After years of bouncing from home to home, Jesse and Joshua Dziomba, ages 13 and 17, finally have a sense of permanence.

Joshua and Jesse were officially adopted Wednesday by Joy and John Dziomba, a couple who have opened their North Tonawanda home to foster children for more than a decade.

The family celebrated the adoption that morning the at the Hillside Children’s Center’s new Lockport location, 66 Stevens St., where they will hold a grand opening on Friday.

Hillside’s Niagara team hopes the new center will give them more space and more resources to help families like the Dziombas deal with the challenges of foster care.




A new building

The Hillside Children’s Center, a not-for-profit agency affiliated with the Hillside Family of Agencies, moved to the Stevens Street location from the Bewley Building after they began to outgrow the space there, said Kathleen Marshall, Niagara team leader.

The agency provides in-home parenting support, adoption support, home and community-based services and therapeudic foster care services to over 35 families at a time.

The bottom floor of the new facility is dedicated to families, with a kitchen, seating area and a conference room used for parties like the Dziomba’s adoption celebration.

A small room filled with comfy couches will soon serve as a setting for family counseling.

“Some of the kids we get in are pretty rough,” Marshall said. “They’ve been through a lot, and they come in with a lot of challenges.”

Therapeudic foster care provides care for children who have emotional or behavioral issues.

At Hillside, parents like the Dziombas, who foster children with special needs, have access to a 24-hour hotline for support, as well as in-home parenting classes and training at the center.

The ultimate goal for many Hillside families is adoption. Marshall said most of the foster parents involved with Hillside eventually adopt.

“Our agency as a whole is really embracing adoption, wanting to be seen also as an adoption agency,” she said.

Something permanent

Marshall said the emphasis at Hillside is on giving kids with unstable histories a place to call home for good.

“Kids need permanency,” Marshall said. “When kids don’t have permanency, they struggle. There’s no stability, no sense of belonging.”

For Joshua and Jesse Dziomba, biological brothers who at one time were separated by the system, the sense of permanence is already helping. Joy said Joshua is excelling in school and has made “a big turnaround.”

“The rewarding thing is to see these children start coming around, to see them change,” Joy said. “We’re really glad that it worked out, that they could be in a home in a family together, and they really are brothers.”

John and Joy have been foster parents for over a decade, working with Hillside for almost 11 years.

Joy, already a mother of two daughters, said she was driven to become a foster parent because of her maternal instincts.

“My heart was to reach out to these children, because they deserve a chance. A lot of the children that come in through here are abused and neglected, a lot of serious thing” she said. “Some of these children don’t have mothers or fathers, and they deserve that.”

Their dedication to fostering has passed on to the next generation, as Joy’s daughter, Corinna Lambert, has been a foster parent for nine years.

In that time, she and her husband Dan have provided a home for almost 15 kids, adopting three of them.

“It’s been a bittersweet experience, but it’s been very, very rewarding and fulfilling,” she said. “If you can just touch one of these kids’ lives, that’s what it’s all about.”

Working together

Lambert has worked with what she calls “the whole spectrum” of fostering, from having no biological family involved to working with the biological parents to bring the kids back home.

For the 25 families in Hillside’s preventive program, keeping the biological family intact is the goal — though sometimes that can be challenging.

“Really, sometimes, it’s just a matter of the parents wanting it more than we do,” Marshall said. “We have a lot of services, a lot of talented people that want to work with families to get them through those barriers keeping them from having their kids home.”

Even if the child has been placed in foster care, Hillside helps the biological family get back together.

Joy remembers two foster children they cared for whose biological father turned his life around, getting off drugs and alcohol, going back to school, until finally he was able to regain custody of the children.

“To see this brother and sister go home to that was really a high,” Joy said. “It was awesome.”

Hillside Clinical Information Specialist Gina Schmidt said the parents have to be willing to work with Hillside to get the desired outcome.

“I’m afraid sometimes the families may see Hillside as a threat, that we’re going to come in and take the kids away, when that’s the last thing that we want,” she said. “Once they embrace it though, it’s incredible how these families can blossom.”

Contact reporter April Amadon at 439-9222, Ext. 6251.