It was quiet inside the Youth Crisis Center with all the children gone to school, and Taylor Moreland sat at her desk working in a room across the hall from where her father, Earnest Moreland’s office was for years.
“I grew up here,” she said, taking a break from her tasks at hand. “He kind of had the plan this is what I was going to do. Being the kid I am to always question everything, I said, ‘I’m not doing that.’ But I was friends with a lot of kids that went here while I was growing up and when I was spending time here throughout college. I just realized we need people in this field. These kids need people.”
Taylor graduated from Parsons High School in 2017 and her paths to her current position were diverged.
“I went to Pitt State, changed my major a thousand times, went from pre-med to nursing, to business and then found my passion in psychology,” she said. “I took some time off to figure out what I really wanted to do instead of wasting thousands of dollars over all these years. I always tell kids to never be afraid to take that break. They always say it is hard to go back, but it was a complete refresh for me. It was nothing to go back. It was exactly what I needed.”
She graduated this past May with her degree in psychology with an emphasis in law, wrought by a welcomed influence from her big sister, Tara Moreland, who is a lawyer. That influence was combined with a passion she discovered in college for activism and protesting and the realization that at least having some knowledge of the law helps you when you are pushing for that change.
Taylor said that her initial thoughts of pursuing something in the medical field were due to a huge influence from two of her high school teachers, LeAnne and Kevin Wiles.
“I got to college and realized quickly math was not my thing at all,” she said. “I’ve always been a talker. I’ve always liked helping people and it was figuring out the way I like helping people is more one-on-one, in a verbal way, over time and not being right there in more like an emergency medical situation. I figured I’m not the best under pressure like that when it comes to life and death.”
“I think within my first week of being here I was like, ‘Yep, this is it for me,’” she said of working at YCC. “If you had told me in high school, I would love diving into people’s minds, I would have been, ‘No. It’s really complicated.’ But looking back, I was always wanting to help people with their problems and figuring out different ways of dealing with things, and I’ve been told I was always very self-aware, which that is a very big tell for ending up in the psychology field.”
She is working right now on her license to be a therapist.
“It’s been super easy to relate to the kids because I’m older than them, but not so far ahead of them. I’m very understanding of what a lot of them went through. It’s easy to understand and relate and gain their trust. It’s been great getting to know the kids and getting to look at the world from their perspective, because a lot of the time we’re like ‘Why are you acting like this or ‘What pushed you to be like this?’ They teach me a lot, hopefully as much as I teach them.”
Taylor didn’t grow up with any mentors, other than her father, who were necessarily interested in the foster care system, but she was highly impacted by Paul Duroni and Rob Barcus, and how well they related to kids. On bad days she found herself looking forward to going to Duroni’s class or having Barcus as her coach.
“I knew I could talk to them if I needed to, but I was more the kid that just thrived off of the positive energy. To this day I see Mr. Barcus and it’s like I’m in high school still. He’s a big jokester and all that.
Having those positive role models was big for her, but she said it was wonderful having teachers you could go to for a laugh and pick your day up pretty quick.
“It was just how well they related to students,” Taylor said. “It showed me that passion to want to help the young in the crowd.”
Looking forward, Taylor said she does hope to stay tied with YCC.
“I don’t know that I want to stay small town my whole life. In college I was very adventurous and figured I’d would end up in a city, but also, now that I’m getting older, I like the security of a small town and it’s nice to be able to make changes in my hometown. So, I could see myself sticking around for a while.
In the immediate future, Taylor said she is looking forward to building even stronger relationships between the youths, schools and community.
“We have a great connection with the schools, our relationship with them is very strong, but I always feel like there could be a deeper understanding of our foster care kids, and definitely more tolerance. The schools, as an educator, it is stressful dealing specifically with foster care kids’ behaviors. It is something, especially nowadays, that we have never seen. It’s very important to dig deeper as to why this kid behaves so badly. So, I would love to see that relationship grow even stronger,” Taylor said. “I’ve been working pretty close with the middle school because my kids are about that age and they ask why is this kid having a tough day, or why this behavior presents, and I love that. We don’t want people to just see a bad kid. There is always a reason behind it. I don’t think I have worked with a kid yet that is just bad for no reason, so I think it is important for educators and people in the communities to come by and delve into the kids’ backgrounds, because they are dealing with trauma we couldn’t dream of and it presents itself in awful ways unfortunately. Their discipline unfortunately always came in the form of abuse or neglect, so they come here and they see at YCC tough love.”
At YCC, Taylor said that means they are discipline focused, but they work with youths for them to understand why, and also for the foster children to be understood, so bridges are never burnt.
“Those kids every day say awful things to us, but we always show them, you do not ruin our bond at all. We will always come back with ‘I don’t like what you said to me, but I understand,’” Taylor said.
She had heard her father’s stories about youth coming back as adults and thanking him. Now she is beginning to experience those types of impacts.
“You have to be 21 to work in a facility like this and I have a 12-year-old boy right now, who not that long ago said, ‘Can I come back and work for you guys? ‘ Of course. We’d love nothing more than for him to come back, because those are the ones who relate to the kids the best,” she said.
Taylor hopes to encourage people from the community, too, to either come work in a residential facility or get a foster care license.
“I believe there is somewhere around 8,000 kids in the foster care system (in Kansas). Every day we see placement agencies saying, ‘We have no other option for these kids’, because like I said, we are seeing behaviors the foster care system has never seen. They are pretty traumatized kids who are hard to take in. Go get your foster care license or work residential like this. It’s the first step in them not turning to a life of crime or perpetrating what was done to them.”