Antelope Valley Gets Full-Time Children’s Services Administrator

Responding to an unusual cluster of child slayings and a spiraling abuse rate in the Antelope Valley, the county Department of Children’s Services on Wednesday assigned a full-time administrator to the region for the first time.

Marty Nagel, who has been a special assistant to department Director Peter Digre for the past two years, took charge Wednesday of the department’s Lancaster office with a mandate to improve its services and better coordinate its work with other county and private agencies.

The Lancaster office, with about 63 children’s services workers and supervisors, was the last one in the department to get a full-time administrator, officials said. Elaine McElhinney, who had been overseeing the Canyon Country and Lancaster offices, now will handle only Canyon Country.

“We really were doing a disservice to the Antelope Valley by giving them a part-time deputy” in the past, said Paul Freedlund, the department’s deputy director for operations. Freedlund said Nagel should bring “a more coherent approach to how services are handled” in the area.

County officials acknowledged taking a closer look at the area’s child-abuse problem after an article in The Times last September profiled a cluster of six Antelope Valley child-abuse slayings in just over a year, and disclosed that the region has one of the county’s highest child-abuse rates.

Nagel, a 41-year-old West Hills resident who joined the department as a children’s services worker in 1978, did not arrive with any added staffing or authority to launch any new programs. But Freedlund said Nagel will become a voice for the region’s needs both inside and outside the department.

“There’s a big push to do something here” in the Antelope Valley, Nagel said. He said Digre and county Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents the area, are both supporting that effort. And Nagel said his experience in the department’s executive office should prove helpful.

Beyond assigning a full-time administrator, county officials are working to open a satellite juvenile court in Lancaster by April or May for dependency cases, typically involving children who have been abused or neglected. Such families now face a trip of more than 70 miles to the current court in Monterey Park.

Freedlund said the department also hopes by late this year to expand the Family Preservation Project, a fledgling program in the Antelope Valley aimed at helping solve problems in families before children must be removed from their homes. The program is already under way in other communities.

Freedlund said county officials continue to discuss creating a specialized medical team for the region to examine child-abuse victims and train other doctors to better recognize abuse. Such a team would be patterned after an existing one at County-USC Medical Center.