DeLays Hope Unique Foster Care Community Will Spawn Imitators
by Mary Rettig and Jenni Parker
May 8, 2006
(AgapePress) - - Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and his wife have started a very distinctly designed foster home community in Texas. Rio Bend is a neighborhood in suburban Houston where specially approved parents live in large, privately subsidized houses with their foster children. Margaret Gow is the administrative director for Rio Bend. She says the DeLays started this community after an experience with what they came to see as an extremely faulty foster care system.
"Mrs. DeLay was a court-appointed special advocate," Gow explains, "and she had a young woman that she was trying to find a foster home for but could not locate anybody who wanted to take teenagers. The Congressman and she decided that they would become foster parents so they could take her."
Through that process, the DeLays realized "how broken the foster care system was, and that we were further damaging the children that we were trying to protect," Gow notes. As a result, she says, they were convinced that the government was doing a poor job of taking care of these children.
While government agencies may "do a great job of building roads, fighting wars, and that kind of thing," Rio Bend's director asserts, "they shouldn't be taking care of people." At least, that was the conclusion to which the DeLays came, she says, "so they are trying to provide a better environment for the children without the government's assistance."
Gow says Rio Bend has much stricter guidelines for foster parents than the state has. For instance, in selecting foster parents the community's administrators look for a married couple that is faith-based and preferably Christian, with only one spouse working outside the home.
In a Fort Bend Herald/Texas Coaster news article, Rep. Tom DeLay was quoted as saying that the funds to build this unique community were raised by the DeLay Foundation for Children and no public funds were used in its construction. Also, the congressman noted that the foster parents are being placed by Lutheran Social Services.
According to the local newspaper's report, each home in Rio Bend is designed with children in mind and features a three-bedroom apartment for the foster family, two sets of washers and dryers, three refrigerators, three or four computers, three bedrooms for foster children, and an extra bedroom for an occasional nanny, as needed. Gow says the parents pay only $450 a month in rent for the large, privately subsidized homes they share with their foster families, and they still receive money from the state for the care of each child they foster.
Also, Gow adds, the DeLays planned the neighborhood very deliberately as a Christian community, complete with a chapel, as they felt that would contribute to making Rio Bend the best type of environment for the children. The congressman and his wife have noted that there is no other place like this neighborhood in all the U.S., but they hope it will become a model for similar foster-family communities in the future.
