State’s Future May Ride on Services for Children : Youth: In creating a unified support system, California would be investing in the worker of the 21st Century.

Tiffany is a 9-month-old girl whose 17-year-old mother has just left the baby’s father because he threatened them with a knife. Jason, 9, and Crystal, 7, walk home from school and wait for their mom, a single parent, to come home from her job with the state. Ben dropped out of school in 10th grade because he was more into crack than learning. What these children have in common is that, despite the multitude of programs that California administers, they have received no state-sponsored aid.

Within the next generation, California’s population of children will grow from 8 million to more than 11 million. The demographic trends tell us that more and more of these children are at risk: increasing numbers of minority youth, decreasing numbers of two-parent families and soaring numbers of children who can be categorized as poor or “near poor.” These trends all point to serious problems facing California’s children.

These children face trouble from the womb through adolescence. Many fail to receive adequate prenatal care, well-baby care or nutrition. Child care is not widely available. Many kids are poorly prepared for schools that may not be prepared for them. As they grow up, there are the hurdles of adolescent pregnancy, substance abuse, dropping out of school and violent juvenile crime.

If California is to meet the challenge of providing for these children, policy priorities need to be set and the current jumble of programs needs to be streamlined.

The sheer number of children in need of services and their ethnic diversity complicates analysis of the childrens services delivery system in California. One in four Californians under 6 lives in poverty, emergency responses to child abuse have increased more than 100% since 1985, and foster-care caseloads have increased more than 50%. California ranks 17th among states in infant mortality, second in adolescent pregnancy and first in juvenile incarceration.

The ethnic composition of the population under 19 represents the forefront of a “growth in minorities” pattern that will reshape the education, health and social service-delivery systems. Ethnic minorities composed one-quarter of California’s children in 1970. Today, more than half the state’s children are minorities, which are projected to make up more than two-thirds of that population by 2020.

The Little Hoover Commission has described the childrens service system as one “in a state of utter confusion and disarray,” administered by “a hodgepodge of state and local agencies that are unable to effectively serve the growing numbers of youth in need of services.”

Although California has unified services for seniors within the Department of Aging, there is no corresponding department for children and youth. With no centralized administrative structure to oversee childrens services, it is virtually impossible to conduct needs assessments, to achieve an unduplicated count of the clients served in any one service category, or to construct anything resembling a childrens program budget.

California’s children are not alone. They are growing up along with millions of other children in a country with no explicit family or children’s policy.

The lack of a comprehensive children’s services system in California has led to an under-emphasis on prevention and early intervention. Experts agree that policy-making in a vacuum leads to more serious problems later.

Although California has developed successful prevention and early intervention programs (for instance, the Early Intervention for School Success and Adolescent Family Life programs) as experts have advised, it hasn’t followed through on those successes. There has not been the commitment of a significant dollar investment in any of these programs to reach a large enough portion of the children’s population.

Over the past 20 years, children’s advocates have called for a comprehensive, coordinated children’s services system in California.

The state has been impeded in its effort to design such a system, however, by lack of information on the needs of children, by turf battles among individual service sectors and by lack of top-down leadership.

The necessary information on the socio-demographic and service needs of California’s children is now available. Policy Analysis for California Education’s “Conditions of Children in California,” a report released in March, presents the fullest picture to date of the lives of California’s children and a detailed analysis of a broad spectrum of services to children.

As in other states, children’s services in California evolved as a set of policy responses to perceived social problems such as poverty, abandonment, or abuse and neglect. Each program has its own set of clients, service providers and issue areas or turf.

It can be very difficult to go beyond an overall policy consensus and begin working with competing constituency groups to develop an actual program. But new players are emerging who stress a unified system that emphasizes prevention and early intervention.

Whether California has the top-down political leadership to accomplish this task is another question. During the 1989 legislative session, two bills--by state Senators Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) and Robert Presley (D-Riverside)--addressed the coordination of children’s services. However, each encountered strong administrative opposition; one bill remained in committee and the second survived only as a watered-down version in which counties were authorized to establish interagency children’s services coordination councils.

Where leadership has emerged in other states through cooperative efforts between the governor’s office and the legislature, statewide efforts have rapidly been put in place. Arizona has established an Office of Children, and Minnesota is moving forward a legislative program known as the Youth Initiative.

The momentum in California seems to be building. Recently, gubernatorial candidate Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) called for the appointment of a cabinet-level secretary of child development and services. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown is preparing to introduce a major bill in which consolidation of children’s services at the local school site can be demonstrated.

California’s children are our future. The child growing up amid poverty, domestic violence and drugs is the worker and parent of the 21st Century. California has the capacity to design a comprehensive service system to meet the needs of its children.

Whether California makes a major investment in prevention and early intervention, builds a program consensus between constituencies and exercises the political leadership to accomplish this goal remains the uncompleted task of the 20th Century.