Centerpiece : A Safe Place : Casa Pacifica’s Planned Complex Will Give Foster Children More Comforts Than Home--But Will the Love Be There?

It was 8 p.m. when Glenna Brabant got the call. Two children were on the way, a brother and sister.

Brabant, who lives in a four-bedroom Simi Valley home, is used to the calls that sometimes come in the middle of the night. Her house doubles as a shelter home, a place where county social workers and police bring scared and confused children, fresh from suspected abuse, neglect or abandonment by their parents.

On this night, the social worker didn’t arrive until 10 o’clock with the children, a boy, 9, and a girl, 11, both bruised. Brabant showed them the bedrooms, the “Mickey room” with its bunk beds and Mickey Mouse sheets, the teen room where two single beds have matching lion bedspreads, and the pink room with its flowered curtains and bedspread.

Brabant’s husband, Wayne, fixed the girl a burrito. The boy took a bath and slipped into one of Wayne’s big T-shirts. By 11:30 p.m., they were in bed, along with the other three children in the couple’s care.

By the summer of 1994, the emergency shelter care provided by the Brabants and a handful of others will probably be a thing of the past. They will be replaced by the complex Casa Pacifica, a $10-million project being built in Camarillo through an unusual public-private partnership.

Here, on 22 acres off Lewis Road near Camarillo State Hospital, as many as 60 children--infants to 18-year-olds--will live for a short time in one of four homey cottages.

They will even go to school here. For fun, they might take a dip in the solar-heated swimming pool, shoot hoops in the gym, play softball or volleyball, or take a break at the “snack shack.” Doctors and therapists will be only a few steps away.

It sounds idyllic, and in fact, critics--what few the project has--say it may be too grand and luxurious, considering most children will stay there only an average of two weeks. Then, a judge will either return them to their parents or decide they are dependents of the court and place them in a foster home.

County officials say the children deserve a better system than they are getting, although they laud the Brabants and others. Every year almost 400 kids are taken from their parents for their own safety. In those first few hours, when the children are frightened and bewildered, they immediately fall into an overburdened patchwork system of emergency care.

“Typically the system is full,” said Doug Miller, deputy director of children’s services for the county’s Public Social Services Agency. With three other homes like the Brabants’ and one group home, the county only has 18 beds available on a 24-hour basis for children when they are first removed from their parents.

When those are full, social workers look to a backup list of regular foster homes. With 35 to 40 children in emergency shelter care at any given time, the county almost always is in the “backup mode,” Miller said.

“We could get a call at 1 a.m. that Dad drove home drunk and Mom can’t be found,” Miller said. Then the search for a shelter home begins, with the social worker making call after call.

“It may take her until 4 a.m. to get them placed,” he said. Meanwhile, the children, already traumatized by the whole ordeal, are wondering what’s going to happen to them.

They might end up in a Thousand Oaks shelter home, when their own home is in, say, Oxnard, making family visits difficult. It might be a home that has room for just one sibling and the other will have to go elsewhere. Later, the children must be schlepped around to doctors and therapists.

The process is stressful for shelter parents as well as for the children, according to Miller. Usually, shelter parents last no more than 18 months. The turnover is relentless.

“They are at our disposal 24 hours,” he said. “Their mobility is truly limited. They wear beepers. The stress and anxiety are constant. They are fabulous people, but they become physically and emotionally exhausted.”

For the school-age kids, there is another pitfall to the system. They usually don’t go to school the whole time they are in shelter care.

Miller wonders: “Kids are going weeks without going to school. Are we being abusive?”

It’s 9 a.m. Friday, the next morning, at the Brabant house and the younger children are just getting up. Glenna Brabant turns down the sounds of Barbara Mandrell singing gospel.

“The older ones like to sleep in,” she says, sipping coffee. Two highchairs stand ready for use at the dining room table. In the corner is a rocking horse on springs.

The younger ones get breakfast and then pick out a video--”One Hundred and One Dalmatians”--to watch in the den off the kitchen. The Brabants have 100 or more videos for the kids, including a shelf of Star Trek tapes.

“We’re kid people,” Brabant said. “You’ve got to be if you want to do this.” At 41, she has four grown children who have moved out. She and her husband looked into becoming foster parents a year ago. Fearing they might get too attached to the children, the Brabants opted for the short-term emergency shelter and became licensed last September.

For $1,250 a month, they are on call 24 hours, seven days a week. After six weeks, they get a three-day weekend without kids. On a recent break, they went to Las Vegas.

“There are times when it gets pretty stressful,” Brabant said. “I need these weekends to get refreshed and ready for the next batch.”

They have space for six kids and from the beginning they have been nearly full, never knowing who might arrive in the next hour. Once a social worker called them after midnight, asking if they could take five siblings.

“Usually they come with only the clothes on their backs,” she said. If need be, she borrows clothing for them from the “clothes closet” she helps run at her church.

She lives with the unknown. Plans for an outing with the kids frequently get juggled because new children arrive and need special attention. She must quickly understand each child’s personality and family background. Some are hyperactive. Some are withdrawn.

“You have to be so careful how you handle everyone,” Brabant said. She tries to connect with every child who comes through the door.

She has seen how abuse and neglect ravage children. Some have no idea how a family functions. Some have never learned from their parents the basics, like tying their shoes.

“There are so many throwaway children,” she said.

To Helen Caldwell, the children are “the most frail population in Ventura County.” She speaks passionately about the need to “turn around the sad history of abused children.”

She has done her share. A longtime Fillmore resident and mother of five grown children, she became involved in the Youth Connection, a group started by Ventura County Superior Court Judge Joe Hadden in 1984. By appealing to the private sector, the group raised money to give needy children things like glasses or dental work.

Out of that grew the realization, she said, that the county’s emergency shelter system for children taken into protective custody was overburdened and that a centralized shelter was needed--something like Orange County’s Orangewood facility.

County officials had long known of the need, but they said they weren’t equipped to fund, build and run such a complex.

“If Youth Connection took responsibility for raising the money and built it, the county would help,” Caldwell said. The group, now known as Casa Pacifica, took on the job.

But the group went one step further. It agreed to run the facility once it was built--a move Caldwell described as more fiscally efficient.

“It was an enormous project,” said Caldwell, who, as a charter member of the Ventura County Symphony Assn. and the Santa Clara Valley Hospice, is no stranger to fund raising.

In 1990, the County Board of Supervisors, not yet in a severe budget crisis, earmarked almost $4 million for the complex. Federal funds amounting to nearly $1 million came later. So far, $3.7 million has flowed in from the private sector.

The money has come in big chunks, much of it from big names. Caldwell, who heads the Casa Pacifica board, and her husband Morrie, owner of Giant Truck Stops, chipped in $350,000. David Murdock, a developer and chairman of the board of Dole Food Co., gave $300,000 and opened up his Sherwood Country Club near Thousand Oaks for glitzy fund-raising balls.

Oxnard rancher Jack Broome, another board member, donated $350,000. Another $250,000 came from the family of Otis Chandler, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and current chairman of the executive committee of Times Mirror Co.

Other chunks came from Ronald McDonald Childrens’ Charities ($300,000) and the Weingart Foundation ($250,000). Kiwanis District 42, covering Ventura County and parts of Santa Barbara County, pledged $500,000. Another pledge has been made by two Rotary clubs in Camarillo offering $250,000. The strapped construction industry has offered more than $1 million worth of labor and materials.

While other charities are bucking a sluggish economy, the money has rolled in steadily, much of it due to Caldwell’s contacts with influential people.

A high-powered marketing strategy hasn’t hurt either. Prospective donors were flown to Orange County’s Orangewood for a tour by a Casa Pacifica board member with an airplane. The board put together a slick video with actor George Kennedy providing the emotional narration.

On the video, viewers meet “Lisa,” 10, whose father has had sex with her the last two years while her mother worked; “Josh,” one of six children of alcoholic parents living in filthy conditions; and “Carlos,” bruised from beatings his father administered with a belt because he thought his son lacked ambition. All are composite characters, played by young actors.

Hadden, also a board member, appears in the video, saying judges see children like these every day. The best time to help them, he says, is immediately after the trauma; if there are delays, the costs to help them down the road add up.

“Kids,” he says, “need a sanctuary where they can be safe and secure.”

Casa Pacifica’s few critics admit they feel as though they are fighting “motherhood and the American flag” because of the overwhelming support for the project.

“But is it necessary they be provided with the amenities of a resort?” asks Jere Robings, president of the Ventura County Alliance of Taxpayers, a citizen watchdog group. “I question if it has to be that grand.”

He also questions who is in charge of Casa Pacifica--its nonprofit private board, or the county.

“Who controls the funds? Are they accountable to anyone?”

The project’s most visible critic has been Robert Woodson, a former board member of CAAN (Child Abuse and Neglect), a Ventura-based private nonprofit organization that assists children.

He claims that at the outset the county failed to solicit bids to determine what group or agency would oversee the building and running of the complex.

“It’s been a closed process,” he contended, with little input from anyone outside the Casa Pacifica board. Several times he unsuccessfully sought an in-depth grand investigation into the project. However, the grand jury has no jurisdiction over such private nonprofit organizations, he was told.

Nonetheless, Woodson, who lives in Santa Barbara, has approached donors, urging them not to donate. When the Casa Pacifica board staged a fund-raising debate last year between former New York City Mayor Edward Koch and William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, Woodson stood in the parking lot with petitions opposing the project. No one has yet signed a petition, he acknowledged.

He agrees with Robings that the complex is too grandiose for current economic times.

“Money would be better spent in prevention,” he said.

But according to Supervisor Susan K. Lacey, who also serves on the 28-member Casa Pacifica board with Supervisor Maggie Kildee, Woodson “is the only negative in this entire thing.” Lacey and others agree more should be done up front to prevent child abuse. But, she said, there was a practical side to the supervisors’ decision to help fund the project three years ago.

“We’d get into a budget session and say it’s a matter of time before someone takes us to court and says you’ve got to have a structure like this,” Lacey said.

There was no bidding at the outset, she said, because there was nothing to bid. It was Casa Pacifica’s project, not the county’s, even though county money later went into it.

“This wasn’t done in the back room,” she said. “It’s a completely above-board arrangement with a lot of protections for the taxpayers built in.”

With a flourish, ground for the complex was broken a year ago, but heavy rains have delayed construction beyond grading and underground utilities. When the place finally opens during the summer of 1994, it will be run by the Casa Pacifica organization and its executive director.

Such an arrangement has never been tried in Ventura County, said Lauraine Effress, Casa Pacifica’s executive director until she resigned last month to become supervisor of county Mental Health Services’ inpatient psychiatric unit.

With its funding and operational setup, Casa Pacifica may be the first of its kind, Effress said, and will probably become a model for the nation.

“Casa Pacifica will have ultimate responsibility for those children,” she said.

But Casa Pacifica will have an unusual partnership with the county because the myriad agencies that now serve children in protective custody will continue to help them at the new complex.

It will be staffed by close to 100 people. About 25 to 30 of them, such as social workers, therapists, counselors and nurses, will be county employees. The rest will be employed by Casa Pacifica.

At Glenna Brabant’s house, the Siberian husky is at the back door and the boy who arrived the night before is anxious to pet him. Her husband, Wayne, an engineer, calls to see how her day is going.

It’s home--something Casa Pacifica will never be, despite everything else that it will be.

“How is it not going to be cold?” Brabant asks. “There isn’t going to be a mom or a dad.”

Brabant, the oldest of eight children, believes that if kids from dysfunctional families stay at her home, they can see at least for a short time how it is really supposed to work.

“I don’t see how they can do that in an institution,” she said.

Brabant bakes cookies with the children, and for some, it’s the first time they’ve ever puttered around in the kitchen. For some, it’s the first time they’ve had to say “please,” make their bed or knock on the bathroom door.

Glenna Brabant runs a tight ship. Her house is spotless, amazingly free of clutter. Her two sewing machines are set up in the living room with boxes of sewing paraphernalia stacked on shelves.

She has to be on her toes at all times for the unexpected, like the boy she was sure had slipped something into his pants while they grocery shopped. Or the teen-age girl whose boyfriend visited the Brabants’ home, smuggling in beer and leaving a hickey on the girl’s neck.

With her hearty laugh, she says, “I don’t think I’d be as good at this if I had not had four children.”

Things come up that just aren’t covered in the four foster home classes she and her husband took, or the advanced classes on hard-to-handle kids. Only once was she so frazzled that she almost called a social worker to remove children from her home--two brothers, under the age of 7, who were out of control.

Because the kids must be in her or her husband’s care at all times, she doesn’t get out much. Maybe to the grocery store if she just has one or two children with her .

Her children and grandchildren drop in, often giving her a hand. Even though she is cool under pressure, she likes to get away for a few hours on Saturday when her husband can take over.

“Sometimes,” she says laughing, “I get in the car with no particular place to go.”

At Casa Pacifica, there will be no house parents living at each of the four cottages. Instead, the buildings--large enough for 20 children, two to a room--will be supervised by counselors working shifts of 8 to 12 hours.

The reason is burnout, Effress explained. It is simply too much to ask house parents to be on call day and night, dealing one minute with a withdrawn toddler and the next minute an aggressive teen-ager.

Nonetheless, the counselors will be “absolutely the most important employees at Casa Pacifica,” she said. They will be better trained than foster parents to deal with abused children, she said. At the same time the kids will get loving attention.

“Casa Pacifica has a huge folder of names of people who want to work as (volunteer) tutors, feeders of babies and basketball players,” she said. As director, she had envisioned a garden on the grounds, and maybe even some farm animals.

Casa Pacifica’s motto is: “A home with a heart.” To give it a homier feel, the group scrapped plans for a central dining room. Instead, children will eat in their cottage, which will have a lounge with a television, stereo and books.

Effress sees Casa Pacifica as a haven for children, some of whom have only known cruelty: “There should be warm, welcoming arms to say, ‘Don’t worry, someone will take care of you, you’ll be safe (and) warm and someone will care for you.’ ”

The complex probably won’t be just for children recently uprooted from abusive homes. Children already declared dependents of the court and placed in one of the county’s 300 foster homes may find themselves routed back to Casa Pacifica when placements don’t work out. There, they might stay up to six months until a better placement is found--an arrangement aimed at preventing children from bouncing from one foster home to another.

Casa Pacifica is viewed by proponents as a remedy for much of what ails the system now. With a school on the grounds, children will be back in the classroom the day after they arrive. Because of all the services that will be available there, the kids won’t have to be carted around the county for appointments.

It all comes with a price tag. The complex will cost about $3 million a year to operate, Effress said, more than it costs to do the job now. But state and federal funds, which now cover most of the expense, will increase to meet the greater level of service that will be provided. County officials don’t expect the county’s share to be any more than it is now.

Even so, the board, which has raised almost all of the $10 million needed for construction and start-up, is gathering donations for a $2-million endowment. The endowment, managed by the Ventura County Community Foundation, will help run the complex.

“The private sector has joined hands with the government to do what traditionally has been thought of as government’s job,” Effress said. “This is extraordinary stuff.”