CHAMPAIGN — As she walked into her bedroom at her family’s home in Philo in a fog of confusion, 9-year-old Amariah Hays didn’t know what to stuff into the large black bag handed to her by a worker from the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services.
So Hays grabbed a few quick items to comfort her — a Teddy Ruxpin bear and her favorite Cabbage Patch doll — and a few items of clothing to take with her on her journey through the foster-care system.
“At that time, I didn’t know that I was packing my whole life into that bag,” she said.
Hays didn’t know her childhood was anything other than normal to that point. She didn’t realize she had endured abuse throughout her first nine years of life, and that her older brothers had endured even more. She didn’t know why her family was constantly moving to new homes in the area, each time forcing her to make new friends at a different school. Later, she found out that her parents were evading DCFS and the watchful eyes of teachers and other school employees.
That day more than three decades ago, she didn’t know why she was called to the principal’s office to meet with DCFS officers, why her mother had no answers for her when she tearfully asked her questions after those officers took her home, or why her 2-year-old brother’s car seat was empty when they drove her away from the only life she ever knew.
The questions that filled her head that day would be far from the last she’d have in the ensuing years, when her father went to prison and her mother eventually lost parental rights to Hays and her five brothers.
Luckily, Hays had people around her to answer those questions, to work through the complicated feelings that come after years of abuse and the court cases that followed, and sometimes, to simply offer comfort.
“I feel really blessed and grateful that this is what life is now,” she said. “It’s pretty awesome. I tell everyone, ‘Foster care saved my life.’”
That’s why she’s dedicated her life to helping kids in foster care. The career social worker now serves as advocate coordinator for Champaign County Court Appointed Special Advocates for children, where she helps train people to support children in the way she was supported as a child.
Because of her work advocating for the children of Champaign County since 2008, the 2002 Centennial High School graduate will be honored in April with a Champaign-Urbana Schools Foundation Distinguished Alumni Local Hero Award.
“Ami is a person who took advantage of the opportunities that were in front of her, and she had a support system through her foster family and people who were involved in her case,” said Champaign County State’s Attorney Julia Rietz, who nominated Hays for the award. “And because of that and because of her own personality, she has succeeded. And to me, what’s most important and what makes her a community hero is that, in addition to having succeeded herself, she’s turned around and is giving back to help those youth who are going through what she went through.”
Without the people who did the same for her, though, she doesn’t know where she’d be.
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The process was painful, but Hays adjusted quickly to her new home with two loving foster parents.
Her biological mother, though, was not so adaptable. Over time, she began canceling visits. At least once, Hays was left waiting on the doorstep. While her foster parents connected with the new family of her younger brother, Micah, to whom she remains close to this day, those visits were the only chances she had to see her four older brothers.
Her shifting reality confused her. Luckily, Heidi Ladd came into her life.
Then an assistant state’s attorney, Ladd did her best to gain the trust of the kids she worked with. Sometimes, that meant trying out different seats in an empty courtroom as the children prepared for a gut-wrenching trial. Other times, that meant changing into her tennis shoes and taking children to the diner across the street from the courthouse.
Hays remembers sitting with Ladd as they sipped on milkshakes and talked. Sometimes they talked about her parents’ case; other times, they chatted about life.
“By the time I was 10, when I was in foster care for about a year, I realized that something was wrong with my biological parents,” Hays said. “I started having questions, and my biological mother would never answer them, and my biological father went to prison.
“I started asking (Ladd) these really hard questions as a young girl because I wasn’t getting them anywhere else. And she was having to explain to me some really hard things, some things that were really hard to process.
“A lot of it was, ‘Your mom has some homework to do. She has to learn how to keep you safe, and she’s not doing that homework. And if she doesn’t do that homework, that’s going to come with consequences.’”
As the two chatted, Ladd could tell that Hays would lead a successful life despite the obstacles.
“She had a sparkle to her, and she was very bright and she was very strong,” Ladd said. “She obviously endured some unimaginable adversity in life, and you could see that she was not going to let that hold her back. That affects every person differently when they go through difficult circumstances, but she took all that and drew strength and determination from it from such a young age and has obviously brought it into her adult commitments.”
Hays, though, remembers a time that could have sent her off-course. She was a freshman in high school when her mother’s parental rights were terminated. One day shortly after the decision, she burst out in tears and lashed out at her foster mother.
“I ended up slapping her open-handed across the face,” she said. “I’m crying, and she’s crying, and I’m saying, ‘My life is ruined. I didn’t ask for this. I hate everybody.’
“And she just grabbed my wrists really firmly and pulled me in, nose to nose, and she just kept repeating herself, she was like, ‘This sucks. I love you. We’ll fix it later. I love you. We’ll fix it later. I love you. We’ll fix it later.’ Until I was calm. And then I went up to my room and cried some more and I came back down and we hugged each other. And then we talked it out.”
Her foster parents, whom Hays declined to name, never officially adopted her because she needed to remain in the foster-care system in order to enroll in the state’s Youth in College program, which helped pay for her education.
Hays, though, considers them her adoptive parents, who both guided her through life. After she spent several years switching schools, they enrolled her in Sylvan Learning Center and helped her learn to read. They gave her advice as she found her way through complicated emotions. And most importantly, they never gave up on her, even on her worst day.
“She could’ve been like, ‘This is too much for me. She just hit me. Send her back. She can go back to DCFS. She can go somewhere else,’” Hays said of her foster mother. “But she didn’t do that. She just kept saying, ‘I love you. This sucks. We’ll fix it later.’ It’s the love that she had for me that was pouring out of her in that moment, when I know something else could have.”
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After experiencing the difficulty of poverty and the comforts of middle-class life, Hays considered careers that would make her far more money than social work. An internship at a day care in inner-city Chicago, though, put that idea to rest.
“I thought, ‘With my life and what I’ve gone through, other kids are going through it, too. And if I can do it, they can do it, too. I just want to be productive in the community. And if I’m productive in the community, I care about that more than anything else right now,’” she said. “So it was at that age that I was like, ‘You know what? I need to do social work.’ That was just what I felt called to do.
“I was just like, ‘I don’t want to work in a hospital. I don’t want to sit behind a desk. I want to work with kids that just need to be lifted up a little bit.’”
She spent a few years as a social worker in Baltimore and Cleveland, but Hays always knew she’d move back home. She’s spent the last 15 years working in the community, the last seven at CASA.
“This is the town that raised me, and so this is what I love the most,” she said. “So I’m not leaving.”
In the years since her parents’ trial, Ladd had lost track of Hays. Then, one day, she saw a familiar face in her courtroom, where Ladd now served as a judge. When she looked at the case, she saw it was Hays, who was working with a minor in court that day.
“It was just, ‘Bingo, she’s in this field now helping children,’” said Ladd, who deflects any insinuation that she’s somehow responsible for Hays’ success in life.
Initially, Hays said she was intimidated by Ladd’s new judge’s robes, but finally, the two connected. Now, they have monthly lunches together and consider each other friends.
“More than almost anyone I’ve met, she’s taken this adversity and turned it into a motivation to help others,” said Ladd, who retired from the bench in 2020. “I can’t say you can predict that when you meet a child, but I see it now looking back. She took everything that has happened to her in life and turned it into something good.
“She really does shine. She lifts up others, she inspires other people. She makes other people’s lives better. And I think she’s always putting others first.”
Her mission has taken on multiple forms.
In 2017, Hays was approached by young-adult author Jaleigh Johnson, whose debut, “The Mark of the Dragonfly,” was a New York Times best seller. He wanted to collaborate on a book.
Over the years, Hays had noticed that plenty of reading material was available for foster parents, but little existed to guide children through the process. So the two wrote a picture book, “A Place Called Home,” about a child who went through the foster care system. The proceeds, she decided, would go to Champaign County CASA.
“I wanted something that not only foster parents could have as a resource, but also something that kids could read that was explaining to them what was happening to them while it’s happening,” she said. “And if they forget, they can go get out that book. A lot of it is, ‘What are my parents doing when I’m in care?’ Well, Mom and Dad are supposed to be doing homework to keep you safe.”
At CASA, she works with children and pairs them with volunteer advocates, who work with a child until their case is closed to make sure they receive the services they’re entitled to. Often, the CASA advocate is the only person who works with a child through the course of the child’s case.
Hays said she doesn’t generally detail her story with the children she works with. Instead, she uses her positive experiences to help provide children the support that guided her through an experience that throws many children off-course.
“Sometimes, just knowing you have that person who you can reach out to” is important, she said. “Someone who can direct you if you feel lost. Someone that can help you maneuver the system to help it work for you. That’s what it’s all about. It’s making sure we’re maneuvering that system to make sure it works for that child.
“I don’t see myself in every kid,” she added, “but I do 100 percent see what caring adults did for me as a kid. I always wanted to be a caring adult that a kid knows, ‘This person cares about me. I know Miss Ami cares about me.’”