Saving the Kids No One Wants : * Let Sacramento Do the Job L.A. County Can’t Do--or Won’t

State officials say they have lost confidence in the ability of Los Angeles County to run its own foster-care system. The accounts of abused foster children--and the nonchalant response from county officials who are supposed to protect them--indeed do not inspire confidence.

Los Angeles County is paid $3.3 million a year by the state to license and monitor 3,800 foster homes that house more than 10,000 children. These are the children, as Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Los Angeles) said, who “started out in life with the breaks against them”--usually the abandoned, the beaten, the sexually molested. They go to foster homes run by people who are paid with public funds to care for them. Most foster parents do an admirable job. Some do not. The problem is that the county has done a poor job of ridding the system of those who only add trauma to broken young lives.

Some examples: The state said county officials discovered 10 children sleeping on the floor of a foster-home garage and 10 more youngsters living in one bedroom; three of the children had been abused. Yet the county waited five months before reporting the case to state officials for license revocation. The home eventually was closed. In another case, a home licensed for four children had 20 infants sleeping in 10 cribs.

The state is moving to take over the administration of the county’s foster-care system in order to straighten out the mess, and the Board of Supervisors will consider having the county voluntarily relinquish its licensing authority. It should.

The county in the past has contended that the state’s aggressive stance is a way to protect itself legally. A lawsuit will eventually settle that score. But so far, the state’s consistently assertive response to correcting alarming deficiencies in Los Angeles County’s foster-care system is a welcome contrast to the county’s own disconcerting placidity.