Jaden was just another kid in the class when Jackie Coombe first walked into Pathways Elementary School in Ormond Beach, Florida, in October 2023. She was there to substitute — nothing more, nothing less. She’d fill in for the day, get through the lessons, and go home. That’s how it works.
But something about Jaden stayed with her.
When spring came, Jackie found out why. One of the other adults at the school told her something that stopped her cold: Jaden was in foster care. He didn’t have a permanent home. He was a child bouncing through a system that, at its best, keeps kids safe — but can’t give them the one thing they need most.
Jackie made a decision. She wasn’t going to walk past it.
She started the paperwork. The background checks. All of it. The adoption process in Florida is not a quick one — it demands a great deal from anyone who takes it on, and rightly so. For Jackie, that meant months of forms, home visits, and assessments before the state would consider placing a child in her care permanently. She worked through every step.
By December 2025, Jaden had been permanently placed in Jackie’s care. She later said he had “grown in love and trust” since moving in with her. But one final step remained: making it official.
‘I Got a Mom!’
In June 2026 — nearly three years after Jackie first walked into that classroom — Jaden stood before Circuit Court Judge Joan Anthony. The judge made the announcement: the boy who had once been just another face in a substitute teacher’s class would now be known, officially and forever, as Jaden Andrew Coombe.
Jaden’s reaction was immediate. “I got a mom!” he announced — three words that carried the weight of years of uncertainty, of moves, of hoping that someone would decide he was worth staying for.
Someone had.
Jackie later reflected on just how much Jaden had changed since their early days together — how trust, the hardest thing to rebuild in a child who has been let down, had finally taken root. She didn’t plan for any of this when she took that substitute assignment in October 2023. But she also didn’t look away when it mattered.
There are roughly 400,000 children in foster care in the United States at any given time. Most of them have had adults pass through their lives — teachers, caseworkers, counsellors — people who cared, but moved on. What Jackie Coombe did was simple in concept and extraordinary in practice: she saw a child who needed someone to stay, and she stayed.
