ST. LOUIS — Kory Alexander says he got tired 11 years ago of meeting teenagers from his St. Louis neighborhood with no parents to care for them and no place to go.
So Alexander, then a 24-year-old single guy, became a foster parent to a teenager he knew while working at St. Vincent's Children's Home in Normandy. It's a role he has since undertaken 11 times.
He didn't stop there. So far, he has adopted three teenagers from foster care who are now legal adults. And he's hoping to soon adopt two of his five current foster teens.
"They see me working, they see me home. They see how I step up to the plate and take care of them," Alexander said of the youths, ages 15, 16, 16, 16 and 17, on a rainy afternoon as three of the boys played video games and did homework inside the apartment.
"I talk to them mostly about being independent," he said of the boys, whom the Post-Dispatch cannot name because of their foster care status. "I tell them, 'If you don't go to college, you go into the Army.'"
Although the number is still relatively small, more and more single men are adopting from the nation's increasing pool of hard-to-place foster children.
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