Even though Jacoby Wright had a rocky start in life, he achieved his dream of becoming a Marine.

After going through the Waterford Country School foster care program 10 years ago and living with numerous foster parents trying to “find his feet,” Foster Care Coordinator Rich Heller helped connect him with the Marine Corps where “he found the family that he had been looking for,” WCS Therapeutic Foster Parent Recruiter Sarah Butterfield said. That’s where he “found confidence and sense of self.”

Wright went on to own his own real estate company on the West Coast and earn hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Fifteen-year-old Alyssa’s life was also transformed almost four years ago when she was moved to a newly trained and licensed WCS foster family after she struggled to abide by all the rules of her previous “pretty strict” parent. When she brought Alyssa to meet the new family, Butterfield said, “It was one of those moments where the clouds parted and the heavens opened. It just was meant to be.”

Alyssa immediately clicked with this family, which was “very easygoing” and “amazing,” Butterfield said during a telephone interview. Plus, the foster mother was already a “stay at home mom, which was great for this kid” and she had grown children, so “she’d already been through being a mom several times over.”

Additionally, the parents fostered before and were familiar with the legal system. Later, they adopted Alyssa and her baby half-brother. This happy family moved out of state and now lives on the beach. Alyssa is away at college in Arizona and doing great.

Even though a lot of people are “tapped out” right now because of the pandemic, Butterfield believes there are people who are looking to really “make the world a better place one kid at a time,” which is her motto, a variation on WCS’ maxim: “Whatever It Takes.”

“Having that one person that believes in you, it helps through any recovery, whether it be substance use, trauma, or just kind of making it through childhood, when you’ve been dealt a pretty crappy hand through no fault of your own. Some kids can’t return home, so we want to make sure that we have parents that can fill the slots for some of our foster parents who choose to adopt.”

Butterfield said some children have witnessed or were victims of domestic violence. “Some have absolutely horrific stories and have lived through real hell in their young years. So a lot of our kids have trouble just being a normal kid and playing, because their perspective is a lot larger than kind of what it should be at this point, so we really like to get them connected into their communities to do kid-like things.”

“The fallout of the opiate epidemic has really hit kids very hard. Some parents aren’t able to care for their children due to addiction. They lose custody of their children, and the children lose that connection, which is a huge blow developmentally to any child. So that’s a huge issue.”

Children cope with various mental-health issues, such as depression, anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and bipolar disorder.

In “real life,” this might mean children are “extra anxious about school, because they haven’t had a positive experience” yet, she said. Sometimes, they have “triggers to certain events that happened” so you “just have to know the kid.”

Butterfield said WCS does a great job building relationships and that the coordinator “spends a lot of time with the child getting to know them” and follows children until they “age out” of foster care – even if the child moves to a different foster home.

Orphaned herself, Butterfield empathizes with foster children and feels like she has the “inside scoop into what’s going on in the mind of the teenage foster child” and that “sense of limbo” of not being in charge of their lives yet.

After her mother died in a car accident when she was 13 and her father died of cancer when she was 15, Butterfield (youngest of five children) “bounced around” from living with her oldest sister “who definitely did not have training,” then a friend and later worked full time and attended college.

The WCS Foster Program has served hundreds since its inception 20 years ago. Currently, they have 80 foster children with therapeutic and medically complex issues in Middlesex, New London and Windham counties. Foster parents are reimbursed “at a rate of $55.55 per child per day for wherever they sleep at night,” Butterfield said.

Everyone that applies must pass a background check, attend training classes (which are currently held on Zoom because of the pandemic) and be licensed. During the training process, workers learn how each family interacts, what it likes to do on weekends and what daily life is like throughout the week, Butterfield said.

“Every kid is very unique and the best matches are when kids and parents have something in common,” such as sports, gymnastics, swimming, horseback riding, cooking, or whatever “makes their eyes light up,” Butterfield said. That’s why they need a variety of foster families of different races with various hobbies, passions, energy levels, interest in religion and those that are LGBTQ+.

“So we are able to better put them into the homes that we feel would work out. We’re pretty good at it. Our kids don’t tend to ‘bounce around.’”

Support staff is available 24/7. After 5 p.m., foster parents call their “on-call” system when there is any kind of emergency or crisis. Then a supervisor will call them back within 30 minutes.

If they can’t solve or help with the issue on the phone, she said “they would send out one of the coordinators” to the home or wherever the child is to try and “de-escalate the situation, make sure everyone’s good, maybe the kid would need to be moved into respite for everyone to calm down for the night.”

Butterfield reflects on the quote, “Be the person you needed when you were younger” by author and advocate Ayesha Siddiqi.

“I think we all do a good job of doing that” at Waterford Country School (celebrating its 100th anniversary in Waterford) and Foster Care Program in Norwich.

For more information about Waterford Country School Foster Care at 2 Clinic Drive in Norwich, go to Waterfordcountryschool.org, Facebook: Waterford Country School Foster Care, where there is a link to sign up for online forms to apply to be foster parents. Or call Sarah Butterfield in Norwich at (860) 886-7500, ext. 5170.

Jan Tormay, a longtime resident of Norwich, now lives in Westerly.