County Slow in Keeping Promises on Foster Care

More than a year ago, alarmed Los Angeles County officials announced a critical shortage of foster care and vowed to overhaul the system to find temporary homes for thousands of abused and neglected children.

Have they made good on their promise?

“I haven’t seen a great deal of change,” said Maureen Strelich, a children’s services investigator and union representative. “For all the talk, I don’t think there has been a lot of progress.”

Even Helen Ramirez, the deputy director in charge of foster care for the Department of Children’s Services, admits progress has been slow.

“We haven’t moved as quickly as people would like,” she said. “Rather than do a lot of patchwork improvements, we decided to do a whole reassessment. After an initial look, we’ve decided we need to beef up the whole program.”

Attention on Abuse

In the summer of 1984, many people involved in foster care said they had already reached that conclusion.

The county had long suffered from a shortage of foster homes and facilities, but sudden attention on child abuse--fueled in part by the McMartin Pre-School case--sent reports of abuse soaring.

At that time, there were 28 workers handling licensing of about 600 foster-parent applicants waiting to be screened, according to the Department of Public Social Services.

The same employees were responsible for monitoring the roughly 13,000 children receiving foster care--about 11,500 of them in individual homes, 1,360 in institutions and the rest in group foster homes.

Inspections Required

State law required foster homes be inspected twice a year and licensed annually. Social workers admitted it had been several years since they had been able to do so.

Youngsters sometimes ended up in foster homes more dangerous than the homes from which the county had taken them, workers said. The 1983 death of a 3-year-old girl after being sodomized by her foster parent was a tragic example.

County officials promised a new beginning. They decided in April, 1983, to create the Department of Children’s Services, which took over services for abused and neglected youngsters from the Department of Public Social Services.

The county Board of Supervisors vowed to make improving foster care a top priority for the deparment. So did the department’s first director, Lola Hobbs, who resigned after a stormy six months on the job.

“Unfortunately, during the time Ms. Hobbs was here, nothing was accomplished,” Strelich said. “She reorganized management, and that was about all.”

Specifically, actions in foster care taken during the last year include:

--Adding about four new workers to the licensing section. Another four employees, on loan from a different division, are working in licensing. Ramirez said the backlog today appears to be about the same size, although all applications have been assigned to workers.

--Expanding the county’s foster-parent recruiting program by increasing public service announcements on television and putting ads on billboards and in newspapers.

--Substantially increasing training for foster parents, although sessions are optional.

The county’s proposed 1985-86 budget allocates about $121 million to the department, up from about $90 million this fiscal year. Robert Chaffee, the department’s interim director, is seeking more funding for foster care staff.

Training Sessions Added

In the meantime, the county has added several training sessions for foster parents. Last year, foster parents received only a one-day training session. Today, they can attend a two-day orientation session and an ongoing series of seminars on foster children who suffer from severe emotional problems, sexual abuse or drug abuse.

Fifteen community colleges will offer foster parent training next month, and several hospitals already offer sessions for parents with medically handicapped foster children.

Ramirez said a major goal for foster care today is to make “foster parenting” more attractive.

“I feel the system has dwelt too much on the problems these children present,” she said. “I mean, some of these children you hear about and you think, my gosh, who would want them?” But, Strelich has doubts about changing the image of foster parenting.

“We’ve lost a lot of parents because they come in here with unrealistic ideas to begin with,” she said. “They think they’ll be the knights in shining armor who ride to the rescue of these children who have been grossly abused by their monster parents.

“Some of them have problems that are pretty severe. They damage cars, furniture. Unfortunately, they are abused children, and they have problems.”