I’m receiving a lot of questions about my experiences in foster care from people who have watched my podcast with @BenjaminABoyce ! I’m not sure if I can keep up with the responses one-on-one, so I’m going to begin a running thread here to update answers to popular questions.

Yes, I was moved around a landscape of about 30 to 45 placements in 12 1/2 years depending on how you count it. For the larger number, I’m counting all times I was uprooted and placed into a completely different social group. So it includes moves that occurred internally >>

Within the boys homes where I was placed, where I stayed with the same “company” but moved to a new program in a new location with new staff and peers. I was never given access to my records so I’m left to make these estimates from memory. But I’m confident they are accurate.

On @sheltondesigner ‘a podcast, you will hear me say that in the course of my K-12 “education”, I must have been moved between anywhere from 40 to 60 times. The reason this number is different than the number of “homes” is immediately apparent to anyone familiar with how >>

Group/Boys homes conduct themselves with regard to their client’s education in the 90’s. Every time you moved to a new placement, regardless of whether you had been attending public school or not at your previous placement, each of these homes has its own internal school system.

Each client would be required to start off being evaluated within the home’s own internal education system before they could be approved for public school. So for each placement a client was at, assuming they were public school material, you can assume they moved between at least

Two schools. In my case, I had many times where my behavior or other circumstances had me moved multiple times back and forth between my public school and internal boy’s home school. There was absolutely no stability during my 11 years of “education”.

Since we’ve broached the subject of my education, I’ll go ahead and address the claim I made that there was an attempt during my early childhood education to have me moved from the 1st to the 9th grade. That statement was in fact true, but spoken in a sort of shorthand for a >>

More complicated situation. When it was discovered that I was supposedly “gifted”, the Administration of Nicholas County Elementary School met with me and my biological mother to speak about the possibility that I could be placed in a special class for the 4 gifted students >>

That were found to be attending that school. We were to all be educated in the school annex, an annex of which if memory serves, was being built specifically for this purpose. Each of these gifted students would there in be allowed to pursue the coursework commiserate with their>

Individual aptitude. I tested to be on a 9th -10th grade level in the majority of my courses. So I would have been allowed to pursue that grade level of coursework in those areas and whatever grade level I was found to be operating on for others. I remember this conversation.

I remember wanting this more than anything. I remember my biological mother, who was a schizophrenic, losing her mind about the offer and insisting that the school was trying to “groom” me to be a spy of an experiment or a government lackey, & it broke my heart when she refused.

As for the matter of the bullet proof windows installed at my placement in Jackson County, or the number of death threats I was receiving at the boys home and/or foster home: I was a kid who was getting largely redacted information from the adults who were in control of my life.

I’m just relaying those claims to you all the way they were relayed to me. If there is something that ends up being untruthful about any if that, it wouldn’t be MY untruth. I can only tell you what was told to me. And even if something about it isn’t true, I still had to live >>

Through that moment in time under the belief that it all was true, and if affected me mentally and emotionally as though it was.