[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 139 (Friday, September 8, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1737-E1739]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


            MARYVILLE ACADEMY--AN OASIS OF HOPE FOR ORPHANS

                                 ______


                           HON. HENRY J. HYDE

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 7, 1995
  Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, policy makers have been discussing the merits 
of orphanages within the concept of foster care and the need to restore 
the family in our society.
  R. Bruce Dold, the Pulitzer Prize winning deputy editorial page 
editor for the Chicago Tribune, has written an excellent article for 
Notre Dame magazine, Summer 1995 edition on Maryville, a ``home of last 
resort.'' I am extremely proud of Maryville, which is located in my 
district, and of Father John Smyth, the academy's director.
  Mr. Dold's article deserves a wide audience and I am pleased to 
commend it to my colleagues:
              [From the Notre Dame Magazine, Summer 1995]

                         A Place to Call My Own

                           (By R. Bruce Dold)

       He was a real wisenheimer, as they called it in those days, 
     a cigar-smoking, card-playing, suspenders-and-fedora kid, and 
     if he didn't straighten out quick, why, ``he'd turn out to be 
     a 5-and-10 mug.'' That's what his older brother said. That's 
     the reason Whitey Marsh had to go to the orphanage.
       Oh, it wasn't easy at first. The kid ran away, but the 
     sound of the lunch bell brought him back on the double. And 
     when his brother robbed the bank and Whitey wouldn't spill 
     the beans, it looked dark.
       But Whitey was a good egg after all, and when he explained 
     everything, how he was just trying to help his own flesh and 
     blood, they let him go. And he was elected the mayor of Boys 
     Town.
       His father took off when he heard Tony Kohl was born. His 
     mother was a drunk who beat him and burned him, and when he 
     was 5 and his brother was 2, she dumped them both outside a 
     child welfare office in Chicago.
       They were adopted, but the new parents grew fearful of Tony 
     as he got older. They said he was violent and emotionally 
     unstable, that he hit his brother and other kids. When he was 
     10, they dropped him at an orphanage and tried to make sure 
     he'd never see his brother again.
       The child welfare officials wouldn't let him stay at the 
     orphanage. They put him in a foster home. But he lured some 
     of the younger kids into sex games, and the foster parents 
     got rid of him. The officials put him in a psychiatric 
     hospital, and after four months they placed him in another 
     foster home. He set that one on fire, earning himself another 
     trip to a hospital.
       He went through a dozen foster homes, each time getting in 
     trouble and getting kicked out. So they shipped him to a 
     place in Arizona he describes as ``a prison,'' and he hated 
     it.
       Finally, a year ago, he was sent to Maryville Academy, the 
     112-year-old children's home in Des Plaines, Illinois, run by 
     Father John Smyth '57. After a failed adoption and a dozen 
     foster homes and two psychiatric hospitals and one 
     ``prison,'' he's finally, at age 16, found a place that won't 
     kick him out or lock him up. He's not the mayor of Maryville, 
     but he's doing okay.
       When House Speaker Newt Gingrich raised the prospect of 
     removing unwed teenage mothers from welfare and allowing 
     states to use the saved money to open orphanages, he stepped 
     into a quietly raging war among those who make it their 
     business to look after abused and neglected children.
       When First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton slammed the Gingrich 
     proposal as ``unbelievable and absurd,'' it appeared to be 
     one more clash of partisan politics. Actually, the public was 
     getting its first glimpse of that war among child-care 
     experts.
       Gingrich's suggestion that the naysayers watch the 1938 
     movie Boys Town to get an idea of what he had in mind was 
     cockeyed. Whitey Marsh, the mug-to-mayor character played by 
     Mickey Rooney, is as much like Tony Kohl as The Great Train 
     Robbery is like Star Wars. But in a sense he probably didn't 
     grasp, Gingrich was on to something.
       The United States is currently the de facto parent for 
     nearly half a million abused and neglected children, and the 
     number is growing at a dizzying rate. The nation doesn't know 
     what to do with all these kids, or with scores more who are 
     on the way.
       The revival of the orphanage is an unhappy, but utterly 
     unavoidable, choice. The experts just aren't willing to admit 
     it.
       They held a roast last year for John Smyth, but nobody 
     could think of anything particularly snide to say about him. 
     The best line came from Chicago Police Superintendent Matt 
     Rodriguez, who claimed that the good father held the Notre 
     Dame record for most fouls in a varisty basketball game.
       In a town that routinely chews up and spits out public 
     figures, Smyth, 62, is regarded as an uncommon savior.
       He was a 6-foot, 5-inch center and team captain at Notre 
     Dame when the 1956-57 basketball team placed third in the 
     Mideast Regional of the NCAA tournament. He was picked in the 
     first round of the National Basketball Association draft by 
     the Saint Louis Hawks, but after barnstorming for 30 games 
     with a group of college stars picked to play against the 
     Harlem Globetrotters, he gave up basketball to enter Saint 
     Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago and, in 1962, the 
     priesthood.
       He knew nothing at all about Maryville when he was assigned 
     there, fresh out of the seminary, but he though he could hack 
     it for a few years. The place hadn't changed much since 1983, 
     when it opened as Saint Mary's Training School, an outgrowth 
     of a Chicago orphanage started a dozen years earlier to care 
     for children orphaned by the Great Chicago Fire.
       In the 1920s, Maryville housed as many as 1,200 children 
     during a flu epidemic, and that many again during the Great 
     Depression of the 1930s. But its fate was tied to changes in 
     the nation's child-welfare policies, and in the early 1970s 
     it nearly closed.
       Today there are 276 kids on the campus, a third of them 
     girls. None of the 276 is a Whitey Marsh.

[[Page E 1738]]

       There was a time, more than a century ago, when the 
     orphanage seemed on the cutting edge of child protection. 
     Children who were orphaned in the mid-19th century, usually 
     by health epidemics, either lived on the streets or were 
     placed with adults in poorhouses or jails. Some were shipped 
     west to live with farm families, who often treated them more 
     as indentured servants than as children.
       By comparison, the orphanage was a refuge.
       But orphanages fell into disfavor in the 1950s and '60s, 
     when studies suggested that very young children who grew up 
     in them suffered from developmental delays and failed to 
     establish personal relationships.
       With the advent of antibiotics and the welfare system, far 
     fewer children were orphaned by disease or economic 
     depression. If children had to leave their homes, it was more 
     likely because they had been abused or neglected. The nation 
     moved toward placing those children with foster families, 
     volunteers who provided a temporary, substitute family.
       In 1980, Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child 
     Welfare Act, which established that the nation's goal was to 
     prevent the removal of abused and neglected children from 
     their homes and, if they were removed, to reunify them with 
     their families as quickly as possible.
       The way station of choice for kids who
        had to leave their homes was now the foster family. The 
     orphanage, officially, was on the outs.
       What few people anticipated in 1980 was a new epidemic, one 
     that can't be wiped out by antibiotics: an epidemic of child 
     abuse. In 1982 there were 262,000 children living in 
     substitute care; that number now has soared to 450,000, a 
     high percentage of them the victims of sexual or physical 
     abuse or neglect.
       Smyth estimates that 85 to 90 percent of his youngsters 
     come from homes where parents are afflicted by cocaine or 
     alcohol abuse. A decade ago, 85 percent of the children at 
     Maryville could be expected eventually to return to their 
     parents. Now, just 15 percent have an realistic hope of ever 
     going home. Heck, only 15 percent have any hope of a parent 
     so much as showing up at Maryville for a visit.
       When kids come to Maryville, they are angry and lost. ``We 
     assume that they have not been taught any social skills at 
     all,'' Smyth says. ``Most of them have been through several 
     foster homes. It's just a mismatch there. We're the safety 
     net.''
       Indeed, by the time kids land at Maryville, they have 
     likely failed a half a dozen foster homes, deepening their 
     sense of distrust and cynicism and shattering their sense of 
     self-worth. Maryville is usually the last chance to repair 
     them.
       Since 1979, Maryville has run an intensive therapy program 
     based on the teacher-parent model pioneered at the modern-day 
     Boys Town in Nebraska. Up to nine children live in a 
     townhouse on 98-acre grounds in Des Plaines with a live-in 
     adult or a married couple. Everything is a socialization 
     experience. the kids make their own meals, shop for their 
     groceries, clean house, wash the dishes and balance the house 
     checkbook.
       During the day, the parent notes all of their positive and 
     negative behaviors and assigns points for each behavior. 
     Shaking hands and establishing eye contact with a visitor 
     earns points. Cleaning the dishes earns points. Asking for 
     help, giving compliments, completing homework can all be 
     worth points. Anti-social behaviors such as talking back or 
     picking a fight bring negative points.
       At 7 each evening, all the points are tallied on a 5-by-8-
     inch card. It is, in
      essence, a daily report card. Each child has to accumulate 
     10,000 points every day to earn privileges for the next 
     day: snacks, television, Nintendo, the telephone.
       Over time, the kids move up to higher levels. On the second 
     level they get a later bedtime, more TV time and a point-card 
     review every other day instead of daily. On the third level, 
     privileges are more loosely negotiated. On the fourth, the 
     kids achieve a considerable measure of independence.
       Run away from Maryville and they're busted right down to 
     the bottom.
       In 1982 there were about 140,000 foster homes available to 
     take in kids; in the most recent count by the National Foster 
     Parent Association, there were just 100,000. So where are 
     they putting all those kids?
       ``They're just putting more children in the homes,'' says 
     Gordon Evans, spokesman for the association. ``There's an 
     exodus of families. The kids' problems are much more severe 
     than ever before, and (the foster parents) don't know how to 
     cope.''
       The foster care system, noble in intent, is a bureaucratic 
     nightmare. Numerous studies have shown that many foster 
     parents aren't adequately trained to handle the most troubled 
     children. Moving children from foster home to foster home 
     forces them to deal with rejection again and again. Health 
     care for those children is so haphazard, as they bounce from 
     home to home, that some states have resorted to issuing 
     health-care ``passports'' so the latest doctor has some idea 
     of the child's health history.
       Some states have reacted to the problem by redoubling 
     efforts to prevent child abuse--or responding to it with 
     counseling and other services to parents and children in 
     their homes. Those efforts are necessary, but the results of 
     prevention efforts have been, at best, mixed.
       While the child welfare system imploded, something else 
     happened. Orphanages--the best of them, at least--evolved 
     into highly sophisticated models for turning around the lives 
     of the nation's most troubled kids through intensive, round-
     the-clock treatment.
       Far from the barracks image of the old-style orphanages, 
     the Maryville townhouse would be the envy of any college kid 
     crammed into a dorm room. Each house has a roomy kitchen, a 
     living room, a dining area and bedrooms--one for every two 
     kids. The living room has comfortable sofas and lounge 
     chairs, a 27-inch TV and a VCR. On the cork bulletin board, 
     the therapy schedule shares space with the gym schedule.
       ``They provide consistency, motivation and professional 
     care,'' says Patrick Murphy, the Cook County Public Guardian, 
     whose father was a Maryville resident from 1914 to 1917. 
     ``It's the only option for kids who can't handle the intimacy 
     and demands and inconsistency of a foster home.''
       Critics of institutional care argue that it can harm 
     children by depriving them of a family structure. Says Marion 
     Wright Edelman, director of the Children's Defense Fund, ``We 
     went back to foster care because orphanages are not all Boys 
     Towns. Most families are better than most institutions. That 
     does not mean it's not possible to have humane institutions, 
     but we believe in having a few adults and a few children 
     relating to each other. I don't want to say there's never 
     been a good orphanage, but it has to be at the very, very end 
     of the continuum.''
       Many of the kids at Maryville would agree. Give them a 
     family that wanted them and they'd be gone in a moment. But 
     many of those kids also acknowledge, perhaps reluctantly, 
     that they can't cut it in a family right now. Says
      Tony Kohl, ``I want to go home after school and not think of 
     myself as a Maryville kid. It'd be much different if I had 
     a regular family, but I understand that's not going to 
     happen.''
       Maryville will never force a child to leave, no matter how 
     difficult he is. But Tony has still had to deal with a 
     different kind of rejection. In the spring, his parent-
     teacher took a new job somewhere else. The change to a new 
     parent-teacher was hard on him, and his school grades 
     dropped.
       No one has the corner on perfection in child welfare. ``Any 
     kid who can be in a foster home should be in a foster home. 
     And if every kid can be in a foster home, close Maryville,'' 
     Smyth declares. ``The question you have to ask is, what 
     happens to the kids who are bounced out (of foster homes). If 
     you're going to turn your back on those kids, they'll be on 
     the street.
       ``When you take a kid who's bombed out from a foster care 
     program, who is destructive, then you better have the 
     wherewithal to hang in there and solve the problem. Now, that 
     is tough duty.''
       Besides psychological therapy, Maryville provides 
     preparation for teenagers to live on their own. It tries to 
     prepare them not only for independent living but for family 
     life as adults. It has a Career Development Center with 
     programs in carpentry, printing, auto repair and other 
     vocations, each one sponsored by a local company.
       While studies show nearly half the children who go through 
     foster care drop out of school, every child who lives at 
     Maryville graduates from high school. If a Maryville kid is 
     accepted to college. Maryville pays the tuition, thanks 
     largely to private donations. On average, one-third of each 
     graduating class goes on to college, and two-thirds of those 
     students earn a degree. Maryville has graduated kids from 
     Notre Dame, Northwestern and other top schools.
       All that comes at a hefty price; Maryville spends about 
     $35,000 a year on each child. The parent-teacher, unlike a 
     foster parent, is a paid professional. At Maryville they earn 
     at least $34,000 a year, plus room and board. These costs are 
     paid by the government and private donations.
       Smyth's operation also recruits and trains foster parents 
     and runs a parenting-teen center in Chicago, a witness 
     protection program, a farm school and an emergency shelter 
     for sexually abused children.
      Altogether, Maryville facilities assist more than 12,000 
     children each year.
       Yes, Maryville works.
       The aversion to orphanages nevertheless rages on. 
     Gingrich's proposal to direct money saved from welfare to 
     orphanages raised such an outcry that all references to 
     orphanages were removed from the House bill.
       But Gingrich had twisted the debate. Orphanages shouldn't 
     be repositories for the children of poor parents who are 
     forced off welfare; that's both mean-spirited and 
     prohibitively expensive. But more orphanages are needed right 
     now for children who are victims of serious physical or 
     sexual abuse.
       The genesis of the move to revive orphanages is generally 
     traced to Lois Forer, a retired judge in Philadelphia who 
     spent years in family court and saw no end to the foster-care 
     treadmill on which many children were running. Joyce Ladner, 
     the acting president of Howard University and a child welfare 
     expert, echoed Forer's opinion that more orphanages are 
     critically needed.
       Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm in 1989, 
     writing that the prevalence of crack-cocaine will ``soon give 
     us the no-parent child as a social problem.'' The likely 
     answer, he said, was the re-establishment of orphanages. Much 
     in the way that Moynihan's prescience about the underclass 
     was ignored in the 1960s, his warnings about the state of 
     children have been ignored today.

[[Page E 1739]]

       In 1991, Illinois became the first state to launch a formal 
     investigation into reviving orphanages. But a state-
     established task force concluded that orphanages are ``not 
     consistent'' with the goal of rapidly returning abused 
     children to their families. The task force seemed not to 
     notice that in the 18 months it spent preparing its report, 
     Illinois' foster-care rolls had swelled by another 11,000 
     children.
       The opponents of orphanages make several critical errors. 
     They raise fears that orphanages will be used inappropriately 
     in place of foster homes, but they don't recognize that 
     foster care is being destroyed by a system that forces 
     troubled kids into it who don't belong there, don't benefit 
     from it, and whose behavior hounds foster parents into 
     quitting.
       The opponents cling to the hope that better foster care and 
     ``family preservation''
      programs can handle the child-welfare crisis. It's true that 
     prevention programs are critical and show real promise, 
     but they are still in their infancy. And they're being 
     swamped by the child-abuse epidemic.
       Just as flu and typhoid created scores of orphans in the 
     1890s, so have crack-cocaine and AIDS in the 1990s. ``We're 
     always going to have dysfunctional families. But I'm 
     convinced that sexual abuse and physical abuse is the result 
     of being high on crack-cocaine and alcohol,'' says Smyth. 
     ``They're nuts, they're crazy: When they walk in a room, a 7-
     year-old girl looks like a 21-year-old girl. Human nature has 
     not changed that much in 10, 12, 15 years.''
       In the 1990s, child abuse often starts in the womb. At the 
     child intake center run by Maryville, roughly 5 to 10 infants 
     arrive each day suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome or the 
     symptoms of crack-cocaine use by their mothers.
       The nation can't handle its drug epidemic, which begat the 
     child welfare epidemic. It can't prevent drugs from being 
     manufactured here or shipped in from somewhere else. It 
     doesn't have enough jail cells to lock up the users. And it 
     does not want to spend the money for treatment.
       On top of that, the nation is just beginning to deal with 
     the disaster of a federal welfare policy that prevents 
     outright destitution but contributes to a permanent 
     underclass, which is most prone to child neglect.
       ``Everything it has done has destroyed families,'' says 
     Smith, who works closely with welfare recipients. ``These are 
     the conditions of welfare. You cannot own anything. You 
     cannot save anything, you cannot work and you can't get 
     married. I think that's slavery. If you took away welfare, 
     they'd work. And they'd live and they'd succeed. But you have 
     to raise people up so they can compete. You start by making 
     sure the family stays together and the kids stay in school.''
       Until the nation figures out how to raise up the underclass 
     and end drug abuse--utopian notions, perhaps--it has to 
     figure out what to do with all the kids who can't live safely 
     at home, particularly those whose emotional scars run 
     deepest.
       It cannot afford to turn its back on any reasonable 
     solutions. And that includes the 1990s version of the 
     orphanage.
     

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