Before she was an inmate, Michelle Voorhees was a kid in foster care. Painting a vivid picture, Voorhees asks you to imagine the harrowing, disconcerting experience of being removed from your own home. Story link: https://www.kansascity.com/news/speci...

Video by Shelly Yang and Neil Nakahodo

Links to all the stories in the Throwaway Kids series:

Part One of Six: ‘We are sending more foster kids to prison than college’
https://www.kansascity.com/news/speci...

Part Two of Six: As U.S. spends billions on foster care, families are pulled apart and forgotten
https://www.kansascity.com/news/speci...

Part Three of Six: Frequent moves don’t just harm foster kids’ emotions — they hurt their brains
https://www.kansascity.com/news/speci...

Part Four of Six: Graduation rate of 35 percent? Many foster children ‘robbed of a good education’
https://www.kansascity.com/news/speci...

Part Five of Six: Aging out: Thousands of foster youth graduate to the streets every year
https://www.kansascity.com/news/speci...

Part Six of Six: ‘The state that neglected me as a kid is the
same state that wants to kill me’
https://www.kansascity.com/news/speci...

"Throwaway Kids" is a special Kansas City Star investigation published in December 2019:
A longtime advocate in Kansas City once told a reporter that foster care was “just a breeding ground for prison.”
That comment stuck with us and eventually led to this project. The yearlong investigation began with prisons and branched out into a more comprehensive look at long-term outcomes for children who age out of the nation’s broken, overwhelmed foster care system. 

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