Court Site for Children Is Dedicated : $52-Million Building Will Serve Neglected Youth

The plight sounds familiar.

The neglected teen-ager is bounced from one home to another, almost lost in a system chronically short of money and overwhelmed by demands.

Sounding much like the story of one of the abused children it serves, the central character in this case is the 15-year-old Los Angeles County Dependency Court. And while the final chapter has yet to be written, county officials are hoping for a happy ending.

Dedicated a Site

County Supervisor Ed Edelman and other local officials dedicated a site Wednesday for construction of a $52-million courthouse that will be devoted solely to serving the interests of the 45,000 neglected and abused children under the court’s jurisdiction.

Edelman described it as the only court in the nation to handle the cases of abused and neglected children apart from those involving delinquency.

Except for $600,000 in state seed money and another $1 million from the Los Angeles Rotary Club, the project will be entirely financed by the county.

Situated on a hillside in Monterey Park, the Los Angeles County Children’s Court will become a permanent home for the review of dependency cases when it opens in 1992.

Presiding Juvenile Judge Paul Boland said the courthouse is being designed with young people in mind. Instead of the granite grandeur of a typical county courthouse, it will be a more informal, six-story building with smaller, more intimate courtrooms and a playground.

Students and researchers from nearby Cal State Los Angeles plan to use the center to study the causes of child abuse.

Series of Obstacles

Edelman said the dedication represented a triumph over a series of obstacles the project has faced, from finding the construction money in a tight county budget to assuring Monterey Park city officials that the facility will be an asset to the community.

It will also end the current practice of hearing child-abuse cases in the same building where adult criminal trials are conducted, he noted.

And finally, Children’s Court will have a home.

That will be a far cry from the initial, modest quarters given to the court at its inception in 1974, when county officials decided to split cases involving abused and neglected children apart from cases involving delinquent youths.

First Location

The court was initially located in the old Metro Annex on North Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, where “we used to go into the attorneys’ interview room and watch the termites trail up the wall,” Superior Court Judge Richard P. Byrne recalled.

After a move to another old building, the court was again moved in 1978 in what was billed as a “temporary” relocation to the Criminal Courts Building, Byrne said. “Temporary” has so far meant 11 years.

Besides freeing up courtrooms in the Criminal Courts building, the move will combine other Dependency Court space in the San Fernando Valley into a single, centrally located facility. Byrne said the quest for a new Children’s Court building has been a long, hard fight.

He compared it to a visit to a dentist: “It’s like pulling teeth and it has been a lengthy extraction.”