Child welfare, by the numbers

Large government agencies with vital missions, such as the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, can run properly only on the strength of selfless work, courageous leadership, responsible oversight — and data. Managers and policymakers need accurate, consistent and complete statistics, and they need to demonstrate that they have chosen the right outcomes to measure. Otherwise, there is no way for them, or the public, to know whether they are succeeding.

In October 2010, county supervisors found themselves unable to measure the performance of DCFS because they believed they lacked consistent data from year to year on the number of children who had died as a result of abuse or neglect. They directed county staff to compile statistics on child deaths over the last decade, but soon realized that many agencies track child deaths, often recording different aspects of the tragedies while needlessly duplicating their efforts. With numbers gathered by different authorities with different goals, the supervisors couldn’t agree on whether things were getting better or worse. So the board called for a “single entity” to compile, maintain and interpret child death data. The matter was deemed urgent.

In a report dated March 31 of this year, county Chief Executive Officer William T Fujioka recommended that representatives of various agencies meet to draw up a charter for what became known simply as the “single entity.” The work group was to make staffing recommendations and propose an oversight board.

A year after the supervisors demanded action, and several months after they ordered the head of DCFS to report directly to them instead of to Fujioka, no work group has met. There is no uniformity of child death statistics. There is no “single entity.”

That’s par for the course in Los Angeles County government, where attention spans often last only as long as the news cycle. Frustrating, to be sure. Embarrassing, even.

Outrageous?

Let’s stick with frustrating and embarrassing. There are enough outrages in county government. Too often and too easily, the latest outrage reorders priorities and derails important work as the board reacts to public or media scrutiny and managers react to the board. Supervisors fume, fingers point, heads roll, remedies are debated, selected and quickly forgotten.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich has requested an update on the “single entity,” and that’s a good thing; the county needs some follow-up or some closure on the issue, and it needs it soon, before the next board blow-up over child death numbers. But first, everyone involved — the supervisors, Fujioka, DCFS and all the other agencies and offices that track child death statistics — could profit from taking a deep breath.

And then they can ask, calmly: What happened? Why is it that, a year later, there is no “single entity” with consistent and unassailable data? Was the goal really to create yet another county agency? Isn’t the problem that the county has too many siloed and sometimes squabbling agencies?

It’s important to focus on the underlying mission of the county’s child welfare program, which is, or ought to be, to keep children safe and living securely in permanent homes. The numbers that count are the ones that measure safety and permanency. They include incidents of re-abuse — how often children who were abused before the county intervened are abused again afterward — and how long it takes to move a child from a temporary situation, such as foster care or a group home, back to a reunified family or, if necessary, into adoption.

Those are the numbers for which the Board of Supervisors should be holding the Department of Children and Family Services accountable. The methodology for compiling those numbers should be transparent and files should be accessible to, at the very least, an outside auditor, so the board can be certain the figures aren’t being gamed and are consistent and complete.

Tabulating the number of children in foster care from year to year is not unimportant, especially given that the rate of abuse of children removed from their homes was so high in Los Angeles County through much of the 1990s, and especially given evidence that removing a child can cause emotional trauma that is often deeper and harder to treat even than difficult home conditions. But taken by themselves, without reference to re-abuse or the time to permanency, numbers documenting the steep decline in recent years of the number of children in foster care tell little about whether the county is achieving its mission. Likewise, tracking the deaths of children from abuse or neglect and the rise or decline of those numbers over the years most certainly correlates with the county’s performance; but while those deaths demand the attention of investigators and policymakers, they represent such a small fraction of cases handled by the county that they, by themselves, without analysis, reveal little beyond the stubborn consistency of tragedy.

Yes, the board is duty-bound, morally and legally, to examine child deaths, and to do that it must have consistent, complete and verifiable data. If supervisors need a “single entity” to compile it for them, so be it — but must there be a work group, meetings, a charter, an oversight board and a new agency? The supervisors should recall that the county already has an Interagency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect that has been compiling such data for years. There are complications, including legal strictures against premature release of homicide data by prosecutors, interdepartmental rivalries and the board’s own overly secretive grip on child death files. But those problems would plague any agency, new or existing. If ICAN is not the proper agency, it’s up to the supervisors to articulate why, and to designate another.