Plight of Children Worsens Despite Affluence of O.C. : Welfare: At summit meeting, coalition will tackle issues of poverty, crime, abuse and teen pregnancy.

For the last two years, local child advocates have been getting together behind closed doors to assess the condition of Orange County’s children.

The results have been disheartening: Teen-age pregnancies are soaring, reported cases of child abuse and juvenile crime are at all-time highs, and an increasing number of Orange County’s approximately 600,000 children live at or below the poverty level.

Armed with reams of statistics, community leaders will take this discussion out into the open Saturday when they convene the county’s first Summit for Children at Chapman University in Orange. This forum on the future of young people, they say, may forever change the way children’s issues are handled in Orange County.

“Orange County has to move from denial to acknowledging that we have problems,” said Sharon Paul, a summit leader and director of human services for the County Department of Education. “The problems are not confined to only one group. Every (ethnic group) is under pressure. There’s no singular solution to the problem. We all have to help because it takes a village to raise a child.”

Only a decade ago, it seemed that problems affecting Orange County children paled in comparison to those experienced by children in other parts of state and nation.

Recent surveys show that Orange County children are still healthier and better educated than those of many other areas nationwide, but increasingly they are being deprived of adequate care, housing and family stability.

A warning sign for local child advocates is a report released in March by Children Now, the nonprofit organization that tracks the well-being of California’s children through data compiled by state and federal agencies.

The statistics on Orange County’s children show increases in violence, in poverty rates and in teen birth rates--problems that children’s advocates say have the greatest long-term influences for children and are the most difficult to reverse.

“Orange County is better off in some areas relative to other parts of the state,” said Wendy Lazurus, Children’s Now vice president for policy. “But it’s no longer possible to say that (Orange County’s) children of all races do not face mounting problems. Without question there are pockets of poverty, child abuse and neglect, and births to teen-agers cut across racial and economic lines. It’s a reality for everyone now.”

The idea for the summit was spawned in 1990 after the United Nations World Summit for Children called on communities to use the last decade of the century to focus on the welfare of children.

Believing that the quality of life for Orange County’s children was deteriorating, a diverse coalition--community leaders, individuals, nonprofit organizations, churches, government entities, legislators, corporations, small business and professionals--set about to identify problems and recommend solutions.

The early effort was led by Alison Armstrong, an energetic community activist who is a former head of the Orange County Homeless Task Force. But the ad hoc group’s goals were quickly endorsed by prominent groups and individuals including the United Way; Gene Howard, director of Children Services of the County Social Services Agency; and, significantly, William G. Steiner, who before he was named a county supervisor in March had earned the nickname “Mr. Kid” for his advocacy of children’s issues during the last three decades.

As a summit co-chair, Steiner has given Saturday’s program new visibility and powerful support.

Steiner, former head of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation, said the summit could not have been more appropriately timed, noting that “our children face tough times.”

He and other summit leaders describe Saturday’s opening as a “barn raiser,” a meeting where various sectors of the community will be asked to establish mechanisms to track the condition of the county’s children, set goals and make commitments to solve the problems.

Summit leaders say they expect corporations and some private foundations to pledge large amounts of money for children’s programs and nonprofit groups to weigh in with thousands of volunteer hours.

Steiner is pleased that various groups have “put aside turf issues and are speaking with a common voice. We have to come together because in the economic environment we’re in, we cannot rely on an unending supply of public tax dollars to solve all our problems,” he said.

Other leaders are also optimistic about the summit.

Said Armstrong: “Coming out of this summit, we want Orange County to be a place where children are nurtured. . . . A place where employers offer parent education classes to employees at lunchtime, where churches are day care centers, where schools organize themselves so children leave with vocational skills.

“I don’t mean to be trite, but the future is at stake,” Armstrong said. “Do we want our kids to be the leaders and the innovators or are they going to be the people who fill our jails or the people on public assistance?”

With so much at stake, various summit leaders talked this week about the state of Orange County’s children. They offered up a report card of sorts on how youngsters are faring in some key areas.

Poverty

Surveys have shown that children make up the largest numbers of people in the county who suffer from chronic hunger and homelessness.

County officials say 70,000 local children have no steady source of nutrition beyond school lunches or assistance programs. And about 11% of the county’s children live below the poverty level, according to Children’s Now and the 1990 census.

As worrisome as these figures are, summit leaders estimate that the number of children who are in marginal economic situations is far greater. Extrapolating from their experience with the elusive communities of immigrants, the homeless and the needy, they guess that about 300,000 children in Orange County live at or below the poverty level.

A recent survey by University of California researchers found that 50% of those who needed food on an emergency basis were younger than 18 years of age. More than one-quarter of the parents surveyed reported that they were forced to send their children to bed hungry some of the time.

Children also make up half of the estimated 12,000 homeless people in Orange County, according to Susan Oakson, head of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force.

Armstrong, a former chairman of that task force, notes that “there are people who are receiving (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) in every ZIP code in Orange County. No areas in Orange County are immune to the poverty that’s creeping in,” she said.

“We have to worry about the long-term problems we’re creating by allowing these children to live in poverty because poverty spawns other problems,” said Armstrong, who serves as chairman of the summit’s poverty committee. “We have to address this issue or else we’re creating future generations of very poor people and waves of social problems. . . .”

Education

The county has maintained its leadership in education, with its eighth-grade achievement score being the ninth best in the state and better than the state average. But that is little comfort to county educators who point out that the high school dropout rate, 18.2%, is at a record high.

In the 1991-92 school year, 4,860 students in grades 10 through 12, about 15%, dropped out of classes. But that undercounts the real number of dropouts because hundreds more drop out before high school and during the transition from middle to high school.

The county’s school districts now address increasingly difficult challenges. Many students have limited English proficiency. For instance, the student population speaks 40 different languages, from Swahili to Mandarin.

Sharon Paul, who chairs the summit’s education committee, said educators have to worry about the many extra-school factors that affect a child’s ability to learn.

“You have to realize that when children are hungry and homeless they cannot concentrate; when they are physically and emotionally abused at home, it’s almost impossible for them to learn,” Paul said.

“We have so many children that need special assistance when they arrive on the school’s doorstep. The school cannot be a singular source to solve the problem. We need to partner with the parents and the other sectors of the community to reverse the slide.”

Health

Because of the county’s relative affluence, many assume it has an enviable record in providing health care for all its children.

But the county ranks lower than the state average (53rd among the 58 counties) in providing health checkups for its needy children and also lags in providing prenatal care (25th of 38 counties for which records are available in this category), according to the latest Children’s Now report.

The infant mortality rate (6.1 deaths in every 1,000 live births) is better than the state average but is still higher than the rates of some industrial countries, such as Japan, whose rate is 5 in 1,000.

A grim example of the state of children’s health was found when the Santa Ana Unified School District did health screenings for first- and fifth-graders at two elementary schools. The district found that 88% of the 107 students examined had some untreated problems, including ear, nose and throat maladies, viral and bacterial infections, nutritional deficiencies and skin disorders. More than half had dental problems.

Barbara Talento, a retired Cal State Fullerton nursing professor who chairs the summit’s health committee, said she would give Orange County a D if asked to grade needy children’s access to health care.

“It’s a national disgrace that the American people have money to spend on all sorts of things and no money on our children’s health care,” Talento said. “We have a major task to educate our parents about basic things like how their kids need to be immunized against common illnesses. This summit is a start.”

Juvenile Crime

Orange County is not known as a hotbed for gang trouble, but social workers are wondering how long it can keep this reputation. There are now 200 street gangs who call the county home, and one of the most disturbing trends in the local criminal justice system is the dramatic rise in violent crimes committed by juveniles.

In 1991, the last year for which statistics are available, 817 juveniles were arrested on homicide rape and robbery charges, up 28% from two years earlier. In the same period, the number of youths tried as adults because of the severity of their crimes more than doubled to 145.

Authorities are also encountering increasing numbers of children who are dependent on drugs and alcohol, according to Francisco P. Briseno, the head Juvenile Court judge in Orange County. And drug dependency spawns other problems, including violence, trouble in school, teen-age pregnancy, automobile accidents and a rise in preventable deaths of teen-agers.

Briseno said he believes that “a large segment of juvenile offenders are kids who are not a serious danger to the community, but they are having difficulty coming to grips with how they see themselves. . . . These kids are not doing well in school and home, and they do not have that sense of belonging that would cause them to make the right decisions.”

Briseno said the summit offers hope that the system can become better prepared to deal with issues that affect the county’s youths.

“I’m very optimistic,” Briseno said. “We, the system and our parents, need to spend a lot more time and supervision with our children. The summit is providing a forum for the different groups to recognize the needs and put these supports in place. We are looking at it as an opportunity for the court to be an integral part of the system including the school and the community.”

Social Fault Lines

Last March, a record 5,714 people called the Child Abuse Registry, a hot line used to report child abuse in Orange County. Registry telephone operators--three are on duty 24 hours a day--are receiving so many calls daily that they have started putting callers on hold. The county’s annual rate of child-abuse reports, 52 for every 1,000 children, is better than the state rate of 70.9 per 1,000, but worse than the national rate of 41.

Gene Howard, director of children’s services for Orange County, said he believes that the prolo ged recession is responsible for the surge in reports of child abuse and neglect. “When people are without jobs, it has a real impact on a family,” he said.

Howard said the county and other children’s groups need to emphasize educational programs that “intervene earlier on and prevent abuse before it begins.”

The number of teen pregnancies has risen steadily over the last four years for which records are available, from 3,546 births in 1988 to 4,748 births in 1991, and about equals the state average.

Social workers say an increasing number of young children are having babies. “Our babies are having babies,” said Talento, summit health committee chairman. “Recently in Orange County, an 11-year-old clutching a teddy bear gave birth to a baby. Teens are still asking questions like, “Can I get pregnant if I do it for the first time?’ No one tells them that indeed, you can.”

* FUNDS SOUGHT: Agency for abused children fights to stay open. B1

Children’s Report Card

There are nearly 600,000 minors--people under 18--in Orange County, 24% of the total population. They are increasingly affected by adult social ills like homelessness, poverty and crime. A look at the status of the county’s children:

Age Breakdown More of the county’s children are 4 years or younger. 4 years and younger: 31% 5-9: 28% 10-13: 20% 14-17: 21%

Education The average eighth-grade achievement score was higher than the statewide average. More than 15% of Orange County’s high school students dropped out.

High school 8-grade dropouts achievement score (1990-91) (1991-92) Orange County 15.5% 287 Statewide 18.2% 257

Child Support In 1992, slightly more than half the county’s children received child support either from federally funded programs or through a court order. Orange: 51% San Bernardino: 49% San Diego: 46% Riverside: 42% Los Angeles: 40%

Poverty 60,000 children live in poverty. Most of them are in married-couple households, and six in 10 are older than 5 years. Married couple household: 60% Female household, no husband: 32% Male householder, no wife: 8%

Abuse Cases Up More than 30,000 cases of child abuse reported in 1991, a nearly 50% increase in three years. 1988: 21,647 1989: 25,850 1990: 28,422 1991: 31,772

Pregnancies Up Teen-age pregnancies increased by one-third during the same period. 1988: 3,546 1989: 4,086 1990: 4,675 1991: 4,748

Crime Minors arrested for violent crimes jumped 28% between 1989 and 1991, and the number of juvenile cases going to court rose by 51%. Also, more minors are being tried as adults on felony charges.

Cases Tried as Arrests tried adult felons 1989 637 374 64 1990 803 511 69 1991 817 565 145

Sources: Los Angeles Times reports, Children Now, 1990 U.S. Census; Researched by CAROLINE LEMKE / Los Angeles Times