Troubles in Child Care Told : County Services Called Lacking Due to Fund Cuts

Services to San Diego County’s children--from foster care and adoptions to child abuse investigations--suffer from inadequate funding, problems in administration and a lack of cooperation among the agencies that handle children’s issues, according to a five-month-long review.

The problems are mainly the result of a shortage of money since the passage of tax-cutting Proposition 13, combined with changes in state laws that prompted an avalanche of new child abuse reports and made it more difficult for authorities to remove children from troubled families, the report said.

The report recommended that the Department of Social Services hire an ombudsman to handle complaints from citizens because the resolution of problems is “sometimes slow, sometimes non-existent.” It also suggested that the department consider hiring a legal counsel independent of the district attorney’s office to assist in the preparation of child dependency cases, because the district attorney is seen as reluctant to file cases that cannot clearly be won.

The study, prepared for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors by the Public Welfare Advisory Board, involved interviews with dozens of individuals and written surveys of foster parents and social workers. It offered more than 125 recommendations for improvement. The supervisors are scheduled to review the report Tuesday.

Rosemary Barrett-Smith, chairwoman of the committee that wrote the report, said that despite the problems, San Diego County has one of the state’s better systems of children’s services.

“If you are comparing county to county, we are doing an adequate if not a far above-average job,” Smith said. “There are areas that can be improved.”

County Supervisor Susan Golding, who called for the report six months ago, said she is now convinced that “there is not as good a management of children’s services as there should be.”

“The child is getting lost in the system,” Golding said. “The system seems to be set up and the procedures followed, and there’s not enough thought going to the effect on the child. We’ve got to tighten up everything.”

But Randall Bacon, director of the Department of Social Services, said he agreed with most of the report’s findings and recommendations and said he considered it a favorable review of his department’s performance.

“I interpret the report to say the system is functioning fairly well given the resources it has,” Bacon said. “It needs more resources in order to result in any substantial improvement.”

Bacon said he differed with the report’s suggestion that an independent children’s ombudsman ought to be hired to handle citizens’ complaints.

“I think it would be a very costly and duplicative type of system,” Bacon said. “It’s just the very nature of the business we’re in that it would result in a lot of inquiries and investigations into situations which I think would be non-productive. I think we have a good complaint system within the department now.”

Among the other findings in the 70-page report were the following:

- Children served today by the foster parents network and county adoptions unit have much more serious problems than those served in years past. Victims of serious physical abuse and severe emotional damage, children with self-destructive and violent behavior patterns, and a high percentage of ethnic minorities, many of whom do not speak English, have always been part of the system but are now the norm.

- The county suffers from a shortage of foster parents and the continuing loss of experienced parents. One major reason given by foster parents who leave the program is a lack of confidentiality that allows violent natural parents to learn the addresses of and confront the foster parents who are caring for their children.

“Sometimes it’s merely annoying, sometimes they bring very unpleasant friends with them, sometimes they try to steal the child,” Barrett-Smith said.

- Foster parents complained that the county often fails to disclose important information about the children they are taking into their homes and the services available to them. In a survey of foster families, one in four said the county failed to inform them about children’s problems, including retardation, life-threatening heart defects, a history of psychiatric therapy and tuberculosis.

- County adoption workers are frustrated by a high rate of turnover, increased caseload levels and changes in what they believed were appropriate practices. Many of these problems stem from the effort to end the historical separation of the adoptions unit from the rest of the county’s children’s services.

“This is analogous in some respects to a ‘shotgun’ wedding where the hope is that both parties will eventually work together willingly,” the report said, adding that the unit’s performance appears to be improving.

- Computer and clerical support for the social workers is inadequate, forcing them to spend too much time filling out paper work and too little time solving children’s problems. Hot-line workers should be able to call up information about a suspected child abuser instantly but are not able to. Many staff members are frustrated because they are constantly made to fill out computer forms but are not able to retrieve the information compiled from these forms.

Similarly, management in the department lacks information about the extent of re-abuse, the average length of foster home placements, the frequency of multiple replacements, the frequency of social worker visits and statistical profiles of typical child abusers.

- Child abuse investigators are overworked by a system that requires them to seek a court’s approval within 48 hours after removing a child from its parents’ home.

“The worker is required to conduct a thorough investigation involving the child, the parents and other parties, conduct parent searches where necessary, meet the district attorney’s guidelines for filing a petition, prepare the draft petition, meet with the juvenile district attorney and frequently make a court appearance,” the report said.

To reduce stress, the committee suggested that workers in this “court intervention unit” be allowed to rotate frequently with staff at the county’s child abuse hot line.

- The Department of Social Services, the district attorney’s office, the courts, the county counsel and law enforcement are “harnessed as a team but (are) sometimes pulling in different directions.”

The report said the district attorney’s office appears willing only to file cases seeking to separate children from abusive parents when the evidence against the parents provides a case that can clearly be won.

“The juvenile D.A.’s desire to only pursue cases that are clear-cut must be weighed against the risk to the child,” the report said. “Is waiting for a clearer, more life-threatening incident an acceptable risk to take when a child’s life is at stake?”

Melinda Lasater, chief of the district attorney’s juvenile division, denied that her staff concentrates on winning cases to the detriment of the interests of the children.

“To imply that the district attorney is willing to risk the children for a clear-cut case is irresponsible and untrue,” Lasater said.

She said the county’s social workers are overworked and ill-trained, and thus often are unable or unwilling to develop a strong enough case to persuade a judge to separate a child from its parents.

“Of course we concentrate on winning cases,” Lasater said. “If it means we tell the social worker they have to go back and do additional investigation and they don’t want to go back--if that’s a problem, then so be it.”