Fostering a future: CLA graduating senior defies the odds

May 15, 2016

“I tell everybody all the time, ‘Am I really graduating or is it all a dream?’” Stacey Jerome said, grinning and shaking her head. For her, the College of Liberal Arts commencement ceremony isn’t just a rite of passage. It’s a declaration.

Jerome was taken out of her mother’s home when she was in fifth grade. She spent the next decade in foster care, shuttled from a bad foster home to a group home she says was like a prison before being allowed to live on her own with foster system support. By 16, she was a mother. Her second child arrived a year ago.

Now, the 23-year-old is graduating with a degree in family and human services in the Service to Children and Youth track. She plans to start a nonprofit to help ease the transition for older youth from the foster system to independence, but she might wait until after she gets a graduate degree in law or business.

Persistence isn’t new for Jerome. She graduated high school a year early, after her daughter was born. She went to a community college in Montgomery County, Maryland, before transferring to TU. For three months, she traveled three hours each way on public transportation to get to class, until she could buy a car.

At TU, she started the Students for CASA group to help Maryland CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) in its mission to ensure that every Maryland foster youth is properly cared for. She’s been interning at the organization, spurred by her own feelings that her lawyer and social worker didn’t help her enough.

“There were some times when my foster mom didn’t pay the bills,” Jerome remembered. “The water was cut off, and then she got ill. You would think I would go somewhere else, but they just let us stay there. She got cancer. She was really unable to take care of us. I was like, ‘Why would you let us stay here basically to help take care of her?’”

Maryland CASA’s Wendy Pulliam was assigned to Jerome’s case and helped Jerome advocate for herself. Pulliam says Jerome is one of a kind.

“Some children in foster care, because of their circumstances, sometimes that makes it difficult to see into the future,” Pulliam said. “Stacey has always had an uncanny ability to see what her future looks like.”

She also has the ability to make herself heard. Jerome served on a panel on Capitol Hill, explaining to lawmakers what policies can help foster youth and which ones don’t help at all.

And then there was the time she got an email from the president.

“I was just really going through a lot in my life, financial issues, housing issues, stuff like that,” Jerome said. “So I went to the White House website and I emailed the president saying, ‘Do you have any advice for somebody like me who grew up in foster care, just words of encouragement or motivation to help me out?’"

 

President Obama responded, saying, in part, “Where you are or what’s happening right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up—and if you have faith in yourself and hold on to the courage and resolve that have brought you this far, I’m confident you can reach your goals.”

“I shared that with other foster youth because this is something we all need, to know that someone cares about us and someone is rooting for us,” Jerome recalled. “People don’t actually know what we go through on a day-to-day basis. Some of us don’t have families. We feel like nobody loves us. We can’t go to anyone for support.”

Jerome said the support she got from her professors helped her finish school, even after her son was born last year. The courses she took in the family studies program helped her be a better parent to the children she says were her motivation every day. The Career Center, where she worked, has been what she called a second family. Now she’s looking for a job where she can advocate for young people and foster children, and looking forward to spending more time with her little ones.

“I’m excited to do family vacations with my kids.”

Those kids will watch their mother graduate, along with Wendy Pulliam, and Jerome’s mother and father.

“I really want to tell everyone who’s struggling, ‘Don’t give up. Keep going after your dream. Stay focused,’” Jerome said.

She graduates on Friday.

An email from president obama

Don't Give Up

“Where you are or what’s happening right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up—and if you have faith in yourself and hold on to the courage and resolve that have brought you this far, I’m confident you can reach your goals.”
—President Barack Obama, to Stacey Jerome, via email