After Years in Foster Care, Intern ‘Adopted’ by City Hall Catches a Break

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James Polite spent much of his childhood in foster care.

In high school alone, Mr. Polite estimates, he was placed in 10 different homes. And he received little encouragement from social workers to go to college.

But Mr. Polite, now 25, still believed that college was the best next step. He found encouragement as a volunteer in his teens, registering voters and canvassing neighborhoods in New York City during Barack Obama’s first presidential bid. Mentors on the campaign trail urged him to pursue higher education.

In 2008, at a gay pride rally for Mr. Obama, Mr. Polite met Christine C. Quinn, then the City Council speaker.

Ms. Quinn still remembers their introduction on the steps of City Hall. “James was telling me his story,” she recalled recently in an interview. “And I said, ‘Do you have an internship?’ And he said ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well, you do now.’”

He interned with Ms. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat, for several years, working on initiatives to combat hate crime, sexual assault and domestic violence. He also took part in her re-election campaign in 2009 and returned to help with her unsuccessful bid for mayor in 2013.

“James was the adopted child of the Quinn administration,” she said. “And it wasn’t just me. It was the entire City Council staff.”

Ms. Quinn believed Mr. Polite could defy the statistics.

Across the country, high school graduation rates among foster children remain low. A report released by New York City in 2016 showed that just over a third of the more than 3,000 foster children in high school were on track to graduate within five years. And a recent study using a representative sample of foster youths in eight states, including New York, showed that graduating from college is even less likely, with 11 to 15 percent earning a college degree, according to Foster Care to Success, a national nonprofit.

“The statistics are abysmal,” said Eileen McCaffrey, executive director of the nonprofit, which helps 5,000 students a year, including Mr. Polite, reduce and limit college loans and other expenses while also providing financial coaching services.

Ms. Quinn wrote Mr. Polite a letter of recommendation to Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and followed up with a call to its president. Council staff members even drove him there on move-in day.

“We did everything that was stepping over the line,” Ms. Quinn said. “But I didn’t care. He had worked so hard all his life, and he needed a break.”

Mr. Polite said his experiences working with Ms. Quinn and on the presidential campaign changed his trajectory. Otherwise, he said, “I would probably have not gone to college.”

He was in kindergarten the first time he was pulled from his mother’s home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He was placed with a foster family in Queens. His mother regained custody of him when he was in the third grade. But as he got older, Mr. Polite, who says he identifies as queer and does not base attraction on gender, said he felt misunderstood at home.

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At 13, he ran away, spending three days in McCarren Park in Brooklyn.

According to his foster care records, he walked about five miles from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Manhattan, where he went to the headquarters of the city’s Administration for Children’s Services and requested that he be placed in foster care. The police escorted him home and found the conditions unsanitary. Mr. Polite was removed from his mother’s care.

From then on, Mr. Polite said, he went through 10 placements over four boroughs, some lasting several months, the longest about a year.

As he was shuffled through the system, Mr. Polite said, he found purpose in volunteering. Following the guidance of those he met as a political volunteer, he set his sights on college.

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After graduating from high school, Mr. Polite enrolled in a preparatory year at Brandeis. But he felt pressure mounting as he neared his 21st birthday, which would mark the end of foster care services, including money for room and board.

Months before that birthday, a Brooklyn couple learned about the possibility of fostering him. The couple, Josh Waletzky and Jenny Levison, said they had wanted to foster a gay youth on the brink of aging out of the system. Children’s Aid, one of the eight beneficiary organizations of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, took over Mr. Polite’s case in early 2013 and facilitated the placement. Although Mr. Polite was not legally adopted — his relationship with his biological parents has improved in recent years — Ms. Levison called it a “moral adoption.” He says he considers the couple his second set of parents.

A case worker helped ease the transition into the new family, and the organization’s college adviser visited campus to check up on him and help him navigate financial aid.

Despite the assistance, Mr. Polite struggled at Brandeis. Smoking marijuana, he said, became a coping mechanism to manage his stress. He had first tried the drug at a foster home in his early teens, but in college his habit grew to three times a day. He was placed on a health leave of absence in late 2015 and required to enter a rehabilitation program. During treatment, he learned he had bipolar disorder, for which he is now medicated.

After seven months in the program, Mr. Polite applied to return to Brandeis but was rejected. “I didn’t see it coming,” he said. “But I decided to get my ducks together and plot something else.”

He got a job at an organic coffee farm on the island of Hawaii, where he spent about three months picking beans. There, he said, he found a healthy life balance. After demonstrating that he could handle the responsibility of a job, Brandeis allowed him to return.

Mr. Polite hopes to graduate in May with degrees in African-American studies and political science, and took two classes over the summer to stay on pace. In June, Children’s Aid used $856 from the Neediest Cases Fund for school supplies and fees not covered by his financial aid package. The organization also gives him $300 a month for college.

After graduation, Mr. Polite would like to work with foster children, whom he called “the strongest people I know,” and encourage them to pursue higher education.

“I know how hard it is to be in foster care,” he said. “And when you’re in foster care, you don’t see a lot of others in the system making it, so I’m going to be the person there who can say, ‘I was able to make it, so you can do it, too.’”