The litany of insults included racism, bullying at school, her parents' divorce and surviving foster care.
Westchester Youth Services is the off-campus division of Children's Village, a private, nonprofit youth home for children with such severe needs they have not been able to survive in foster care.
She is survived by a foster son, Yong-ho Ch'oe of Honolulu.
She is survived by a foster daughter, Patricia Dreyer, of Minnetonka, Minn.
Gwen is survived by her foster daughter, Louise, grandchildren, Shaquan and Akilah, and great-grandson, Makai.
Also survived by a foster daughter Pinar Oya Yilmaz of Houston, TX and one cousin Diana Toner Keenan of McLean, VA.
For ballet companies to survive they must foster new audiences and continually establish their relevance as leading art institutions.
That the Excell Center, which now houses 52 youths from ages 10 to 18, has survived the die-off of foster homes is partly a matter of real-estate economics: it costs less to house people in the heart of the Central Valley than it does in urban areas, and it costs less to pay workers to take care of them.
My fellow foster siblings who survived and excelled all had one thing in common: they all had something they were working towards.
And even if he survived, it was just a foster-care arrangement, a way for Ms. Byers to keep busy while she recuperated from a car accident.
