A student sent to the principal’s office for starting a fight finds a new home with his family instead

Foster care has been a refuge for youth who have lost their parents, experienced trauma and challenges at an early age, and just need a chance at a brighter future.

Raven Whitaker-Smith, a social work student and junior at the College of Social Work at the University of Kentucky, shared her emotional adoption journey to highlight the importance of foster care and adoption during National Adoption Month.

Currently, Raven has loving parents and three family dogs, all Boston Terriers. She lives off campus in Lexington with two friends and two cats.

But she declared, “If you were to observe me from the outside looking in, you would think I had the perfect life. However, once upon a time not too long ago, my life looked completely different.”

“Not every day was bad, but most days were bad.”

The first 11 years of the social work student’s life was very traumatic. Her parents were drug addicts and were young parents to Raven and her siblings.

She shared, “My home life was a very dark place. I was not safe, I did not feel love, I was neglected and abused.” As the eldest child, she bore the brunt of the trauma. While she could only do so much, she tried her best to shield her siblings from constant abuse and neglect.

When she was 11, Raven and her siblings were finally removed from that terrible environment by the Department for Community Based Services (DCBS). That became her saving grace. Though the siblings were separated because of the trauma that Raven endured, they remain connected to this day.

Raven was placed in Holly Hill Residential Home and attended a Campbell County school. In 2015, she was in the sixth grade and found herself sitting outside principal Jason Smith’s office. She had been suspended after starting a food fight and was waiting to be picked up.

When Smith asked Raven, now 20, if she would ever throw food in a restaurant, she told him she had never eaten in one. The principal said, “I recognized that she needed something to go in her favor, maybe for once, that it hadn’t gone in her favor in the past, but she just needed somebody to help her.”

The suspension would completely change the future social work student’s life.

Marybeth Smith had struggled with infertility for years and the couple had become foster parents in the hope of adopting a child. However, they gave up that option after a trio of siblings they fostered for nearly one year were returned to their biological parents.

After meeting Raven, however, the Smiths felt that they needed her to be part of their family and began the process of getting recertified as foster parents.

Marybeth said, “This was something that, obviously, he felt pretty passionate about because I’m sure she’s not the only kid that he has dealt with who has been in a similar situation. So something about Raven was special to him, and obviously I trusted him.”

Raven joined the Smith family in June 2015. The early years together weren’t easy of course. Raven tested the Smiths’ boundaries, but they worked on overcoming emotional challenges and developing a stable home environment. The Smiths gave Raven hope and the strength to work through her trauma.

Together, the family of three overcame the odds. The Smiths formally adopted Raven on November 3, 2017, when she was a high school freshman.

Now, as a junior social work student, Raven feels she is where she is supposed to be. She said, “I need to choose something that I’m passionate about. It feels really cool to tell my other classmates that I was in the system, and then they go and they tell their friends and everyone else about my story.”

As part of her course work, Raven does volunteer work for the DCCH Center for Children and Families, a nonprofit organization that helped facilitate Raven’s foster care with the Smiths, where she also plans to do her internship in her senior year.

She also shared her story in an essay to mark National Adoption Month, which is celebrated each year in November to raise awareness about adoption issues.

According to the Children’s Bureau, in 2021 around 400,000 children in the U.S. spent time in the foster care system. In Kentucky, over 8,000 children are currently waiting for a foster to adoptive parent, according to the DCCH Center.

Raven acknowledges that foster care saved her life, and this inspired her desire to be a social worker. She encourages everyone to think about adopting or fostering a child, especially since there are so many children like her who need love, care, and hope in their lives.

As Jason said, “I really believe there are no bad children. Children are a product of their environment and the people who raise them, or who don’t raise them unfortunately, so given the right opportunity, given the proper support, love and affection, all children can be successful.“