After seeing firsthand how failures in the social services end of a child’s life can lead to that child’s landing in the criminal justice system, she felt she needed more ammunition if she was going to help.
“Just going through it and then working for it, I saw the pitfalls and how children get lost in the cracks,” she said. “I was one of those children that didn’t trust the system. You have these promises that are never kept. You turn around and you see a different worker all of the time. And I wanted to understand it a little bit more.”
Davis-Boyer has lots of advice for kids in the social service system based on her own experiences. For one thing, kids in foster care should learn to be as inquisitive as possible, she said.
“A lot of youth in foster care don’t realize that they’re wards of the state, and that the state takes care of them,” she said. “There were a lot of resources out there for me and I started asking about them at first because I was tired of people asking me questions. I ended up getting driving lessons, financial aid and scholarships. I was able to benefit from the supervised independent living program and had my own apartment at 17.”
One of the services she found was a tutoring program administered by the School of Social Administration’s Center for Social Policy and Community Development. Her main reason for going to these sessions wasn’t so much to get extra scholastic help, but to help her sisters — who were still under their mother’s care — with such things as clothes, money, food and diapers without anyone finding out, Davis-Boyer said.
But those tutoring sessions led to her becoming a student at Temple, thanks to her mentor, Program Coordinator for the Achieving Independence Center Harold Brooks. He knew that Davis-Boyer had the grades and the smarts for higher education; it was just a matter of getting her to go.
She fought him tooth and nail, she said.
“I didn’t think that I was college material,” she said. “But he wouldn’t give up. He kept pushing me, and I started to get acceptance letters from colleges. That felt good.”
She also credits Brooks with giving her a tool that she now uses in her work with youth in trouble at the Daniel Boone School: the word “why.”
Although she was a good student, she also was a discipline problem, Davis-Boyer said. Her situation at home was causing her to be angry and express that anger through fighting. While no one else had asked her what was going on, Brooks did, she said.
“We’re always so quick to label children,” Davis-Boyer said. “What happened to someone sitting down with the child and asking why he or she is acting out? ‘Why’ is such a powerful word. It makes you think before you do something. That’s what I always teach my kids [at Daniel Boone].”
The biggest challenge she faced with returning to school was trying to make sure that she had time with her husband, Chester, her daughter, Synia, 3 and the little sister that she adopted, Hazel, 9. Because she’s dedicated to her mother and grandmother, finding the time to study while caring for all of them was a challenge, she said.
But because of what she ultimately wants to do, Davis-Boyer believes that the sacrifice was worth it, something that she’ll impart to her daughter when she’s old enough to understand.
“Spending time with your children and bonding with them is crucial,” she said. “I had to keep reminding myself that I’m doing this for her and because of that, it’s meaningful. Hopefully, she’ll understand someday.”
While it would have been easy for her to look at her life and see only what went wrong, Davis-Boyer said that if she had gone that route, she would have sold herself, and the children that she hopes to help now that the city is addressing its social service issues, short.
“I’ve always had responsibility,” she said. “I never had the chance to be a child because I was always in adult situations. But, life is what you make of it. You have to be positive and you have to be strong.” |
