Keeping Eye on Goal of Preventing Abuse : Cooperation Needed in Agency Feeling Fiscal Strain

When a neighbor telephones police to report the 5-year-old next door is being beaten, the law requires an immediate response. Police investigate and social workers join them, deciding whether the child must be removed from the house. If so, does the child go to a relative, a group home, eventually into foster care? The courts help determine that.

But when possible, the social workers intervene before the child is beaten. In recent years, Orange County has taken the praiseworthy step of stationing social workers in police departments and schools. Evidence of potentially abusive situations at home could prompt a visit from a social worker.

The county employees did not bring just warnings and lectures, and they were careful not to interfere with peoples’ lives without cause. But they often did fine work in helping parents and children become functioning families. Their work nearly always went unsung to all but those affected.

Some child abuse prevention programs have been scaled back or eliminated since the bankruptcy, and there are valid concerns that more may go. That would leave workers in the children’s services department of the county’s Social Services Agency able to step in only after damage is done.

The strain on social workers is obvious. More than 400 Social Services Agency employees have been laid off since December, and nearly 50 social worker positions have been left empty. State guidelines specify assigning about 35 families to a social worker. In Orange County, officials say the caseload is well above that figure, making it difficult to meet the targets on family visits. One social worker was reported to have 70 cases assigned.

In an effort to do more to prevent child abuse, several social workers are pushing to separate the children’s services unit from its parent Social Services Agency, arguing that it will allow more prevention. But the director of the Social Services Agency, Larry Leama, rightly has cautioned that a new unit would still need someone to handle budgeting, payroll, accounting and the like.

Leaman and other officials have given a properly cautious response to the proposal. Still, the social workers who raised the possibility deserve encouragement for continuing to emphasize the risks children face in this county, risks that will become graver because of the bankruptcy.

The county’s social workers have often wound up teaching people how to run a household. Teen-aged parents who did not learn from their own parents how to cook, care for a child or even keep a house clean have been instructed by the county. Social workers took new parents shopping, gave them tips on nutrition and showed them simple tasks such as refrigerating milk to stop it from going sour. It sounds simple, but for too many parents it was not.

The motive was always the same: help the children. The goal was keeping the family together, stopping situations from getting so bad a child had to be taken away. It was an important goal, worth the emphasis that was given.

Given the realities of the bankruptcy, the goal of the Social Services Agency must be to prevent child abuse and keep families together as much as possible. Orange County has had a better record in this field than many other large counties, where children are often removed before there is much of an attempt to work out problems. Achieving the goal will take cooperation between the agency’s staff and managers, as well as a willingness to listen on both sides and to work together to find solutions.