I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher Read Free Book Online Page A

going to be home for a while, and there wasn’t going to be a home to go back to anyway, since we were getting kicked out. We couldn’t run and hide from the authorities forever. If they couldn’t get us at the house, they’d just find us somewhere else.
    Sure enough, when I got to the office, Ms. Spivey and the DCS people were waiting, and they walked Carlos and me out to the big car that was waiting for us. Grown-ups always got their way. We just had to make do with whatever decisions were made for us.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Life in the System
    A fter more than twenty-two years of working for the department and several hundred children, Ms. Bobbie Spivey still remembers dealing with my brothers and sisters more clearly than just about any other in her career. “Certain families just stay with you,” she told me.
    The questions she was able to answer for me were definitely proof of that statement. I was amazed by how much she remembered. But, of course, there were going to be a lot of things that she couldn’t recall, couldn’t share, or simply didn’t know. For that reason, I wanted to do some research into my past. I accessed all the court records I could about my early life and time in foster care. Unfortunately, a lot of the records were missing—most of them, it seems. Just in the past couple of years, a federal lawsuit forced Tennessee to clean up its Child Welfare System. After years of bad management, disorganization, and out-of-date policies, they were forced to pretty much completely revamp the entire department.
    A lot of new people were brought in to help straighten things out and to get them running in a better way to actually meet the needs of the kids in the state instead of just shuffling papers—and kids—around. Now, the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services has some great people in charge, and I think it will make a huge difference in the kind of care the kids in the system receive. In fact, Tennessee is now one of only six states in the nation that has special accreditation for how it handles children in state custody. Back when Ms. Spivey was handling my family’s case, she was also in charge of about twenty others—not twenty other kids, but twenty other families. That was the normal workload for someone in her position. Now, with the new system, a social worker usually has fewer than ten family cases to manage at once. Obviously, that is a huge improvement and makes a big difference in the amount of time and energy they can give to helping each child under their care.
    But sometimes a system has to hit rock-bottom before it can be replaced with something better. Sadly, I was a part of the system right before the lawsuit brought all the problems to light, so a lot of the information and records about my life have been lost. What I have been able to find, though, has been amazing to study and jogged a lot of memories I’d thought were gone forever. I’ve also learned some new things I never knew before about my family and what all was really going on around me when I was too little to really understand it.
     
     
    CARLOS AND I WERE TAKEN from Coleman Elementary in the afternoon and brought to the home of a woman named Velma Jones, not too far away. It was a cream-colored house with burgundy shutters and a wide front porch. It wasn’t very big, but it was clearly the meeting place for the entire Jones family.
    Velma, or “Twin,” as everyone called both her and her sister, Thelma, was—and still is—one of the most energetic and involved ladies I know. Even though she is older now and has to use a motorized scooter to get around, she is still constantly on the go, doing some kind of community work anywhere that needs her.
    Each twin had several foster kids at her home. At Velma’s, besides just Carlos and me, there were four boys who I remember specifically, but I can’t use their names because of privacy laws. One had bad asthma and it was always a challenge for him to keep up if