Mrs. Hollis, the CASA volunteer, pointed at the bottom of the state payment ledger and said, Bernice, thats not the worst part. Every one of those transfers had to be approved by a supervisor. And that supervisor was sitting two rows behind me in the courtroom.
The judge had already ordered Mateo back to my home that same afternoon. Mrs. Hollis had pulled the county property records and shown that the therapeutic placement Ms. Pruitt moved my boy to belonged to Denise Pruitt Hale, Ms. Pruitts own sister, and that a therapeutic placement in Arkansas pays more than twice what I got. Four children moved into that one house in eight months, all from Ms. Pruitts caseload, all taken from older foster mothers she wrote up as paycheck moms.
And every one of those four transfers had a supervisors signature approving it. I turned around. Two rows back sat the regional placement supervisor, and his last name was Hale.
The man who signed off on moving four children into a house owned by Denise Pruitt Hale was Denises husband, which made the sister, the caseworker, and the supervisor all one family running children through one profitable address.
It was a business. A quiet, sickening little business. Ms. Pruitt found children in stable foster homes, wrote the foster mothers up as unfit paycheck moms, moved the kids to her sisters house under the higher-paying therapeutic label, and her brother-in-law the supervisor approved every move. The children were the inventory. The state checks were the point.
I have fostered thirty-one children in one little house in Little Rock. I am sixty-four, and I have a wall in my hallway with thirty-one school pictures on it. Mateo came to me at five. He did not talk for two months. He slept in his shoes in case somebody came to take him. His first word to me was pancakes. By nine he was reading two grades ahead and calling me Mama Bernie.
Then Ms. Trina Pruitt was assigned to us. She walked through my house like she was looking for dirt, opened my fridge, counted the beds, asked how much I get a month. Six hundred and twelve dollars, I told her, it doesnt cover his shoes. Three weeks later she came back with a deputy and pulled Mateos fingers off my apron one by one while he stood there in his socks. Youre a paycheck mom, she said. These kids are just a check to you.
My sister said maybe its time to let go, Bernie, youre getting older. I did not argue. I packed Mateos bag, his books, his nightlight, his red sneakers. And when a form slipped out of Ms. Pruitts clipboard, I saw an address and a last name, and I wrote both on the back of a grocery receipt and told nobody.
A CASA volunteer is court-appointed, and Mrs. Hollis had visited my house every month for four years, so she knew exactly what kind of home Mateo was being taken from. She did what I could not. She pulled the property records for that address, and the payment ledger for that one house, and she laid the whole scheme in front of a judge.
Moving children for profit, writing false reports to justify it, and approving your own familys placements is not casework. It is fraud and it is abuse of children in state care, and when the caseworker, the foster home, and the supervisor are all one family, it is a conspiracy a court does not treat gently.
Mateo came home that afternoon. I could not stand up when the judge said it. My legs would not work. Mrs. Hollis put her hand on my shoulder and steadied me.
Ms. Pruitt, her sister, and her brother-in-law the supervisor all faced the law, not my anger. The other three children were reviewed by a new team and returned where they belonged, or placed honestly for the first time. The paycheck moms they slandered got their names cleared.
Youre a paycheck mom, Ms. Pruitt told me, these kids are just a check to you. It turned out the only people treating those children like checks were the three who shared a last name and a bank account. Mateos red sneakers are back by my door. His picture will be the thirty-first on my wall, and the first one I ever had to fight a whole family to keep.