Study on Children Paints a Bleak Picture : Social Services: Lack of prenatal care, abuse and neglect cases, and crowded schools are taking a toll, report says.

A wide-ranging report issued Tuesday on the status of San Diego County children in such areas as health, welfare and education has found many of their conditions grim.

Among the findings of the Condition of Children report, which looked at the plight of children in 22 subject areas:

* Latino mothers in San Diego are five times more likely than white mothers to receive little or no prenatal care, though this has not led to dramatically high infant mortality rates.

* The number of reported child-abuse and neglect cases has more than doubled since 1985.

* The number of children in foster care has doubled since 1983.

* School construction has not kept pace with a steadily increasing student enrollment.

The report, which was 1 1/2 years in the making, is the first of what county officials hope will be an annual study. Although the report painted a bleak picture, it was unclear how many of the county’s more than 700,000 children were actually included in the results.

Lack of prenatal care has spread among women of all ethnic groups, said the report, which was part of a collaborative effort by San Diego County and local school boards.

About 10% of mothers in 1988 received little or no prenatal care, a figure that has grown steadily since 1981, when it was at a low of 3.6%, said Nancy Bowen, a medical doctor who is chief of maternal and child health for the county.

“The population has grown dramatically, and we have not had the health care structure for indigents that has kept up proportionately,” Bowen said.

Compounding the problem is that providers of prenatal care dropped steadily in the 1980s, as did those willing to treat low-income persons, Bowen said.

“They got inundated. They were treating women with more serious problems, the money was getting just further and further behind what they could have made elsewhere, and they became frustrated with the MediCal bureaucracy,” Bowen said.

While the number of white women receiving little or no prenatal care went from 2.7% in 1985 to 3.4% in 1988, the same figure for Latino women skyrocketed from 10.4% in 1985 to 18.3% in 1988, the report said.

Bowen said poor Latino women traditionally have not had adequate health insurance, while others fear their immigration status may be affected by asking for prenatal care from a government agency.

Latino women also have not been educated on the benefits of prenatal care, and it has not been viewed as important, Bowen said.

At the same time, Latino women, particularly those who have arrived in the United States recently, have led more healthy lifestyles and thus their low prenatal care rates have not translated into dramatically high infant mortality rates, Bowen said.

“Their lifestyle is more healthy. There is less substance abuse, not as much smoking, a good family support system and better nutrition,” Bowen said. However, “women who have been here for three and four generations, their infant mortality rates get worse if they stay in low-income categories.”

Other findings in the report show:

* There were 86,758 cases of child abuse and neglect reported in 1990, a 206% increase from 1985, when there were 42,041 reported cases.

* The number of children in foster care jumped 210%, from 2,992 in 1983 to 6,283 in 1990.

* Enrollment in schools in the county has increased by 38,611 students in the last three years, while only 21 new schools with a combined capacity of 16,000 students have been built.

The report blames an overloaded state funding system and the fact that only one of nine bond issues on the ballot since 1979 to build new schools has been passed.

The report is one of the first concrete results of a collaboration between county government and local schools, which hope to integrate some overlapping functions. For example, the county and schools often duplicate paperwork because they provide social services to the same children. By reducing paperwork, and the bureaucracy related to it, schools hope to reduce costs.

“Any money that you get at any level of government has strings, and most of those strings are tied to paperwork,” said Frank Perez, president of San Diego County School Boards, which represents school boards across the county.

Collaboration between the county and schools could mean that many children’s services such as child-abuse prevention and foster care screening normally conducted by the county could be done at school. Drug prevention programs such as D.A.R.E. are already run by police agencies in schools.