Girl harnesses Potter's magic

WAYNE WASHINGTON

St. Petersburg Times

A bay area foster child identifies with the fictional character, writes about it and wins a trip to New York.

Ashley Rhodes-Courter dreamed Harry Potter dreams.

Living in a Plant City foster care home where she said she was beaten, forced to swallow hot sauce and run laps under a stifling summer sun, she dreamed of magical worlds far away.

Just like Harry Potter.

Except Potter's travails are a figment of author J.K. Rowling's best-selling imagination.

Ashley's says her pain, and her miraculous rescue from it, are real.

The 14-year-old Citrus County honor student's essay about how one of the Potter books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, affected her life won her a trip to New York City to meet Rowling and to appear on NBC's Today show Oct. 20.

Scholastic, publisher of the Potter series, selected Ashley's essay and nine others from among 10,000 submitted during a contest held last month.

Two of the 10 winners were from Florida. The other Florida winner, 8-year-old Shelby Nicole Hill of Sarasota, wrote about reading the Potter books while she and her mother lived in a homeless shelter.

The essays were posted on USA Today's Web site, www.usatoday.com.

Rhodes-Courter said she learned Oct. 2 that her essay had been selected.

"It was a bit of a surprise," said Ashley, a ninth-grader who began reading more at the suggestion of her adoptive parents, Gay and Philip Courter.

"They wanted me to read more in my free time and not do things, like watching television, that aren't as productive," Ashley said.

Despite her success in school, Ashley said she didn't enjoy reading books that much. "Generally, it's very hard for me to get into a book," she said.

To get her more interested in reading, her parents gave her some of Rowling's books.

"There's something about them," Ashley said. "I love them."

The Sorcerer's Stone, the first in the Potter series, was of particular interest to Ashley. The book describes how Potter escapes a miserable orphan life through wizardry.

"Here was a boy exactly my age who also didn't have a caring family," Ashley wrote in her winning essay. "My mother's neglect put me in foster care for 10 years. Even though the Dursleys treated Harry cruelly, he only had one set of foster parents while I moved 14 times."

Ashley described a nightmarish stay in the foster home of Charles and Marjorie Moss.

"I was beaten, forced to swallow hot sauce, run laps in the blistering sun, squat in awkward positions and food was withheld," she wrote. "I didn't sleep under the stairs, but I did share a claustrophobic room with eight girls."

Like Potter, Ashley dreamed of a way out.

"When I was lonely and miserable, I dreamed about magical worlds and fantasized being rescued," she wrote.

That rescue eventually came. She was moved to The Children's Home and adopted by the Courters about three years ago.

Charles and Marjorie Moss, meanwhile, were arrested in May and charged with 40 counts of felony child abuse and neglect. The charges don't cover the time when Ashley lived there, but she gave a statement to police investigating the case, and to lawyers who earlier this year sued state officials on behalf of children who say they were abused or neglected in foster care.

The Mosses' attorney has said they are victims of manipulative children and a department that believes anything the children say.

Ashley's experiences changed her life. Winning the essay contest and earning the trip to New York City is only part of it.

In June, she gave a speech in Washington, D.C., during the annual conference of the National Court-Appointed Special Advocates praising her court-appointed advocate. The speech went so well that she was asked to speak to court-appointed advocates in Greenville, S.C., on Friday and in Jacksonville on Oct. 25.

"She has very little shame about her experience," Gay Courter said. "She has much more pride about overcoming it."

Now she's getting set to go to New York. She'll fly up Oct. 19 and have breakfast with Rowling the next day.

Meeting Rowling will be a thrill, Ashley said. But New York offers other thrills, too.

"The shopping," she said, "is phenomenal."