Bypass County : Foster Home Volunteers Jolt System

Avon Dawdy was amazed when she watched public service ads on television that urged viewers to become foster parents.

As president of the San Fernando Valley Foster Parents Assn., Dawdy knew many foster families that had been waiting months for a child. Los Angeles County staffers had told those families there was a shortage of needy children.

But if the county couldn’t manage to fill the vacancies in households of already qualified families, why would they seek more foster parents? Furthermore, Dawdy suspected that the county didn’t have a good grasp of the actual number of children needing placement.

When the association’s informal random poll of 45 foster families showed 40 with empty beds earlier this year, Dawdy and Kathie Durand, another foster parent, decided to prod the system along.

Bypassing the county’s placement office, the two women began helping the county’s social workers find homes for needy children. In a month, children had been placed at all 40 homes, and grateful social workers were calling the pair at all hours for more help.

“We didn’t do this with the intention of taking over their job,” said Durand, a secretary at a Northridge janitorial service. “We did this to say, ‘Look how bad things are.’ ”

The pair’s success has been embarrassing for the county’s Department of Children’s Services. County officials blame their own antiquated placement system for what they’ve come to see as a critical problem.

Outdated Information

County workers use file cards to manually keep track of foster families with vacancies, but some cards are outdated, conceded Albert May, an assistant director at Children’s Services, which coordinates child placement, adoptions and abuse programs.

The county’s data becomes obsolete when families and social workers do not notify the central office after children are placed or leave a home, May said. The problem has been exacerbated over recent years by the increasing number of troubled and abused children who must depend on the county for shelter, May said.

As of April, 1988, the county had 8,786 children in foster homes and 2,390 others in group homes.

“It has become less accurate as the years go by,” May said of the system.

County officials hope a new computer system, which will be designed with input from professionals as well as Dawdy, will alleviate the problem by making it easier to absorb the massive amount of data.

The efforts of Dawdy and Durand have come to the attention of Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who wants to know why two women can accomplish what the county has trouble doing. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on Antonovich’s motion requesting Children’s Services to work with the Valley Foster Parents Assn. and evaluate their concerns.

“There is an urgency or they wouldn’t be going to that extreme,” Vicki Fouce, Antonovich’s deputy on health matters, said of the association.

Antonovich Criticized

Despite the attention, Durand and Dawdy are not happy with Antonovich. They accuse him of ignoring their pleas for several months until he was forced into an election runoff earlier this month. They said they began calling his office last year, sent him results of their survey in January but got little response from Antonovich in recent months.

Dawson Oppenheimer, Antonovich’s spokesman, said the criticism is unfair because it can take months to thoroughly investigate constituents’ complaints.

“The supervisor rarely shoots from the hip,” Oppenheimer said. “He wants the problem analyzed. He wants to come up calmly with sound solutions.”

Meanwhile, many parents say they are indebted to the two Valley women for linking them up with children who desperately needed stable homes.

“They are very concerned about the needs of our children in the community. I must praise them to the hilt for that. Not too many people are showing concern,” said Beth Palmer, a Tujunga foster mother.

Another fan is John Blair, the owner of two hardware stores, who along with his wife qualified as a foster parent early last year. Every week, Blair asked the county if there were any children available for placement. The answer was always no.

Blair finally contacted the association this spring. It put Blair in touch with a social worker needing a home for an emotionally disturbed 8-year-old girl.

“After waiting eight months and hearing nothing, we gave them our name, and we had a child in two weeks,” Blair said.

Updating Required

The women’s methods are simple. First, they surveyed all their members. They created a file card for each family that contains the parents’ child preferences and whether they have an opening. The association’s parents are required to call if any information on the cards needs to be changed. That requirement is drummed into the members with reminders at the association’s monthly meetings.

About 60 families belong to the association, which is run essentially by the two women.

The volunteer work consumes the women’s days. At 8 a.m. Wednesday, Dawdy, 65, of Arleta, plugged in her iron for two hours’ worth of ironing. Seven hours and 35 calls later, she had almost finished.

Durand, 32, of Reseda, who spends 20 hours a week on association business, takes her yellow foster-parent cards to work so she can help make matches on the spot.

The women say they adopted this cause because foster children, many of whom have been abused, institutionalized or born with drug addictions, need the nurturing and love only families can give. If the county cannot find a home for the children, they end up in county-run MacLaren Children’s Center or in group homes.

“The department is not too happy with us because we’re doing it, but we’ve done it out of desperation,” said Dawdy, who has been a foster parent for 40 years.

A county social worker, who asked not to be identified, said supervisors in the Valley office have forbidden them from calling Durand and Dawdy for referrals to foster families. But she said some social workers are ignoring the prohibition.

May said he had no objections to social workers using the grass-roots network. He called the two women “fine foster parents” whose “intentions are well-meaning.”

“I would prefer them to report to our system,” he said, adding: “I can’t argue if it works. . . . Until we get something better than that, I can’t complain about it.”