ACAP Child and Family Services is the end of the line for a lot of kids, but Largo Wales says it never turns away a child, no matter their behavior or parent issues.

Eighty-five percent of the children come to ACAP from the Department of Social and Health Services with social, emotional or financial problems, but some come there from home or corporate daycares that no longer can handle them.

Among these are kids labeled “failure to thrive,” kids so badly abused that most of their bones have been broken, kids with wounds that don’t show on an X-ray or CT scan.

Wales, ACAP’s executive program director, sees the bad stuff every day, but she gets to see the good things happen, too.

“They get here and they walk and they talk and they laugh, and their behavior is wonderful and they learn to read,” Wales said. “We give them four meals a day and they’re happy. Once we get a child to turn around a little bit, we have a full-time social worker here, and we work on getting the parents to be a little more positive and build on the success.

“… It’s hard to take unless you really believe in what you are doing,” Wales added.

Wales is definitely a believer, and her faith in what she is doing keeps her on the go even on the worst days. In her year and a half at the helm, she’s had a lot of hard days, moments when ACAP’s end looked to be at hand. Wales credits the Auburn community, which she said has responded time and again to the need.

“I don’t care how bad the times are, people are stepping forward,” Wales said. “Ever since I moved to Auburn, I don’t know if I’ve ever really asked a person in Auburn and they have said no. Around here we ask, and people don’t say no.”

For all ACAP’s energetic chief does for kids, the Auburn Reporter has named her its Person of the Year for 2009.

“She is incredibly driven,” said Debbie Christian, director of the Auburn Food Bank. “I don’t think the woman sleeps. She has a passion for everything she picks up, but especially for kids and the special needs in their lives.”

“Driven is a good term, as well as enthusiastic, dedicated, and incredibly tenacious,” said Jim Blanchard, executive director of Auburn Youth Resources, which Wales once served as president of its board of directors. “She’s just done a marvelous job at ACAP and taken it through extremely difficult times.”

Financial woes

When ACAP’s board of directors put Wales, its former program director, in the newly created position of executive program director in June of 2008, the agency was in the grips of its worst financial crisis ever. It couldn’t meet payroll. Soon it would have to vacate its home of 35 years, a set of portables in Les Gove Park, to make way for the Auburn Community Center project.

ACAP needed to find another home ASAP.

“The first week we couldn’t make payroll, so I went out and in seven hours raised $17,000,” Wales said. “While we were figuring out the payroll, which took a number of months of cutting things and dealing with the budget, I was also looking for a new location and I was able to get an extension on the eviction from the City.”

Wales led an army of parents and volunteers one memorable afternoon and night in November 2008, and in 12 hours they moved ACAP into a wing of the White River Presbyterian Church. Then the state fire marshal demanded that the agency make costly safety upgrades, including a firewall, before it could open for the kids.

Wales helped find the money and spoke to the parents and volunteers, letting them know what ACAP was up against. Then she marshalled a team of volunteers to build the required firewall. She herself was at the church from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day until the work was finished, putting to use the construction skills she employed to pay her way through college.

“We didn’t have a Christmas last year at my house,” Wales said.

ACAP then had to work out the terms of a four-year lease with the church.

Need to grow

Today ACAP rings with the laughter of small children again, and that elusive goal of financial stability seems almost within sight. The problem is that ACAP is limited to 45 kids, but it needs 105 to get on a sound financial footing. It can’t do that, however, without further upgrades, including six new bathrooms, an overhead sprinkler system and another firewall. Wales said the expansion will cost about $300,000 but ACAP has everything except the bathrooms paid for, and they will cost about $85,000. Bathrooms require an expertise that firewalls don’t, she noted.

“Now we’ve got a nice home, but in order to be fiscally solvent we absolutely have to increase the enrollment, but we can’t without major structural changes,” said Wales.

Wales writes two grants a week, most of which are denied, helping to make up the hole blown in ACAP’s budget in part when United Way decided to stop funding it. She is also leading the effort to get the expansion going, raising money, meeting with construction companies, calling different people to see if they can help with the sprinkler system.

“The real problem we need to solve is to no longer be grant dependent, and once we get the enrollment up, we won’t be,” Wales said.

Born in Seattle in 1948, Wales is the oldest of two children. Her father, Gilbert Wales, was a mechanical engineer who worked for Hughes Aircraft and helped design hydrofoils for Boeing. Her first name is unusual, she concedes, but her father originally had something more startling in mind to name her — he suggested “Spraygun,” after his beloved sail boat.

“My mom just went, ‘Whoa!'” Wales said. “So they pulled out a map … and they saw Key Largo Island, so I got the name Largo,” Wales said.

Her family lived overseas for years, eventually returning to the Northwest, and Largo graduated from Lakes High School in 1966.

She went on to earn a degree in home and family studies from Washington State University, a masters in creative learning from the University of Puget Sound and a doctorate from Seattle University in business and leadership. A Fulbright Scholar, she worked in China after the cultural revolution and in India, studying how the governments there organized their educational systems. She also has a two-year degree as a paralegal from Highline Community College.

She worked for the Auburn School District for 15 years as the director of special education and elementary education. In the late 1990s, she spent three years reorganizing the Orting School District’s special education program. After that, she went to work for the Puyallup School District, and briefly returned to work for the Orting School District before accepting the ACAP position

While all that was going on, Wales found time to serve as a president of Auburn Youth Resources, past president of the Auburn Food Bank and past president of the Auburn Noon Kiwanis Club. She is a member of the Auburn Communities and Schools Forum. She was recommended for the top ACAP position in recognition of her top-notch grant writing skills and her fiscal understanding, among other qualities.

Something most people don’t know about Wales is that until the eighth grade she couldn’t read at all.

“I matured late. We lived in Turkey, Germany, England and California, so there was that continual interruption in my education and I missed some of those reading building blocks,” Wales said.

When Largo was 14, her mother found a librarian willing to help, and she began to learn how to read. She wasn’t reading at grade level, however, until the second year of college.

Being a late-blooming learner opened her heart to kids.

“I really have a great deal of empathy for people who have a hard time with school, or have a hard time picking something up when everybody else is picking it up,” Wales said. “As a child, all the measures out there showed I was pretty stupid, but I didn’t feel stupid. So when some of my kids here have a kind of a free spirit in their relationship to behavior or something is out of synch, I have a great deal of compassion for them.”

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Anybody who would like to help ACAP with time, material or contributions, may call 253-939-0870 and ask for Largo.