Study Assails ‘Disarray’ in State Services for Children

In a searing indictment of the way the state runs its programs for abused and abandoned children, the Little Hoover Commission charged Thursday that California’s $1.2-billion children’s services network is “in a state of utter confusion and disarray.”

Citing graphic examples of children who have “fallen through the cracks” in the system--sometimes with tragic consequences--the commission’s report placed blame on a “hodgepodge” of agencies with conflicting procedures and philosophies. The result, the report said, is that many children who “desperately need help are not being served at all.”

Of the 80 investigations conducted by the watchdog panel in the last 25 years, Commission Chairman Nathan Shapell said “none have revealed more tragic problems of such broad a magnitude.”

As one example of failures within the child-abuse prevention network, the report tells the story of a 14-month-old baby who was removed from a “loving emergency foster-care home” after surgery and placed with another family for adoption. Two months later, the child was found dead after being beaten with a shoe. According to the report, authorities later determined that the adoptive parents were a male transvestite and his lover, who at the time of placement was being sought by police.

Delivery System

In a letter to Gov. George Deukmejian that accompanied the report, Shapell warned that “without a drastic rethinking and restructuring of our state’s children’s services delivery system, a significant portion of our next generation of children will not be able to assume responsible roles as productive members of society.”

The report is the product of two public hearings and 10 months of interviews by the commission, which was established to investigate and recommend reforms of waste and mismanagement in state government. To verify its findings, commissioners also turned to a panel of 33 experts.

A second phase of the study containing detailed recommendations is expected to be completed in the fall.

Almost as soon as it was released, however, the report’s conclusions were attacked by two of the 12 commission members for being “too strident” and overdramatizing problems. The dissenters plan to issue a minority report that will question the credibility of the commission’s study.

“Despite the fact that there were individual cases that were shocking, I don’t feel that justifies the rather extreme denunciation of the entire system,” said Lester O’Shay, a commission member and the head of a San Francisco real estate development firm.

Assemblyman Phillip D. Wyman (R-Tehachapi), who also serves on the commission, said the report was “long on rhetoric and short on solutions.”

“I don’t think it measures up to the usual standards of integrity of research and statistics, so I wasn’t about to sign my name to it,” he said.

The 62-page report cuts a wide swath through the various types of services offered for children. It attempts to link such diverse services as day care for children of working parents to the problems of runaway youths and the tangle of legal requirements that govern treatment of abused children.

Jeannine English, the commission’s assistant executive director, defended the report’s broad sweep as necessary to understand “all the services needed to make (children) whole and turn them into productive adults.”

“We look at child care as the first step,” she said. “In many instances, they don’t get the care, and that provides frustration to families and results in abuse and neglect. With chronic abuse and neglect, these (children) are the ones who become homeless.”

The report identifies at least 35 individual state programs that provide government-supported child care or help for abused and neglected youths.

Among the report’s major findings is that many of these agencies failed to set clear priorities and have become “overburdened” by a rapidly escalating number of reports of abuse.

At the same time, the commission found that about 60% of the reported cases of abuse were later determined to be “unsubstantiated.”

Runaway Youths

The report contends that the problem of runaway youths is largely ignored by public and privately financed agencies. For instance, the commission said there are no statewide programs for “hard-core street kids,” 75% of whom, the report contends, engage in illegal drug use, prostitution and other criminal activities.

One major solution offered by the commission is to establish a single state agency to coordinate and oversee all types of services for children and to increase the amount of government-subsidized child care.

Gale Wright, special assistant to state Social Services Director Linda McMahon, said she was “very, very disappointed in the methodology and research that (the commission) employed.” Contending that the report is little more than a combination of “anecdotal information and opinion,” Wright said it fails by emphasizing the role of government over “the importance of the family.”

“What they are simply saying is they want more government and more money,” she said.