Panel Urges Coordinating Children’s Services : Child care: The 1,300 public and private agencies are operating their programs oblivious to one another, a report says. A 20-member planning board for the county is recommended.

A blue-ribbon committee convened last year to study children’s services in Los Angeles County has concluded that a 20-member Children’s Planning Board is “urgently” needed to coordinate the 1,300 private and public agencies serving children in the area.

“All of these agencies are looking at their own programs, doing the very best they can, completely oblivious to everybody else,” committee chairman David W. Fleming said Monday as he released the panel’s conclusions. “No one is looking at this from the point of view of the child.”

The Blue Ribbon Children’s Services Planning Committee found that some children received services from five or six agencies while other children went without desperately needed help. “It is the equivalent of someone having five different prescriptions from different doctors who don’t know about each other,” Fleming said.

There are several public or private boards with different oversight responsibilities, but no panel coordinates services offered by all children’s agencies in Los Angeles. Fleming’s 11-member panel was formed last May by the County Board of Supervisors to study coordination of child-care agencies in the area.

“It is a crime that this kind of money be expended by people--good, well-meaning people--on programs that go in every single different direction,” Fleming said.

Despite Fleming’s report, the details of the panel’s 10-month study for the county’s Commission for Children’s Services are not expected to be made public until next week. A hearing to discuss those findings has been scheduled for late April.

Fleming’s presentation to the commission was well-received by members. The commission, a citizens panel, has been highly critical of the county Children’s Health Services Department for its handling of child abuse in foster homes and other problems.

State welfare officials threatened to take over the county department last year after revelations that department workers had failed to protect foster children from abuse.

Fleming said it was outside the scope of his committee to determine how much money a Children’s Planning Board might save--or how much it would cost. But he added: “If the board could cut 10% from $3.5 billion, that’s a significant savings.”

Fleming said that one-fifth of Los Angeles County’s 2.5 million children are served by about 1,300 different public and private agencies. The county, with 8.3 million people, spends $2.5 billion each year on children’s services, while private agencies spend nearly $1 billion, he said. These figures exclude education.

“There is no overall planning of these services, no coordinated goal setting, no systemwide monitoring of fiscal or administrative efficiency, and no assessment of effectiveness for families and children, although the best individual programs have some or all of these things,” concluded researchers Jacquelyn McCroskey and Sid Gardner in a recent critical report on children’s services in Los Angeles County that Fleming’s committee studied.

“Services for families and children in the county are fragmented, uncoordinated, unplanned and poorly documented,” according to the report.

Fleming said his committee “strongly urges” the supervisors to set up a board, which it believes should be composed of 10 public and 10 private members. The 10 public members would include representatives from five county agencies that deal with children and one appointee by each of the five supervisors. Private members would include representatives of foundations, private agencies, corporations and minority groups.

The blue-ribbon committee was unanimous in its support of such a board, Fleming said, although opinions differed over staffing and chairmanships.

Sheriff Sherman Block, who heads a 25-member governmental group called the Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect (ICAN), issued a comprehensive report last year that showed one child a week is murdered by a parent or caretaker in Los Angeles. In a fifth of those cases, the Department of Children’s Services had prior reports of domestic violence.

During the hearing Monday on the report, Fleming and members of the children’s services commission discussed “turf wars” involving Block, who has reportedly opposed the creation of an oversight board and prefers coordination of all children’s services through ICAN, which occasionally works with private groups.

While not criticizing ICAN’s performance, Fleming and several of the commissioners strongly opposed any bid by Block to coordinate services that have nothing to do with law enforcement.

“At the time our committee was set up, a turf war was going on,” Fleming said. “The sheriff made clear his opinion that the coordination should be done through ICAN. At the time our committee set up, it was the sheriff on one side and Children’s Services on the other. We thought the best way to approach this was to set up a completely new body made up of both public and private services.”

Neither Block nor Deanne Tilton, executive director of ICAN, could be reached for comment.

“Sheriff Block has proposed that the staffing for this planning body be through ICAN,” said Penny Weiss, assistant director of ICAN. “There has been a history of problems, but I think everyone has the same goals. We just have a different sense of how you get there.”