The caseworker’s name was Denise Pruitt. I remember because she always smelled like those butterscotch candies old ladies keep in their purses, and she smiled too much for someone delivering bad news.
“Pack your bag, sweetheart. New placement.”
Fourth time in eleven months. I was nine.
I didn’t cry anymore by then. Crying made the other kids in group homes look at you. I just grabbed the trash bag with my stuff. Two shirts, a book about horses I’d stolen from a library in Dayton, underwear that didn’t fit right.
But this time was different.
This time, the woman at the new house was Cheryl Kowalski. Fifty-three. Hands rough from gardening. She didn’t crouch down to my level like they train you in the foster parent classes. She just stood in her doorway in these beat-up slippers and said, “You hungry? I burned the mac and cheese but it’s still edible.”
I stayed with Cheryl for fourteen months. Longest I’d been anywhere since my bio mom went away. I started sleeping through the night. Stopped hiding food in my pillowcase.
Then Denise showed up again. Butterscotch. That smile.
“Pack your bag, sweetheart.”
Cheryl’s face did something I’d never seen a foster parent’s face do. She grabbed the doorframe. White knuckles. And she said one word to Denise: “No.”
What happened after that. Six years of what happened after that. Cheryl hired a lawyer she couldn’t afford. Exposed a rotation scheme in our county where certain supervisors cycled kids between homes to justify budget increases. More kids in motion meant more federal dollars. We were line items. I was a line item.
Cheryl lost her fostering license for “non-compliance.” Lost her savings. Lost her house on Elm Court with the garden out back.
She never stopped.
Last Tuesday, I got a manila envelope in the mail. No return address. Inside: six years of internal emails between Denise Pruitt and her supervisor, Greg Hatch. Dates. Dollar amounts. My case number highlighted in yellow on seven different transfer authorizations.
And paper-clipped to the front page, in Cheryl’s handwriting I’d recognize anywhere:
“Now you know. Now show them.”
I haven’t called her yet. I’m sitting in my car outside the county courthouse and my hands won’t stop shaking because what’s also in that envelope
What Was Also in That Envelope
A death certificate.
Cheryl Kowalski. Died March 3rd, 2024. Pancreatic cancer. Diagnosed eight months before she mailed the packet. She knew she was dying when she put this together.
She’d organized everything. Tabs. Color-coded sticky notes. Six years of legal correspondence, FOIA requests, denied appeals, and one hand-drawn timeline on graph paper showing every child in the county who’d been moved more than three times in a calendar year between 2013 and 2019. Forty-seven names. Mine was circled twice.
I sat in my car for forty minutes. The parking meter ran out and I got a ticket. I didn’t move.
I kept thinking about her slippers. Gray. One of them had a hole by the big toe. That’s the first thing I noticed about Cheryl. Not the house, not the yard. The hole in her slipper. She didn’t care what I thought of her. That was new.
The House on Elm Court
I should tell you what those fourteen months were like. Because I think people hear “foster care” and they picture either the horror-movie version or the Hallmark version and neither is right.
Cheryl’s house was small. Three bedrooms, but one was storage. Boxes of her dead husband’s things she hadn’t gotten to yet. Stan. He’d been gone two years when I showed up. Heart attack at a Kroger. She told me that on my second night there, just flat, while she was doing dishes. “Stan dropped dead at the grocery store. I still can’t go to that Kroger. Isn’t that stupid? Like the building did it.”
She didn’t ask me questions about where I’d been. Didn’t ask about my bio mom. Didn’t try to be my friend.
She made dinner every night at 5:45. Sometimes it was bad. She wasn’t a good cook and she knew it. Once she served me fish sticks that were still frozen in the middle and she ate one, made a face, and said, “Well, that’s raw.” And we both laughed and had cereal instead.
She let me read whatever I wanted. Got me a library card. My own library card with my name on it. I’d never had anything with my name printed on it that wasn’t a court document.
I slept in a twin bed with a green comforter that smelled like fabric softener. The kind in the purple bottle. I know because I’d open the hall closet just to smell it sometimes when she was asleep. I don’t know why. To make sure it was still there maybe.
Month four, she found the food under my pillow. Granola bars, crackers, one apple that had gone brown. She didn’t say anything about it. She just put a basket on my nightstand with some snacks in it and said, “These are yours. Nobody touches them but you.” Refilled it every Sunday.
Month eight, I called her Cheryl for the first time instead of “ma’am.” She didn’t make a big deal about it. Looked over from the TV and said, “Hm?”
Month eleven, I started to wonder if she’d want to keep me.
Month fourteen, Denise came.
What “No” Costs
I learned all this later. Pieces of it from Cheryl’s letters. Pieces from the lawyer, a woman named Sandra Doyle who worked out of a strip mall office in Fairborn. Pieces from the documents in the envelope.
When Cheryl said no, Denise wrote her up for “failure to cooperate with placement directives.” First offense. Verbal warning in the file.
Cheryl called Sandra Doyle the next day. Sandra charged $175 an hour. Cheryl was living on Stan’s pension and Social Security. She paid Sandra $200 that first meeting (Sandra cut it short by fifteen minutes; I found the receipt) and filed a formal inquiry into why I was being transferred.
The county’s response took six weeks. The reason given: “Therapeutic reassessment indicating need for specialized behavioral care.” I was nine and had no behavioral issues on file. My grades had gone from Ds to Bs at Cheryl’s. I was sleeping. Eating at a table.
Sandra filed a challenge. The county moved me anyway. I went to a place in Springfield. The Reidels. Brenda and Tom Reidel. They had four foster kids already and a beagle that bit. I slept on an air mattress in a room with a boy named Kevin who was thirteen and stole my horse book.
I was there five months.
Then I moved again. Then again.
Meanwhile, Cheryl was calling Sandra every week. Sending letters to the county. Showing up at board meetings. She was nobody. A retired dental hygienist with a dead husband and dirt under her fingernails from her tomato plants. And she was making noise.
They pulled her license in 2016. The stated reason was a bullshit technicality about continuing education hours. Sandra Doyle told her it was retaliation and that they could fight it, but the legal fees would be significant. Cheryl sold her car. Bought a used Civic with 140,000 miles from a lot on Route 35.
That same year, Sandra filed a FOIA request for all transfer authorizations involving children in the county’s care between 2012 and 2016. The county stalled. Missed deadlines. Claimed lost records. Sandra filed a complaint with the state. Nothing happened for nine months.
Cheryl lost her house in 2018. She couldn’t keep up with property taxes and the legal costs at the same time. She moved into an apartment on the east side of town. Kept the garden boxes from Elm Court, put them on the apartment balcony.
I didn’t know any of this was happening. I was fourteen by then. Four more placements. I’d stopped thinking about Cheryl. Stopped thinking about most things. You learn to make yourself flat. Take up no space.
Greg Hatch’s Inbox
The emails in the envelope go back to 2013. That’s a year before I even entered the system. This was happening before me. I was just one of the kids it happened to.
Greg Hatch was a budget supervisor for the county’s Division of Child and Family Services. Not a caseworker. Not anyone who’d ever met a kid in care. He worked on the fourth floor of the county building in an office with no windows, from what Sandra later told me.
The emails are between him and three caseworkers. Denise was one.
The scheme was simple. Federal Title IV-E funding is tied to placement changes. Every time a child moves, there’s administrative processing. New paperwork. New assessments. New billing. Each transfer generated between $4,200 and $8,900 in reimbursable costs depending on the type of placement. Multiply that by forty-seven kids moved three, four, five, six times a year.
One email from Hatch to Denise, dated November 2015: “Need to get transfer numbers up before Q4 close. Flag any stable placements over 10 months for reassessment.”
I’d been with Cheryl twelve months when Denise came.
Another, from January 2016: “Kowalski still making noise. Revoke cert and reallocate her cases. Don’t need this right now.”
He wrote it like he was talking about inventory. Moving boxes from one shelf to another.
Denise replied in twelve minutes: “Done. Will process Monday.”
Twelve minutes.
Why I Haven’t Called
Cheryl’s dead. There’s no one to call.
I keep picking up the phone anyway. Put it down. Pick it up. Her old number’s probably disconnected. Someone else’s phone now. But my hands keep wanting to do the thing they’d do if she was alive.
I’m twenty-three. I aged out of the system at eighteen. Got my GED. Work at a distribution center outside Columbus. I have an apartment with a lease in my name. I have a library card. I still think about the one Cheryl got me.
She never adopted me. The system made sure of that. You can’t adopt a child when you’ve lost your foster license. You can’t even get visitation in most cases. I saw her once after they took me. 2017. She showed up at my school. Just stood by the fence at recess. Didn’t say anything. One of the teachers told her she had to leave.
She left.
And she kept fighting for four more years after that.
Tuesday, 9:47 AM
I’m still in the parking lot. The death certificate is on the passenger seat. The envelope is in my lap. The county courthouse is right there, gray stone, pigeons on the steps.
I think about what happens if I go in. If I give this to someone. A reporter. A lawyer. The state AG’s office. I think about Greg Hatch, who according to LinkedIn still works in county government. Different department now. I think about Denise Pruitt, who retired in 2020 with a full pension.
I think about forty-seven kids. Some of them are adults now like me. Some of them are still in the system.
I open the car door.
My foot hits the pavement and I’m thinking about burned mac and cheese and a basket of snacks nobody touches but me and a woman who stood in court seventeen times for a kid she’d known fourteen months.
I grab the envelope.
I go inside.
Stories like these stay with you long after you finish reading. For another account of someone fighting to protect a child from a broken system, check out the story of a grandmother who discovered what they were calling “therapy”, and if the name Pruitt caught your eye, The Boats From Garfield Township opens with a Donna Pruitt facing a different kind of loss entirely.
