Frequent Abuses at MacLaren Reported

More than 50 reports that children were abused by staff members at Los Angeles County’s children’s shelter have been made to police so far this year, the Board of Supervisors was told Tuesday.

A representative of the county grand jury, presenting the panel’s final report on a three-month investigation of MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, said the volume of mistreatment allegations shows that more needs to be done to weed out staff members who have neither the temperament nor training to work with the abused or neglected children.

“These people don’t know how to cope with these kind of children. So they have constant confrontation,” said Gloria Tiscareno, who chaired a grand jury committee that investigated the shelter. She said that children are physically restrained in inappropriate ways, such as arm twisting, and are often sent to “quiet rooms”--small, barren quarters which she described as “horrible.”

El Monte police Sgt. Mike Wolf said that the number of child abuse complaints to his department, cited by the grand jury, “sounds about right.” He said that both children and staff have made more reports recently as an outgrowth of media attention to the center’s problems, and because staff members have been made more aware of their legal obligation to report incidents that might be deemed abusive.

Allegations have included charges ranging from a staff member breaking a child’s arm to shaking youngsters, Wolf said. “A lot of these are minor cases that before would have been handled in-house,” he said.

El Monte police have referred the reports to the district attorney’s office, which is conducting an ongoing investigation of possible criminal conduct at the center. Robert Chaffee, acting director of the county’s Department of Children’s Services, said that problems identified by the Grand Jury are being addressed. Background files of employees are being reviewed, quiet rooms are being remodeled and the entire staff is being trained in “non-aggressive” restraining techniques, he said.

Dick Shumsky, an official with the union that represents most MacLaren workers, said he was “shocked” by Tiscareno’s comments, which he said “cast aspersions” on the staff. He said grand jurors are “naive” about the problems faced by the MacLaren employees.