‘A SECURE PLACE’

“Home is where your story begins.”

They are six simple words that adorn a wall hanging in the Christmas-decorated living room of Dan and Sharon Robbins’ Santa Clara neighborhood home.

And the couple has provided a home for nearly 40 foster children — anywhere from a few days old to a couple of years — since being certified as foster parents in 1995. Many of them have arrived there as newborns, handed to them by state Department of Human Services workers, or sometimes even the birth mothers themselves.

Others, such as Dakota, now 15 and the Robbins’ adopted son, arrived when they were a few months old.

“I love it,” Sharon Robbins, 53, says, when asked why she and her husband of almost 33 years decided to become foster parents to babies born to parents with drug and alcohol problems; parents who have neglected and/or abused their infants; or parents who’ve had children removed by the state before, and thus have had their newborn children taken under the DHS’s “threat of harm” category.

“And I guess, in some ways, it answers a need in my own heart,” continues Sharon, holding her latest foster child, a tiny 3-month-old baby girl who weighed 3 pounds at birth, and weighs only 6 pounds today.

“I mean, listen to them,” Sharon says of the children in her house, which resounds with the cacophony of ear-piercing screams and thundering feet. “When they’re not screaming,” Sharon adds, with her eruptive, infectious laugh.

“I know that what we provide is a secure place for them,” she says. “We love them like they’re our own, at the same time knowing they belong to somebody else.”

Two child abuse cases in the past 13 months shocked Lane County residents and led to an investigation of the state DHS’ Lane County branch, which concluded that both were isolated cases and not part of some larger, systemic problem. But for every foster care case that goes wrong, that ends up in front-page headlines, there are at least 100 others that serve as examples of the way it is supposed to be done, the Robbinses say.

“We can do better than that”

As a young married couple, the Robbinses had been trying for three years to have a baby when they decided in 1981 to adopt an infant boy from Mexico. What they didn’t realize was that Sharon had finally just become pregnant with a girl. Thus they raised Nick, now 29, and Brianna, now 28, together.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, Sharon considered becoming a foster parent.

“Kind of like now, there were some horrible stories of children in foster care,” she says. “And I thought, ‘We can do better than that.’ ”

Dan Robbins, however, was not quite so adamant about being a foster parent, and the idea was shelved.

About a decade later, with Nick and Brianna by now teenagers, Sharon says she had an epiphany while reading a book from C.S. Lewis’ beloved children’s series, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” a story of siblings magically transported through a wardrobe to a land where animals talk.

She begins to cry as she recalls the moment when the character of Lucy meets the lion, Aslan, and is the only one who sees him at first. And how Aslan instructs her to follow him on a journey pitting good against evil.

“As a Christian, I felt in my heart this is where he is taking me,” she says of God. “And I told Dan, ‘This is what we have to do.’

“And Dan said, ‘I don’t so much hear God telling me that,’ ” she says, another laugh breaking through her tears. But her husband eventually relented, and the couple began the process of becoming foster parents with a call to state officials.

Dakota, now a sophomore at North Eugene High School, was their first, arriving in May 1995 at the age of 4 months. He is the only one of their foster children they have adopted.

However, the Robbinses adopted two other children who were in the state’s foster care system outside their home. David is now 14 and a special-needs student at Spencer Butte Middle School; Corwin, 9, is also a special-needs student, at Gilham Elementary School.

David was 5 and living with a foster family in the Portland area when the Robbinses adopted him. Shaken as an infant, David sustained brain damage and uses a wheelchair to get around. Corwin, who is developmentally disabled, was adopted when he was 3 from a Baker City foster home.

The Robbinses are also in the process of adopting two of their current foster children, twin 2-year-old boys they have cared for since they were infants. The six children in their home now is the most they have ever had, and one below the state’s maximum for foster parents.

Although some feel foster parents do it just for the money the state provides them, the Robbinses say being foster parents is not a money-making proposition.

“To put it into perspective, it’s about $20 a day per child,” Sharon says. “I think of it like a baby-sitter. Who wouldn’t love to have a baby-sitter for $20 a day? The taxpayers of the state get a pretty good bargain.”

The math bears her out on the basic rate for foster children up to age 5. The state reimburses Oregon foster parents $629 per month to provide food, shelter, clothing, etc. for children that age. That breaks down to $20.67 per day. Rates are higher for older children, and foster parents get additional money for caring for children with special needs.

Also, when foster parents adopt the children, they can negotiate with the state to continue an “adoption subsidy” up to, but not more than, the foster care reimbursement rate. The Robbinses receive subsidies for all three of their adopted boys, but it is only a fraction of the foster care rates, Sharon says.

“Moment in time”

The Robbins’ passion for providing a home for children in need has rubbed off on adult daughter Brianna, who has worked for the Lane County branch of DHS the past six years — first as a caseworker and now as a foster home certifier — after graduating from George Fox University in Newberg.

What’s more, she has adopted one of her parents’ foster children, Gabriel, who came to the Robbinses for 10 days of respite care as a 15-month-old.

Today, Brianna and Gabriel live across the street from Dan and Sharon’s home in a house that Brianna bought.

Brianna Robbins has seen firsthand the challenge, difficulty and stress that DHS caseworkers undergo in finding suitable homes for foster children. Her first days and months on the job as a 22-year-old caseworker were “terrifying,” Brianna says.

“These are people’s lives,” she says. “You’re making decisions that are going to affect people’s lives forever. That’s a huge responsibility.”

Her parents now work with caseworkers and certifiers in Douglas County to avoid any conflict of interest with their daughter being a Lane County DHS certifier.

Sharon Robbins says she is puzzled by cases like that of the 9-year-old Blachly boy whose adoptive parents, Alona and Rodger Hartwig, received prison sentences after pleading guilty last summer to physically abusing him. The boy first came into their home as a foster child. A DHS investigative report on the case released last month concluded that DHS officials and staff failed to give adequate attention to nine child abuse allegations leveled at the Hartwigs over a 5½-year period after they were certified as foster parents in 2003.

“Knowing how closely I’ve worked with my caseworker, it’s always difficult for me to understand how it could get to that place,” Sharon says. “I have a hard time understanding how families can hide that stuff where it ends up to the point where a child is hospitalized.”

Dan Robbins says he and his wife have always been very trusting of others. But their experience as foster parents, and dealing with birth parents who’ve had children taken away, has taught them to not be so trusting, he says.

“You look at them,” Dan says. “You talk to them. They come off looking very normal, very intelligent. But they know how to pull a con. We’ve had to kind of learn to see the cons and not be trusting all the time.

“But I think for every bad one, there’s probably 100 good ones,” he says of foster parents.

Tragedies like the Hartwig case create enormous difficulties for the system, he says. “I think that’s one of the reasons there aren’t more people willing to be foster parents,” he says. “When these things happen, it’s bad publicity and rightly so.”

The Robbinses, though, say they would never trade their experiences.

“You have to go into it with the attitude that they are not my children, but I’m going to do the best I can for this moment in time,” Sharon says. “It’s just a little window. And you try and make the biggest impact you can. … When kids leave here, they take a little bit of us with them. We still love them. Just because they are not in our home anymore, doesn’t mean they’re no longer a part of our lives.”

They always try to help keep the children’s birth parents in the picture, she adds. They invite them into their home. And they stay in touch with the children who leave their home and are adopted by other families.

“It’s the hardest, most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Sharon says.