A middle school principal in Kentucky adopted a girl who was acting out after she had spent her whole life in and out of foster homes. Sent to his office after being suspended, he realized that she just needed, perhaps one time, for “something to go in her favor.”
Kentucky school principal Jason Smith walked out of his office one day and saw a girl from the 6th grade sitting on a chair by the door—suspended for throwing a cup of yogurt during lunch.
One can only imagine how much delinquency and mischief Smith had seen throughout his 14 years in charge of the school, but something about the girl struck him that day. Asking whether she thought such behavior was acceptable at a restaurant, Raven Whitaker replied she had never been to one.
Where she had been was in and out of foster homes for most of her life, where foster moms and dads had made plenty of promises they were unable to keep.
“At that point, I had felt like she just needed a hand, needed help,” Smith told Good Morning America. “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.”
After discussing it with his wife Marybeth, she believed there was something special about Raven.
The couple had struggled with infertility for years, and had previously failed to turn foster children they’d hosted into candidates for adoption. After discussing the matter with Raven’s case worker in 2015, they heard that they too could foster her. They also talked with her personally about the matter.
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With their doors opened, Raven wasn’t sure it was going to turn out any differently, although she admitted to GMA that the welcome was immediately and detectably warmer than past homes.
“It was really weird at first because, in my mind, I thought of [Jason Smith] as the bad guy because I was always getting in trouble,” Raven Whitaker-Smith told GMA. “I gave them a bunch of trouble to see what would happen, I kind of tested whether or not this was real or not to see if they would keep me no matter what, because they would tell me that but, you know, I’d heard that a lot before.”
However, it wasn’t long before the love and sincerity of the couple won her over, and the three became an official family in October 2017.
With a principal in the house, Raven improved her performance in school, graduating and moving forward to attend the Univ. of Kentucky where she is studying to be a social worker.
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