Foster Home Oversight

In response to “Foster-Home Oversight: A (check) in Every (box),” by Linda Blandford, Op-Ed Page, April 10:

Startling revelations, grotesque abuses, program failures and disturbed children. These images predominate in media coverage of the foster care system.

As licensing workers, assigned full-time to assess foster parents, we are deeply concerned with the care provided by these families. Thus, we were pleased that The Times sent a writer to spend a day with the Exposition Park Foster Home Licensing Unit. How peculiar, then, was the word portrait she painted after her visit!

Blandford’s image was of a cold, unfeeling group, striving to avoid any contact with an unpleasant reality. From the headline to its ironic closing implication that we seek not to see those who would lie, cheat, beat and starve the children unfortunately placed in foster care, Blandford’s message is clear. If we don’t see the negative, maybe it will go away.

Her imagery is consistent with this: neat people, boxes are checked, heads bent over desks, civil service at peace, etc.

And the staff she describes: an unmarried woman with no children, an overweight black woman, a male clown wearing Navajo jewelry, a raw carrot-eating ACLU stalwart, and an engineer’s wife--an unguided group turned in on itself.

These superficial impressions were a disservice to readers. Neither we nor the foster home licensing system are perfect. But by presenting licensing workers as cold, unfeeling bureaucrats, striving doggedly to get through checklists while avoiding the realities surrounding us, Blandford missed a great deal:

Foster home licensing is a legally mandated activity. It is also a necessary and valuable part of a team effort in which foster parents, foster children, and a large government agency are necessarily linked in providing care and supervision for children who have been legally removed from the homes of their parents.

With little formal training, modest financial remuneration, and minimal institutional support, foster parents on the whole provide the county with a remarkably high level of care for the children.

Improvements could be made by raising the modest payments to foster parents, and giving them greater training and backup. More licensing staff and lower caseloads for licensing workers would enable the system to process new applicants faster, give more support to the already-licensed, and make it easier to weed out foster parents who don’t belong in the system.

WALTER LIPPMANN, MARY PARKS

PATRICIA KAMOTO, DON BENJAMIN

HARRIET ELLIS, Los Angeles