‘She Just Needed a Hand’: Kentucky Principal Adopts Student Who Was Sent to His Office

A Kentucky household will celebrate their ninth Christmas as a family of three after the father, a school principal, adopted a troubled student.

Jason Smith, a principal for 14 years, met his daughter, Raven Whitaker-Smith, in 2015 when the then-sixth grader was sent to his office after being suspended.

A family in Kentucky will celebrate their ninth Christmas together this year after an adoption that began in a principal's office. https://t.co/1UggWzHvdw

— Good Morning America (@GMA) November 30, 2023

“She was just this sweet looking, little innocent child sitting there, kind of defeated,” Smith told Good Morning America on Thursday. “I asked her, ‘What’s going on?’ and she said that she had thrown a cup of yogurt at lunch and had been suspended and was waiting to be picked up.”

The educator recalled how when he asked Whitaker-Smith, now 20, if she would ever throw food at a restaurant, she responded that she had never eaten at one.

She was living in a group home after being “bounced” from foster home to foster home for the majority of her life.

“At that point, I had felt like she just needed a hand, needed help,” Smith said. “I recognized that she needed something to go in her favor, maybe for once, that it hadn’t gone in her favor in the past, but she just needed somebody to help her.”

Smith and his wife, Marybeth, had previously served as foster parents with hopes of adopting children after the couple struggled with infertility for years. 

However, they left their fostering “dream” behind almost six years prior after a trio of siblings they took in were returned to their biological parents after having them for nearly a year.

Marybeth Smith told the outlet that when her husband got the courage to open up about his special interaction with Whitaker-Smith, she knew it wasn’t a topic he was taking lightly.

“This was something that, obviously, he felt pretty passionate about because I’m sure she’s not the only kid that he has dealt with who has been in a similar situation,” she said. “So something about Raven was special to him, and obviously I trusted him.”

It was June of that year when the Smiths first opened their home to the struggling girl, after going through the recertification process for fostering.

“It was really weird at first because, in my mind, I thought of [Jason Smith] as the bad guy because I was always getting in trouble,” Whitaker-Smith recalled. “But then for my first weekend visitation, they made me feel extremely welcome, like I was already in the family. They got everything that I needed without even knowing that I would be there forever. They just did it.”

When the Smiths first began fostering her, Whitaker-Smith said that at the time, she assumed they would be another temporary family like the other homes she had been in before. 

Looking back now, however, she said she “always knew” her principal and his wife would be her parents.

“I gave them a bunch of trouble to see what would happen,” Whitaker-Smith recalled of her earlier days with her adoptive parents. “I kind of tested whether or not this was real or not to see if they would keep me no matter what, because they would tell me that but, you know, I’d heard that a lot before … I wanted to just challenge and see if they were really willing to accept me.”

Marybeth said that she and her husband were not surprised to see their new foster daughter act out, because of what she had been through before.

“She had been let down by all the adults in her life, so why would she trust us,” Marybeth Smith said. “We were just two complete strangers to her at first.”

In addition to overcoming emotional challenges, the Smiths also helped Whitaker-Smith learn basic skills that had been neglected in her group home, teaching her everything from routines like taking showers and brushing teeth daily, to working her way up from being on a third-grade reading level at age 11 to being on par with her high school classmates. 

“She was willing to do all that extra work,” Marybeth said of the hard hours of homework her daughter put in. “It wasn’t just us pushing her. She saw the benefit in education and wanting to better herself, so she was willing to stay after school.”

On November 3, 2017, the Smiths were finally able to formally adopt Whitaker-Smith.

Four years later, the adoptee escaped the odds of being a former foster kid and was accepted into the University of Kentucky, where she is now a junior studying social work.

Marybeth recalled that when her daughter took her first class as a social work major, she told her, “I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

“I need to choose something that I’m passionate about,” Whitaker-Smith said. “It feels really cool to tell my other classmates that I was in the system, and then they go and they tell their friends and everyone else about my story.”