Back to the Orphanage? : The mere mention of these institutions chills some, but others ask: What are the options?

In a Covina neighborhood of tract homes and upscale ranch houses, 30 children are growing up together in an orphanage--an institution that might seem to many as anachronistic in this modern suburb as a debtors’ prison.

But some experts might argue that the 91-year-old Masonic Home for Children actually is ahead of its time.

It’s a trailblazer of sorts because, as some child welfare workers have contended, it may be time to return to orphanages as a way of easing America’s over-taxed foster care system.

Orphanages, the institutions whose very name evokes Dickensian images of “cinder blocks and urinals,” as one worker put it, suddenly have found themselves more widely touted as a possible future for foster care.

And, as a result, those who staff the few remaining orphanage-type homes are finding themselves in demand as consultants. For example, John Rose, administrator of the Masonic Home for Children, said he has received numerous inquiries from groups and individuals nationwide interested in starting homes similar to his. Personnel from the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services are conferring with directors of the Villages, a children’s residence based in Topeka, Kan. Malcolm Smith, the Villages’ education director, said his office has fielded more information requests than can be filled.

But not all the recent attention to orphanages has been positive.

Opponents of proposals to revive the institutions dismiss them as a simplistic, quick-fix solution. One critic, calling the plan “bizarre,” said orphanages historically “were not happy places. They did not prepare kids well.”

A resurrection of the institutions would only “further victimize the victims of this whole (foster care) mess,” said Jerry G. Miller, director of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives.

No matter how well run an orphanage may be, “it isn’t home and it isn’t the real world,” said Brian Cahill, president of Hathaway Children’s Services, which runs a residential treatment center for abused and neglected children in the San Fernando Valley.

But those on both sides of the debate agree that something must be done soon about the increasing numbers of homeless and abandoned children.

Official estimates put the number of children in foster care nationally at 340,000, although some experts say the number of children living out of the home is closer to twice that. By the mid-1990s, some experts predict 845,000 children will require out-of-home care, said Brenda Nordlinger, executive director of the National Assn. of Homes for Children.

This burgeoning population of neglected youth would no doubt come as a surprise to those who advocated shutting down orphanages in the 1940s and 1950s, when many social workers predicted there would be no more need for the institutions because young parents no longer were dying from wars and plagues, leaving children behind.

But what those predictions failed to account for was the increase in “orphans of the living,” as the new homeless youngsters sometimes are called. These new orphans come from families splintered by drugs, poverty, AIDS and other problems.

The recent push to reconsider orphanages as a solution to their plight has been inspired largely by two child welfare advocates: retired Philadelphia Judge Lois Forer and Joyce Ladner, a Howard University School of Social Work professor.

Having observed abandoned youngsters’ problems from different perspectives--the juvenile justice and social welfare systems--both women reached similar conclusions.

They agreed that children who enter the system already traumatized by physical and sexual abuse, and other offenses, are only damaged further by failed attempts to reunite them with their families or by unsuccessful foster placements. In many cases, experts say, children have lived with--and been rejected by--10, 15 or even 20 sets of parents.

Forer wrote in Washington Monthly about a boy who bore more than 70 scars from beatings by his prize-fighter father but was returned to his home because child care agencies believe “the family should be kept together.”

Ladner, Forer and others say society should put less insistence on forcing children back into their own troubled families and into individual placements. Instead, public agencies ought to devote more effort to establishing group homes in the orphanage tradition.

What the new orphans need, they contend, is some sense of permanence.

“I still think foster care works very well with some children,” Ladner said. “But our emphasis on trying to reunite the child with the parents is not always serving the best interests of the child. I guess what I’m trying to do is challenge the notion that we can provide every child with a lovely, wonderful set of foster parents.”

Ladner said she uses the loaded term orphanage “reluctantly.” Indeed, so disturbing is that word to so many people that advocates already are proposing alternatives, such as “children’s communities.”

But orphans themselves don’t seem to object to the term.

In fact, Father Joseph Rivers--founder and director of the Orphan Foundation of America and a man who grew up in foster homes and orphanages in New York State--said “orphanages are what kids like us need.” Shuttling children from foster family to foster family is “really a cruel system,” he said, adding that after experiencing the turmoil of repeated placements, he found orphanage life a welcome sanctuary. “I loved it. I had a home.”

The new orphans, of course, often differ greatly from those of Rivers’ day; many of today’s abandoned youngsters have serious psychiatric and behavioral problems, requiring skilled intervention. It’s common for such children to have had devastating experiences--seeing a parent murdered or having themselves sold sexually to pay for a parent’s fix of crack, experts said.

“These children are hurt, incapacitated, explosive and aggressive,” said Dean S. Conklin Jr., executive director of the McKinley Home for Boys in San Dimas. “They don’t like themselves, and they don’t trust the world.”

No one also suggests these volatile youngsters be housed in facilities like the orphanages of old--cavernous brick buildings where hundreds of pale children dined, mess-hall style, and slept in rows of steel bunks. The model agencies today are looking at is more like a prep school, where eight or 10 children live with house parents in a home-like setting.

For instance, at the Masonic Home, which only accepts children with a familial link to the Masonic order, children are grouped in small, single-story homes, giving the place the feel of a community rather than of an institution, said home administrator Rose. The homes are scattered over 33 acres of lawns and citrus groves. Bordering one side of the facility is a “Huck Finn” type play area, as Rose described it, complete with a stream and hiking trails.

While siblings often are split up in foster placements, brothers and sisters here can live in the same house, depending on their ages. Children arrive as young as age 5 and may stay until age 18, “unless their family puts itself back together,” Rose said.

One typical resident, Rose said, is a boy abandoned on his grandfather’s doorstep at age 8. The child had been in 17 schools and homes in three years. He had been placed on psychotropic medication and had little self-esteem, an attitude reflected in his bent posture.

The grandfather, a former stone mason, could not care for the boy and delivered him to the Masonic Home, where he was taken off medication and was treated with a fairly traditional regimen of encouragement and attention. If the boy’s emotional problems had required more specialized care, he would not have been accepted at the home, which is equipped to handle only “the good apples,” Rose said.

Today, he said, the boy, who now stands straight, is a star wrestler with a B+ average in his high school classes.

A case such as this, in which a child goes permanently to a group home rather being treated and returned to the foster placement system, is rare these days, said Nordlinger, of the National Assn. of Homes for Children.

Few long-term group homes exist. More common are facilities emphasizing short stays so as to comply with the Family Reunification Act, the federal law that requires agencies receiving federal money to strive to reunite children with their families or to put them in foster or adoptive families.

“The focus of our entire child welfare system is to keep families together, if we possibly can,” said Mary Hayes, director of specialized resources for the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services.

While admirable in theory, some say the policy harms children who might benefit from a permanent placement. It also has made it impossible for orphanage-type facilities to operate without relying on private money. The Masonic Home, for instance, is funded by the Masonic fraternity.

Experts agree that a natural or surrogate family is the best place to raise a child. “That’s the grand plan and the major design,” said Masonic Home director Rose.

But some children cannot safely be reunited with their parents; successful foster placements also have become more elusive as the population of homeless youngsters gets tougher and the demands on foster families greater.

“Finding suitable foster families is a problem. Training and supervising them is a horrendous problem,” said Conklin, who, in addition to being the executive director of the McKinley Home for Boys, is president of the California Assn. of Services for Children, whose nonprofit child-care agencies serve 30,000 youngsters in the state--or about half the state’s total foster care population.

Even given suitable foster families, matching them with a child can be difficult. Many children needing homes are older, and, thus, not so attractive to foster--or adoptive--families. And many orphaned youngsters have emotional problems or are of such an age that they won’t bond with “a fake Mom and Dad,” as one adoptee said.

Still, as difficult as it can be to find a family placement, “I think it’s ultimately preferable” to a group placement, particularly with young children, said Bob McCallie, executive director of Sunny Hills Children’s Services in San Anselmo.

Another residential agency head, Cahill, of Hathaway Children’s Services, agreed that a foster parent system could work only if it received more money and support. “I guess I’m not giving up” on the current system, he said.

Others, such as Nan Dale, executive director of The Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., said the push to install every child in a family reflects a “romanticized view. We do need a middle ground (group placements) for a lot of kids,” she said. “Kids really need to feel there’s one place committed to their care.”

Societies have resorted to orphanages whenever a surplus of homeless youth began to “menace the gentry,” says Eileen Simpson in her book, “Orphans, Real and Imaginary.”

Orphanages were popular in England during Dickens’ time because hungry, half-tamed urchins threatened the well-fed citizens, she writes. Similarly, orphanages proliferated in America during the Civil War, when war orphans swarmed the countryside looking for food and shelter.

As inhumane as the early orphanages could be, their closings were premature, Simpson said in an interview.

Simpson, who as a child lived with a surrogate family, said she preferred living in an institution because it offered one thing that foster families often do not: fairness.

“I think what a child suffers from most is unfairness,” she said. “In an institution, whatever attention there is is fairly well distributed.”

Given that endorsement for the orphanage system, Simpson said she is under no illusion that institutions can ever make up for what orphans have lost.

“There is no substitute for a family,” she said. “You just do the best you can.”