Working In A Group Home

My first job right out of college was at a group home for teenage kids who had been removed from their homes. This was a state funded home, and the kids were either waiting to be placed in foster care, or reunited with their families. It was a soulless, awful place to work.

The kids were bad. I was one of the few staff members who enforced the rules there. I firmly believed that structure and rules were the best things for these kids. It creates a measure of safety for them. And that was all I could give them. I would enforce the rules, and then get called names by the kids or cussed out. By the end of my job I had a nick name from the girls. They called me the “f**kin B*t*h.” When I would arrive to work in the morning, one of the girls would see me, then yell out to the rest of the girls, “The ‘f**kin B*t*h is here!” That’s how they greeted me in the mornings.

The kids were not allowed to have blankets in the common rooms. I think you can imagine why. These are hormone charged teenagers with little to no guidance for most of their lives. Sitting in the common room, watching tv, under a blanket – really not a good idea. We already had two teenage mothers, we didn’t need more.

On Saturdays, I would go into the common room and confiscate all the blankets in there. I got several complaints and expletives thrown my way.

The kids had a quiet time every afternoon, where they had to stay in their rooms and not come out. I enforced the rules, because, again, that’s all I could do – provide them structure. When I was on the floor, kids were actually expected to stay in their rooms. Sometimes, they would step out to see who was in charge, see that it was me, then duck back in their rooms.

We had one girl who was a car thief. She was also one of the teenage moms. She was sixteen and her one year old baby girl was in foster care. On Saturdays, the kids were allowed to sleep in. I would sit at the end of the hallway, while they slept. One Saturday morning this teenage girl came up to talk to me. She was hanging out at the desk, shooting the breeze when she noticed my new engagement ring on my finger. She commented on how beautiful it was, and I noticed, she couldn’t keep her eyes off of it. I took it off to put lotion on, when I remembered who I was talking to. Someone said something to the teenage girl and she turned to speak with them, so I quickly picked up my ring and hid it in my mouth. She turned back and I saw her eyes scan the desk for my ring. She looked at my hand, then back at the desk, but couldn’t see where it went. I know, that if I hadn’t stuck it in my mouth, she would have somehow gotten it and I would never see it again.

Another girl was sex crazed. She was only thirteen, but all she ever talked about was sex. She was either talking about penises or sex or flirting with the guys. She thought she was so clever when she turned the word penis and pronounced it pen-es. Like none of us knew what she was talking about.

All the kids had serious problems. Whether it was drugs, sex, or crime, they were all into something. Another staff member commented that these kids weren’t in juvenile hall YET, because they hadn’t gotten caught-YET.

I hated the job, but I learned some things while there. There was something that really surprised me when I first started working there. We had to do room inspections on the kids’ rooms to make sure they didn’t have any contraband: drugs, porn, food, etc. When I first went from room to room, inspecting them, I found something in almost every room that surprised me. Almost every girl there had a Bible. And they weren’t all the same Bibles. They were all different. Some were white, leather Bibles, some were soft covered Bibles, or others were small, New Testaments, but almost every single girl had some kind of Bible. I was so shocked by this. But then, I had to remember, God says He’s a Father to the fatherless. No one can hide from Him. God was moving in these kids’ lives, as He always does. Revealing who He is. I don’t know how much those girls read their Bibles, but almost all of them had one. And they weren’t allowed to bring a whole lot to the home, only the bare necessities. So with them, in their problem infested, ruined, lives, they knew the Bible was some kind of life line.