Addicted moms get second chance

Center helps women get clean and regain custody of their kids

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Nov 9, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (27 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO:

After losing custody of son Elijah Search, 10, and daughter Jaydika Anderson, 1, when her boyfriend was arrested for selling drugs, Crystal Stuebner was able to clean up her life and get her kids back by completing a program at the Letty Owings Center.

For Crystal Stuebner, the list of obstacles standing between her and a stable life was long. She was a methamphetamine addict who smoked marijuana and gambled.

At 27, she had no idea she might attain any other life.

But the list of things that could make Stuebner change was short.

On the day the couple’s hotel room was raided and Stuebner’s boyfriend was arrested on drug charges, Oregon Department of Human Services caseworkers took custody of her 2-month-old daughter.

“I felt like the world was swept out from under my feet when I had to call my son’s grandma and say DHS is on their way, they just took my daughter, and they’re on their way to get Elijah (her 9-year-old son),” Stuebner says.

The children became legal wards of the state, but Stuebner was given a choice. She could regain custody, she was told, if she straightened out her life. And she could begin that process if she entered the residential program at the Letty Owings Center in Northeast Portland.

As state officials confront a foster home system that appears to be failing huge numbers of children at increasingly greater expense, the Letty Owings Center in Northeast Portland represents an alternative – and has for 18 years.

The center, funded largely through state funds funneled through the nonprofit Central City Concern, takes in drug-addicted and alcoholic women who are pregnant or the mothers of young children.

With an intensive daily dose of addiction treatment and parenting education, the center prepares them to lead stable lives as mothers.

Over the last 18 years, 750 women have graduated from the center, most after living between six and nine months in the facility.

Nearly all of the women at the center are there because, like Stuebner, they have lost legal custody of their children.

Most have been allowed by courts to maintain physical custody of their youngest child as long as they stay at the center and receive treatment for their addictions.

The 10 or so women who arrive at the center each year while pregnant are hoping to retain custody of the children they are carrying. Most of them have lost custody of other children.

But the Letty Owings Center is gearing up for a landmark event. Sometime in the next few months, the 200th baby will be born to a woman staying at the center.

According to Director Nancy Anderson, that mother will have to have fulfilled Letty Owings requirements – requirements many women find too difficult – to be able to maintain custody of her baby when she leaves.

Anderson says that one out of four women who come to the center leave within the first two weeks, and lose the chance to keep or regain custody of their children.

“It’s hard to engage them the first two weeks,” Anderson says. “It’s fearful to them. It’s frightening. They don’t like constraints.”

Among those who make it through those first weeks, Anderson says, nine out of 10 “graduate” by fulfilling all of the center’s requirements. As for how many of those graduates remain drug-free after leaving the center, Anderson says she can only guess because she hasn’t found grant money to finance a long-term study of Letty Owings graduates.

Success can save money

Sarah Goforth, director of alcohol, drug and mental health services for Central City Concern, says that because most of the women who graduate from Letty Owings are placed in supportive housing subsidized by Central City Concern, informally the nonprofit keeps tabs on many of them. And the reports, Goforth says, often are positive.

“We certainly hear back and forth,” Goforth says. “A large percentage do well.” And a number of the Letty Owings graduates, Goforth says, get back the older children who had been taken from their custody before they entered the center.

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