FOSTER CHILDREN : PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : Foster-Home Oversight: A Checkmark in Every Box

The Exposition Park welfare office is on Vermont Avenue, north of Martin Luther King Boulevard. There is always a crowd and a sense of chaos held at bay: children, some playful, some whining, bored men, haggard women, a babble of languages and disasters. It is life, and it is not orderly.

The office of the county’s foster homes’ licensing unit is one floor up. There, it is as if someone has turned off the sound and slowed the frame. The touches of lilac paint, the reassuring sturdiness of old-fashioned manual typewriters, the lack of windows, which shuts out the view of palm trees but also that of decaying houses and the drear of poverty. Heads bend earnestly over the paperwork; the civil service is at peace.

Patti Kamoto is a neat person. Her handwriting is even; when she enters her car’s mileage on official logs, her figures line up. She keeps her pencils in a case and erases any mistake before writing over it. The six-page Regulation Compliance Checklist for foster homes is clipped within its folder. On house calls, she keeps the papers straight, the boxes checked. Order reigns around her.

There are 32 licensing officers for the whole of Los Angeles County, and they are way behind. It takes months to get to see a new foster home. Beneath the unnatural office lights, there is the slow burn of the foot soldier blaming the fools at headquarters as he slogs on. “It’s been so long since some of the folks up there were workers,” Kamoto says, “they don’t even remember.”

There is a space around Kamoto, a fatalism almost, as if life has taught her the safety of distance. No husband, no children, and hard, possibly, to work for a government that interned your American-born parents in a desert camp. “Hatred,” she says, “drains a lot of your energy.” But so does love. “I do all I humanly can,” she says, “but no, I don’t take it home.”

Foster care is a morass: drug-addicted babies, troubled teen-agers, poverty, cruelty, greed, a minefield of liability and lawsuits. Of course it is easier to concentrate on getting the paper work right; there life is beyond unraveling.

There is little guidance, four supervisors in five years. So, like any infantry unit, the licensing team has turned in on itself. There is Harriet, a big, warm, black woman from Suffolk Springs, Tex.: “I can usually walk in a house and know when people are going to be good.” Don, the wiry office clown sporting a touch of Navajo jewelry, spars with Walter, ACLU stalwart and Nation subscriber, who brings raw carrots in his Igloo lunch box. Mary, an engineer’s wife, has been here 23 years and talks of “saints who have literally saved children’s lives.”

After lunch, they leave their cocoon of routine and set off alone to face strangers.

The houses vary: small, large, old, shabby, clean, mostly black. The poor of pocket, the rich of spirit, those who have least are quickest to open their houses to parentless children. The middle class and well-to-do picture a 15-year-old drug addict mother with visitation rights sitting on their English chintz sofas and shudder at the thought of suits, danger, threat.

So, in a road of lean, small homes, Patti Kamoto parks her spotless Toyota and checks for gangs on the corner, guard dogs frothing behind fences. Her clients are new applicants who have already been allowed to take a year-old baby into their home. Their two children are in high school (“my son may go to the pros--to the Kansas City Royals”), the vacuum cleaner marks run through the house: “They know we’re coming, we make appointments,” says Kamoto. “We can’t live with a family for a week, OK?”

The couple talk of how cute the baby is, how they baby-sat for him when he was with his last foster mother, how they never whipped their own children as they were whipped.

Kamoto works doggedly through her checklist: She measures rooms and crib bars, worries over disinfectant, first-aid kits, monthly disaster drills, TB tests and CPR certificates, fingerprints for Sacramento. No awkward, prying, challenging questions.

What will go in that huge empty space marked “motivation” on the Initial Licensing Study form? He says that he coaches school sports; she says that she works in a health center. Their word passes on trust. Confrontation, unpleasantness is skirted; Kamoto does not offend. Even the most detailed form cannot contain boxes for what is left unsaid, for questions unasked.

It is a decent process invented for decent people who do not lie, cheat, beat and starve.