At work, Frances Smith is a crossing guard. At home, she cares for her adopted kids. For her annual vacation, she’s a volunteer elf for hundreds of foster children. Meet a Holiday Hero.
Outside an unremarkable old storefront in Newnan, a volunteer raised the gate of an equally unremarkable 14-foot moving truck. As the door creaked upward, Frances Smith’s smile grew more radiant.
“Look at that,” Smith said.
A hive of volunteers swarmed around her.
New dolls, clothes, bicycles, coffee makers, toiletries, puzzles, games, blankets, gift cards and more packed the floor of the cargo hold and scaled up its sides. A 15-passenger van parked next to it was just as full.
For 500 to 600 foster children and vulnerable elderly adults under the watch of Coweta County’s Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS), those will be their Christmas presents.
Smith, 64, is the volunteer Christmas Joy program coordinator for Coweta County DFCS. For more than 15 years she has made certain that no child or adult in the system has gone without gifts on Christmas Day.
From now until a couple of days before Christmas, she and her small group of volunteers will collect and sort a steady stream of presents. The task will consume the bulk of Smith’s holiday season — and annual vacation — as it has for the decade and a half since she has been volunteering. But she doesn’t mind. Because she knows from experience that even if a foster child is placed with a family, it doesn’t guarantee that the child will get gifts under the tree.
A short woman with silver gray hair and a raspy voice that can fill a room, Smith has lived her entire life in Newnan, as has her husband of 46 years, Henry. She has worked there for the police department 41 years and she’s quick to say there’s not a person in the town she doesn’t know. But if by chance she doesn’t know them, her husband does. They raised two biological sons there, and Smith credits the town with helping her and her husband make it on modest incomes as they reared their boys.
“You know it costs a lot of money for things like band and school trips, but people in the community helped us. So this is our way of giving back,” Smith said.
It was after her sons were grown that Smith and her husband became foster parents in 1996. Their house was empty and there were children in need. Through the years they served as foster parents to more than 130 children. Kids would cycle in, then out.
But as time went on, it became more and more difficult for her to give the children up. She broached the subject of adopting with her husband, who promptly told her that they did not get into foster care to adopt.
“But when you pick them up from the hospital and they’re just a day or two old, then three or four years later you still got them, you can’t give them back then,” Smith said. “By then I love them. They’re mine.”
They have adopted nine of the children, ages 4 to 18, all of them now living in the small house where Smith brought up her own sons.
This is what led her to become first a volunteer for the Christmas program and its coordinator eight years ago. She begins the process in late September or early October each year, sending out an appeal letter through DFCS to past donors. Over two months she collects the donations and DFCS agents distribute them in time for Christmas.
Year round, her day starts at 5:30 a.m., getting the youngest child ready for school. She’s at her job as a school crossing guard by 7:30 a.m. An hour later she arrives at her second job as a parking enforcement officer for the city of Newnan. She does that until it’s time to return to her crossing guard job when the school day ends.
“Then I go home and my real job starts — cooking, homework, bathing, getting the kids ready for bed,” Smith said.
Most nights she doesn’t get to bed before midnight. During the holiday season it’s later. So she can devote more time to the Christmas project, she saves her vacation every year then takes off the entire month of December to run it. This year she’s having to take the time off from her city job — without pay.
“I keep telling her that she has got to slow down, but my mom has always loved kids and she looks forward to this every year,” said Adrian Smith, an associate minister at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Newnan.
Staying busy also helps combat a particular emptiness Smith has dealt with since 1993, Adrian said. That’s when the Smiths’ son Henry died at age 27. Three years later she and her husband took in their first foster child.
“I went from having one brother, to having four brothers and five sisters,” Adrian said. “And her kids want for nothing.”
To make sure other kids, and seniors, have what they need, Smith tries to broaden the circle of donors every year, though she depends on her regulars.
Mary Hamblin and her 11-year-old daughter, Lynsey, are faithful donors. Lynsey and a small group of her friends go on a shopping spree every year on Black Friday, when they try to find the perfect pajamas (not too fuzzy), sweatshirts (not too corny) and accessories (not too flashy) for girls they likely will never meet and who’ve lived through things Lynsey and her friends have been spared.
“I don’t want to give somebody something I wouldn’t wear,” said Lynsey, who through her mother nominated Smith to be a Holiday Hero.
“When I’m doing it I feel really good because if we weren’t doing this then those kids wouldn’t get presents.”
--------------------
Frances Smith is one of 14 Holiday Heroes nominated by AJC readers for making a difference in their community. Read each of their inspiring stories every day until Dec. 31.
About the Author
