All children deserve to be raised in loving and caring homes. Sometimes that doesn't happen and the children are removed from their birth parents and put into foster care and in other cases, they are put up for adoption. In The Winning Certificate and Death of a Foster Child Rick Podowski and the Hefty Trio examine the issues associated with adoption and foster care.
Sylvia Medina, a student at Central High joins a teenage gang after her adopted mother's death and is trapped in a lifestyle of violence and hopelessness. Can the school's Literary Club and an image on the computer of her birth mother provide the hope necessary for Sylvia to survive?
Antonio Medina, after his wife's death from cancer, tries everything to get Sylvia back on track. However, nothing helps until Rick Podowski and Leti Rios, advisors to the high school Literary Club, get Sylvia involved. Sylvia reluctantly shares some of her poems. Then, as Sylvia becomes more committed, she begins to change and becomes in touch with her feelings.
As Sylvia develops her ties to the Literary Club, she gets more intrigued by the picture of her birth mother and tries to find her. She learns that her mother lives in New York and when members of the Literary Club go to Columbia University to attend a conference and receive an award for their magazine, Sylvia goes along. Instead of going to the conference, she visits her mother.
She finds out that her mother married a very rich man, and she has two stepsons. The stepfather is dead, and the two sons along with her lawyer are trying to obtain her farm and include it as part of a land trust being used as a means to launder money for the mob. Murder, kidnapping, money laundering, and mob activities are included in this novel.
In addition to being an amateur detective novel, The Winning Certificate is the story of how a young woman, her adopted father, and her birth mother each react to the seven core adoption issues, confronting, as they do, personal issues centered on loss, rejection, guilt and shame, grief, intimacy and mastery or control.
The term "winning certificate" refers to two things. Our birth certificates are the proof that we are connected to a family structure that is greater than ourselves. The main character in this story was finally able to confront the issues associated with her adoption as well as coming to grips with the people named on the original birth certificate. Students in minority schools often feel inferior because their life experiences are not valued. The Literary Society members in this novel achieved a degree of excellence in their stories and poems about their lives, which resulted in their receiving a "winning certificate" in a national competition.
The Winning Certificate, won the 2011 Global eBook award in the amateur sleuth category and is available for $2.99 at Smashwords or at Amazon.
California’s foster children attend an average of seven to nine different schools by age 18—80% are held back in school by the third grade. In an investigation by a local newspaper, they found that about one in five foster children are given psychotropic drugs. Less than half of California’s foster youth will graduate from high school and only 2% graduate from college or universities. Each year over 4,000 foster youth emancipate in California. They lack a supportive network of adults and generally have no plan for work or housing. Within the first 2 to 4 years after “aging out” of the system, 51% of these young adults are unemployed, 40% are on public assistance, 25% become homeless, and 20% will be incarcerated. This situation is similar in other states.
In order to have a foster child in the home, the interested couples must complete an extensive complicated process, which many find to be extremely humiliating. Although there have been attempts in recent years to make the rules less oppressive, the California Community Licensing agency (CCL), has made complying with the rules more important than the welfare of the child. Rules like keeping the detergent for the washing machine under lock and key are common even if your foster child is a teenager. It's even worse if you obtain your foster child from a private agency rather (FFA) than the county. Instead of a cooperative effort between CCL and the Foster Family Agency, there seems to be one of "obey the rules or else" which creates stress for all involved and works to the detriment of the children.
Fear is the overriding factor as social workers and agencies go overboard to keep from losing their licenses or being fined. CCL acts like a fiefdom where inspectors intimidate both foster parents and the adoption/foster care agencies. Child Protective Services (CPS) becomes the enforcer for this system and in many cases, unproven allegations can become the basis for removing a child. The rigidity of the system creates the situation where there aren't enough foster parents.
Death of a Foster Child explores the guilt felt when the foster placement of a teenage girl in the home of Rick Podowski and his wife failed. To complicate matters, the foster child was brutally murdered and the authorities believe she was selling drugs on the school campus and by implication asserted that the foster parents allowed this behavior. Rick Podowski with the help of Leti Ramos, Erin McGinty, and Teresa Spinelli, also know as The Hefty Trio investigate to learn the truth.
In the process of investigating, they discover the world of drug sales on the high school campus, the underlying challenges facing students in a gang-infested school, as well as the difficulties faced by special education students. The reader will experience the frustrations of foster parents when faced with a system that is designed to keep the children dependent. Suggestions to improve foster care and move the children towards independence are provided at the end of the book.
Even though both books address difficult topics, the stories are uplifting. As an added bonus, Rick and The Hefty Trio love to eat and the books contain ethnic recipes with pairings of boutique wines from the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.
Death of a Foster Child is available for $2.99 at Smashwords or at Amazon.