Cassaundra Friedberg was 8 years old when she was first taken to the Jamison Center, Kern County’s emergency children’s shelter. When police arrived at her family’s front door, they found filth and little food. Cassaundra’s parents had gone out of town, leaving an older brother to care for his four siblings.
The five children were snatched away from the Bakersfield home and deposited into the Jamison Center. The two oldest boys were kept together, as were a younger sister and brother. Cassaundra, the middle child, was housed separately.
“I was very scared. I was crying. I felt isolated,” Cassaundra, who is now 22, recalled during a recent interview. “Every night, I would get my pillow and blanket and crawl under a desk in the room. That’s where they would find me in the morning. I still remember that room. I would cry and cry in school. It was very emotional.” In about a week, Cassaundra and her brothers and sister were returned to her parents. “I was relieved to go home.”
Five years later, Cassaundra and her two younger siblings were sent back to the Jamison Center. Cassaundra is a bit sketchy about the details of this incident, but she recalls police were summoned to check on conditions in a neighboring house. Instead, they went to Cassaundra’s, where they again found squalor.
By then, Cassaundra’s father, who had a lengthy criminal record, had died of a heart attack. Cassaundra’s mother was not sending her children to school. Police and social workers stepped in, removing the children from the home. After two months, the children again were returned to their mother.
Two years later, Cassaundra returned to the Jamison Center a third time, when her mother was arrested on drug charges. This final visit resulted in Cassaundra and her siblings being assigned to foster care.
“As a teenager, you are scared, angry and depressed. You are angry at the situation. You feel the social workers are picking on you. When you live in a situation, like I did, you justify it to yourself. My parents didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone’s parents did drugs.”
Cassaundra grew close to her foster parents’ adult daughter. Eventually she moved in with the woman, who adopted her last year as an adult. “She is my mom. She will always be my mom.”
Cassaundra graduated from Liberty High School and went on to earn a bachelor of arts degree in criminal justice from California State University, Bakersfield. She now is working on a master’s degree in public administration from CSUB.
And she has returned again to the Jamison Center -- this time as a staff member, helping and comforting the shelter’s children.
Why return if her memories are so painful?
“To confront my fears,” she said. “I like Jamison. We are here to do a lot of good. But it is a scary process for a child to be taken away from parents and isolated.”
Working at the Jamison Center and pursuing a career in criminal justice is her way of helping vulnerable women and children.
Conditions at the Jamison Center on Shalimar Drive in northeast Bakersfield have changed since Cassaundra was that young child hiding under a desk. No longer is the center overcrowded, with children sleeping several to a room on cots and on couches.
“We went to school in shifts,” Cassaundra said, recalling when she lived at Jamison Center there were more than 60 children living there. “It was crazy, insane.”
Jamison Center overcrowding has been relieved by the establishment of a network of emergency foster homes, explained Carl Guilford, the center’s director.
“We try to make Jamison as child-friendly as we can, but it is an institution,” said Guilford. “We try to get children into a family situation as quickly as we can.”
On the day Cassaundra was interviewed, the Jamison Center housed only 28 children. Most were in the 7- to 12-year-old age range. The center’s staff was about 50, with teachers, medical workers from Kern Medical Center and mental health personnel on site. Most children now stay at the center for a matter of hours and days, rather than weeks and months.
“If a child does get here, social workers try to quickly find them homes,” said Guilford, noting that keeping the number of children at the Jamison Center low allows fragile children to receive more individual care.
“Because I have lived here, I know where these kids are coming from and I try to help,” said Cassaundra. “These kids are going through a scary process. Jamison is better than when I lived here. But these kids are still scared.”
(In photo, above, Cassaundra comforts a small child at the Jamison Center.)
This story written by DIANNE HARDISTY was posted first on The Bakersfield Californian's Website (www.bakersfield.com) on Dec. 10, 2009. It was published in The Bakersfield Californian on Dec. 13, 2009.
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