County Honors Student for Helping Abused Children

To three children at a foster home in South-Central Los Angeles, LaChanee Thompson, a 17-year-old high school graduate, is like a mother.

She takes the siblings, ages 2 to 6, to the playground. She helps them learn the alphabet. She prepares fish sticks and juice for their lunch. At night she tucks them into bed.

“I do everything a mother would do,” LaChanee said as she dropped a ketchup-stained dish into the kitchen sink. “They keep me pretty busy. I do as much as I can when I’m not busy with school work.”

She inherited a home at 55th Street and Normandie Avenue from her godmother last May. Instead of selling it to help pay for college--she enters UCLA in September--she turned it into a foster home.

For this “selfless and generous contribution to needy children,” Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke presented LaChanee with a plaque at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.

“I love working with children,” LaChanee she said. “It’s an honor to be recognized for this.”

She was 16 when her godmother, a teacher’s aide at a nearby elementary school, left her the single-story stucco home.

“I wasn’t expecting it,” she said. “Some said to sell it. Others said I could make money if I leased it.”

So LaChanee turned the house over to her aunt, a social worker at a Pasadena group home for abused youths, to create a foster home for children under 12.

“That was the best idea I heard,” she said. “She’s taken me to her work since I was 13. I grew up with the kids she works with.”

LaChanee worked with family and close friends to bring the house into compliance with safety laws, move in four donated beds and fill it with donated toys and children’s clothing.

She alternates shifts with her aunt, grandmother and a family friend to care for three children, who were abused by their mother. The foster home also takes in children in emergency situations.

“She’s special,” said the 6-year-old, whom social workers asked not be identified. “She reads me books about snakes and sharks.”

LaChanee, an honor student and class president at Banning High School in Wilmington, plans to study sociology.

“I’ve seen so many children who have been neglected and abused by their parents,” she said. “Children need to be made a priority. I want to do as much as I can to help them.”