Miss Kentucky is UK student who was once in foster care. Now she advocates for kids
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- Miss Kentucky Ariana Rodriguez used pageants to secure scholarships for college tuition.
- She created The Lucky Ones Foundation and podcast to support foster youth.
- Rodriguez hopes to run a facility for youth aging out of foster care.
Ariana Rodriguez entered her first pageant because she dreamed of a college education.
“I really wanted to go to college, and I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it,” she said.
Rodriguez, 20, spent her childhood moving among family members and friends in kinship care, living in a foster home for two years and then living out of her car at age 16.
Often, she and her siblings barely adjusted to one home before they were shuttled off to another one.
“I went between cousins, my grandparents, my mom’s old friends. I switched schools pretty much, like, every single year,” she said, until she got to high school.
At 14, she said she was returned to the care of her mother, who has battled addiction and was homeless.
But Rodriguez was driven to reach for something more, and last month she was crowned Miss Kentucky.
She’s using her time in the role to speak out for kids in the foster care system.
Rodriguez, who has completed two years at the University of Kentucky as a social work and psychology major, has set up a foundation to help children in foster care with things like prom dresses, Christmas gifts and suitcases to replace the garbage bags they often carry their belongings in.
It’s called “The Lucky Ones.”
She also hosts a podcast by the same name that is “dedicated to amplifying the voices of foster alumni and revealing the harsh realities of the foster care system.”
‘They need to listen to kids’
Rodriguez, who regularly interviews others who have experienced foster care on her podcast, said there are a lot of things that could be improved about the foster care system.
“It starts in the very beginning, in court,” she said in a recent interview. “The process that they put kids through is very dehumanizing.”
As a child, only once was she given the opportunity speak to the judge when a decision was being made, and in that instance the judge did the opposite of what she had asked, she said.
While she said she knows courts can’t always leave placements entirely up to the children, they could do more to take their voices into consideration.
Even though she was very young, Rodriguez said she wrote letters and asked her case workers to share them with the judge, but they were not passed along.
“They don’t ask kids what they want,” she said “A lot of kids in foster care are treated like adults in every other situation.
“I had been pretty much raising my little brother and sister. ...I took care of things like an adult, so for them to treat me like a kid, it made me mad,” she said. “They need to listen to kids.”
And she said the removal process used by Child Protective Services made her feel like she and her siblings were “pawns on a chessboard.”
She said she remembers sitting in a CPS office for hours when she was 12 years old, as workers looked for a foster care placement for her and her 10-year-old brother.
“I vividly remember locking arms ... and saying, ‘you’re going to have to pull us apart,’” Rodriguez recalled.
Ultimately, she said, workers found a home that would take both of them.
“When you’re in the CPS office, most of the people don’t even introduce themselves to you,” she said. “They just treated us like a case.”
She learned to count every item she owned, including the clothes she was wearing, and then “they do a full body inspection to make sure that you haven’t self-harmed,” she said.
Rodriguez understands the reasons behind the process, and many CPS employees are “overworked and underpaid, and they have too many cases,” she said.
Several issues in Kentucky’s foster care system were reported earlier this year, including a lack of housing options and placements for children in the state’s care.
For Rodriguez, empathy and explanations were often lacking in the foster care system.
”You’re treated like a criminal,” she said. “It feels like you’re a number and not a kid.”
And, Rodriguez said, the foster home she went to had its own challenges. While she pointed out that every experience is different, she said she felt as though “my foster parent was only in it for the money.”
She said the family members and friends she’d been placed with before entering foster care had struggled financially, but she felt that they cared about her.
Once she was in foster care, she said those providing care “didn’t care about me the same way.”
Then, 26 days before her 14th birthday, she was returned to her mother’s care.
While Kentucky offers a college tuition waiver for youth in foster care, Rodriguez suddenly didn’t qualify because she wasn’t in state custody anymore. But she was determined to go to college.
“I just knew that I was capable of so much more,” she said.
Finding a way to go to college
While Rodriguez couldn’t control many things in her life as a child, she said she learned the importance of “focusing on what you can control, rather than what you can’t.”
She kept busy with all kinds of activities at Bardstown’s Thomas Nelson High School — the marching band’s color guard, choir, Future Business Leaders of America, school plays.
And she said she knew there were scholarships associated with pageants.
The Miss Kentucky title comes with a $20,000 scholarship, but there are other scholarships available too.
So, as a 17-year-old high school student, Rodriguez said she spent $1,000 she had saved up for college on the things she needed to enter the Miss My Old Kentucky Home pageant, a preliminary competition for the Miss Kentucky pageant.
“I spent all my college savings,” Rodriguez said. “And I lost.”
But what looked like the end was just the beginning for Rodriguez.
She said the pageant director, Kimberly Lile, “worked day and night to try to find sponsors from across the country” to help her keep competing.
And people came through.
“They saw that initiative. The only thing I had was my passion,” Rodriguez said.
“I didn’t even know how to curl my hair. I didn’t even have glasses. I couldn’t see the judges on stage,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I didn’t have a track for the talent competition; I just got up there and sang.”
Last year, she competed in the Miss Kentucky pageant as Miss Lexington, but she said, “I didn’t even make the top 12.”
This year, she came back as Miss Bardstown, which is her hometown, and won.
Rodriguez is the first foster care alum to be named Miss Kentucky. She’ll be heading to Orlando, Florida, to compete in the Miss America pageant later this year.
Plans for the future
Rodriguez is taking a year off from UK to focus on her Miss Kentucky duties, as well as her work as the spokesperson for the Kentucky Department of Agriculture’s Kentucky Proud program.
She’s looking forward to the Kentucky Derby next year, which happens to fall on her 21st birthday. As Miss Kentucky, she’ll walk the red carpet along with the celebrities who attend.
And with the scholarship money that came with the Miss Kentucky title, along with other scholarships,, she plans to seek a master’s degree.
Jay Miller, Dean of the UK College of Social Work, is also an alum of the foster care system and has been an inspiration and support to her, she said.
Her ultimate goal, Rodriguez said, is to run an independent living facility for young people who age out of foster care. She envisions a “compound” of sorts, where young adults can begin to recover from the trauma they’ve experienced and develop life skills through mentoring and other supports.
“I never learned how to do taxes, how to dress for an interview, what to put on a resume,” she said. “Anything that I learned how to do, I learned off of YouTube.”
She wants better than that for other kids.
She said opportunities for that dream are coming her way, as she makes connections with more organizations and community members.
She said her mother, who has struggled with addiction, is in recovery.
“She has really just started to realize, ‘My daughter did this,’” Rodriguez said. “My mom is the most special person in the world to me.”
In a special St. Patrick’s Day message on her podcast, Rodriguez talked about luck.
“No matter where you come from or what you’ve been through, there is always something waiting for you on the other side of the hard days,” she said. “Sometimes the hardest roads lead to the greatest rewards.”
“Remember, you make your own luck.”
