Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company
Local News : Thursday, December 07, 2000

When Elizabeth and Robert Rosenthal bought their home in Shoreline more than 20 years ago, it had two bedrooms. Now, it has six.

It was occupied by two people then. Now, it's hard to say how many you'd call occupants. Six, if you count the couple and their four foster and adopted kids. More if you add the kids with disabilities who call the Rosenthals their respite home at some point or other during any given week. And still more when you count the staff - all six of them - who help out at various times during the week.

Liz and Robert Rosenthal are part of the specialized foster-care program for the Kindering Center in Bellevue, an agency new to The Seattle Times' Fund for the Needy program this year.

Since 1962, the agency has provided services to children with special needs and their families. The foster program, started in 1985, zeroes in on finding homes for what are commonly called hard-to-place kids: disabled, behaviorally challenged, medically fragile.

Much of the program is about sharing the parenting, between the birth parents of disabled kids, who can't provide full-time care, and the foster families.

"There's no way I could do this without them," Liz Rosenthal says of Kindering. "They do all the paperwork, take care of all those things, so I can do what I do best."

An example of that is what she and her husband and staff have done for 10-year-old David Price-Jubenville.

David's mother, Lisa, who lives on the Eastside with her husband and two other children, said she first made contact with the Kindering Center when David was about 18 months old. "We knew something was wrong. He wasn?t speaking, his mannerisms were different."

Kindering's therapies helped, but it was still tough for the family. Taking care of David was a full-time job, to the exclusion of almost everything, and everyone, else. Kindering stepped in again and lined up respite care - with the Rosenthals. Two years later, David moved in with them full time, as part of the center's specialized foster care.

It wasn't easy, Lisa says. "The hard part was letting go. There was the guilt thing. But the fact is it was the best thing we could do for David." Now she can spend more time on the rest of the family, including holding down a job to help support them, and still bring David home every Saturday.

And David's changed. "He's perpetual motion," Liz Rosenthal says, "but he's a lot more manageable, more focused." Some of that comes from natural maturation, but things like structure and consistency and medication have helped, too.

It's just before 4 p.m. on a weekday and David comes in the door, just off the bus that brought him home from special classes at Brookside Elementary School in Shoreline.

He goes right to a board on the living-room wall where there are pictures of the tasks ahead of him for the afternoon. That?s how everybody in the house communicates with David - a vital version of show-and-tell.

Wash hands.

Snack.

Recycle.

Make bed.

Puzzle.

Swing (depending on the weather).

He removes the picture of the first task, puts it into a special folder and then washes his hands.

Pictures of the kids who have lived with the Rosenthals line the walls of the dining room - some adopted, some foster children. Robert Rosenthal got them started on this path in the late 1970s. He spotted stories called "Sunday's Child" that appeared in The Times' Sunday Scene section, and wanted to take in one of the special-needs kids. Their lives in this business took off from there.

This cannot be easy work. This must be, in fact, an incredible effort. But as far as Liz Rosenthal is concerned, it's very simple. "You feel like your work is important and you feel like your work is appreciated," she says. "That goes a long way for me."