Plan Unveiled to Overhaul Child Welfare : Children’s services: The 123-page document admits that the county department has failed in important tasks.

In response to state complaints about serious flaws in Los Angeles County child welfare programs, county officials unveiled a sweeping plan that calls for a top-to-bottom overhaul of the beleaguered Department of Children’s Services.

The so-called “corrective action plan,” which is the county’s attempt to fend off a state takeover of the child welfare agency, outlines fundamental problems at nearly every level within the department.

The plan acknowledges that the department has failed to properly define its mission, is not adequately training its social workers and operates under policies that conflict with one another or are unclear. Some social workers, the plan says, have not received handbooks that tell them what department policy is.

The plan lists 10 critical issues identified by the state that need immediate attention. Among them are the county’s failure to respond on the spot to reports that children are in immediate danger, to help parents visit children who have been taken from them and to provide counseling for abused and neglected children.

In each category the plan outlines barriers that have prevented the county from meeting state regulations. In the case of parent-child visits, the plan notes that regulations are unclear and that children are sometimes placed in foster homes far from where their parents live.

The plan proposes a range of solutions to the department’s problems, among them a top-level management reorganization, a redeployment of the department’s social workers so that they can better handle their heavy caseloads, and the establishment of pilot projects to test new programs.

The complex 123-page document, which a department spokesman called “a blueprint for restructuring,” will be presented to the County Board of Supervisors today. The board must approve the plan before it is submitted to the state Department of Social Services, which will review it and report to the Legislature on the county’s progress.

The county department serves 55,000 abused and neglected children, 10,000 of them in foster care. The 6-year-old agency, which employs nearly 1,600 social workers, came under fire this year amid reports that it had failed to shut down foster homes where children were being physically and sexually abused.

Those disclosures, as well as years of complaints from state officials about the department’s failure to meet state guidelines, led to the resignation of its former director, Robert L. Chaffee.

County officials are continuing to seek a permanent replacement for Chaffee; a search firm is expected to present the Board of Supervisors with a list of its five top candidates in November. In the meantime, Elwood Lui, a retired appellate judge, is serving as interim director.

While state social services officials have said they are pleased with the progress the county is making under Lui, it will be the Legislature that decides whether the state will take control of the county’s $457-million child welfare system.

At a public hearing last week, state Sen. Bill Greene (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Los Angeles) insisted that they want to see significant improvements in the county’s performance--not just plans for improvement--before they back away from the takeover threat.

The county’s plan was greeted with cautious optimism at the county Commission for Children’s Services, which has long been at odds with the department it monitors.

“I think they have done a real credible job on the face of it,” said Beth Lowe, the newly elected commission president. “But our questions will be, ‘How easy is this going to be to implement? . . . I guess I feel like we need to give it a chance and see.”

The plan has not been widely distributed to child advocates. The supervisors received their copies on Monday; Joel Bellman, a spokesman for Supervisor Ed Edelman, said it was too soon to assess reaction among board members to the document.

The plan calls for the reorganization of the department to be largely complete by next June. Department spokesman Bob Ballenger said he believes that changes will continue past that date as new problems and issues crop up.

“The department is kind of like a supertanker,” he said. “It develops a certain amount of inertia. Turning it around is not something you can do quickly or easily. . . . This is going to take a while to pull together.”