinners, and a community garden, where young and older residents can meet and strengthen ties.” Last year, writing for The Atlantic, David Brooks suggested that extended families and tightly connected neighborhoods could replace the nuclear family. “Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time,” he writes, calling the loss of the nuclear family, “a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms.”

There are certainly enough arms here. Still, these children have often come from environments with grandmothers, aunts and neighbors — yet none were responsible or capable enough to be their primary caretakers. Peppers Ranch is built on a different idea, the notion that children ultimately need nuclear families — stable parents, biological siblings — as well as a community where they can support each other. It seems to be working.

NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY IS A RESIDENT FELLOW AT THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, A DESERET NEWS CONTRIBUTOR AND THE AUTHOR OF “NO WAY TO TREAT A CHILD: HOW THE FOSTER CARE SYS TEM, FAMILY COURTS, AND RACIAL ACTIVISTS ARE WRECKING YOUNG LIVES.”