Front-Line Fighter for Children

Jennifer Garza’s day begins when a hotline call comes in to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.

A newborn is in the neonatal intensive care unit at a Covina hospital, born to a mother who shot speed, cocaine and heroin throughout her pregnancy, had no prenatal care, lives in a notorious welfare motel and already has four children ages 6 and under scattered among relatives.

In the lingo of Garza’s profession, this is a classic Section B, or “failure to protect,” a breach of the state’s welfare law and grounds for seizing a child.

The seasoned social worker moves quickly.

She grabs the forms she will need to take custody of five children, along with a cell phone, a beeper, a Thomas Bros. guide, a car seat, a clasp to tie her hair back to avoid catching head lice and the files for several other cases she hopes to pursue that day.

Caseworkers like Garza, who operates out of a regional office in the San Gabriel Valley, are the soul of the county’s child protection system. Under its current director, Peter Digre, the network has been transformed from a scandalously mismanaged agency to a national model, serving 66,000 children and logging a death rate that in recent years has fallen below the average for major cities.

“They are the foundation,” Digre said of the department’s 2,400 social workers. “This is a field in which 99% success is total failure. And the ultimate life and death reality is the visits to the kids.”

Dispatched to unfamiliar, sometimes dangerous surroundings, workers like Garza are expected to make instant predictions about a child’s safety. They get no public recognition when they are right, but are second-guessed, pilloried and perhaps fired when they make a mistake and a child dies.

Part detective, part shrink and part paper pusher, the caseworkers respond to hotline reports, assess homes, petition the court if children are to be removed from their parents and then monitor their progress--with the mother and father, relatives or in foster homes.

At best, the workers encounter overwhelmed parents, without financial or emotional resources but with a sincere desire to be responsible caregivers.

At worst, they find adults who abuse drugs, behave violently, live in squalor and deceive authorities in order to keep children who are their claim to a larger welfare check.

Then the caseworker must choose: leave the children in a potentially life-threatening home or push them into the dubious embrace of the foster-care system.

These are the decisions Garza, an effervescent 33-year-old with a mop of red curls, has made daily in her half-dozen years as a caseworker. Such tough choices are what drew her to this job. Garza, who grew up in West Covina, had planned to be a teacher. But she changed her mind after working at a methadone clinic in graduate school. She says she likes the grittiness and the chance to help people one-on-one.

So, let’s ride with her on three recent days, when she visited 23 children and 21 family members, sent one child to a foster home, placed seven with relatives and left 15 with parents hoping that a good scare would steady their course.

Along the way, Garza subsisted on fast food, worked past midnight on court petitions and rarely saw her own sons, who are 13 and 7, or her husband, a deputy sheriff who works the swing shift in East Los Angeles.

Her reward? A salary of about $60,000, including overtime, an occasional trip to see her beloved Phoenix Suns, visits to the mall to indulge an addiction for new clothes and the conviction that she is saving lives and rehabilitating families.

MONDAY, FEB. 5

Garza’s first stop is the Inter-Community Medical Center in Covina, where the drug-abusing mother has already checked out, leaving behind a 6-pound, 5-ounce girl.

Garza instructs the nurse not to release the baby to anyone. She is now a ward of the county. A judge will decide her fate, based on Garza’s recommendations.

The original complaint tells Garza that the mother lives at the Monte Carlo Inn in Azusa, a bad sign since the motel is well-known to social workers as a drug location and the scene of frequent child abuse claims.

Attached to the complaint is a computer printout that tells Garza that child protection workers have seen this family twice before, another bad sign, although it will be days before the prior case files reach her desk because of antiquated record-keeping.

Garza assumes that the other children, ages 6, 3, 2 and 1, will be at the motel, and she intends to take them into custody. But in Room 119 she finds only Anna Hernandez, 23, and Freddie Alba, 25. (All parents’ names in this story are pseudonyms. The Department of Children and Family Services prohibits identification of clients.)

Hernandez, explains that the other children are with their great-grandmother, leaving the impression that they are normally with her. She does not deny using drugs, but downplays the problem.

Alba, shirtless and heavily tattooed, presents himself as outraged at his girlfriend’s behavior. He didn’t know she was using, he said, and wants to claim the baby and raise it at his mother’s.

“So I’m left here by myself?” Hernandez whines, staring vacantly at the television. Garza notes her indifference to the baby. But Alba is persuasive: He’s taken a Polaroid of the infant and stuck it between the wings of the TV antenna. Perhaps he is a suitable parent.

Garza’s next stop is the great-grandmother’s Azusa bungalow, which has a tidy garden and several tricycles out front. She finds an extended family that undercuts the couple’s version of events.

Both Hernandez and Alba are heavy drug users, the relatives say. And all of Hernandez’s children, born to a succession of fathers, have been handed off to relatives.

“She just dumps them as she has them,” wails one of the infant’s great-aunts, who has three children of her own as well as Hernandez’s 2-year-old. “Why don’t they tie her tubes?”

The 1-year-old was initially fed diluted tea instead of formula, said the great-aunt who raised him along with her own four children. The 5-year-old has a shunt in his brain as a result of a birth defect but wasn’t taken to the doctor for checkups until he was turned over to Hernandez’s father.

Hernandez yanks the children back every once in a while to qualify for a larger welfare check, the relatives say. And previous social workers have visited but closed the case without court intervention.

Garza scowls at what she considers inadequate casework. “This time it’s going to be legal,” she says. “We want you guys to feel confident.”

She takes notes, fodder for a court petition.

Garza calls her office and asks the secretary to run criminal checks on all adults in this household, one of many now-mandatory procedures that were discretionary when Digre took over in 1991.

The extra chores are a bone of contention with their union and angers many caseworkers, who are carrying caseloads 20% higher than their soon-to-expire contract allows. The workers charge that Digre has buried them with unmanageable new tasks to woo the department’s critics, then disciplines them for any undotted I’s. Last month, more than 300 of them picketed department headquarters, complaining that management was making them scapegoats.

Garza, who some of her colleagues consider a goody-goody hellbent on getting promoted, disagrees. “Things are a lot tougher, but 200% better for the kids,” she says.

She privately interviews Hernandez’s older children about how they are treated. She surveys the home, to be sure there is food, fire alarms, no electrical hazards.

Her beeper goes off, with results of the criminal checks, all clean.

It is 4 p.m. and Garza has yet to eat lunch. “A one-hour call can turn into a day,” she says. “But this is pretty much contained. Let’s get something to eat”--Happy Meals from McDonald’s drive-through window--”and start Round 2.”

Round 2 is a pair of neighboring homes in Rowland Heights, similar in their particulars: filthy dwellings, children without proper immunizations, fathers with criminal histories involving drugs.

Garza parks her shiny Toyota Camry and checks the rear-view mirror to make sure she has no food in her teeth. Then she knocks at the apartment of Tina Royce, her boyfriend and their toddler.

The father was arrested over the weekend on drug possession charges. Detectives called the hotline asking that the home be checked.

Garza finds a fetid apartment, infested with fleas from a mangy dog. The floor is a sea of dirty laundry, fast-food wrappers, tangled electrical cords. An overweight child is asleep on a sour-smelling futon. Royce, 22, a heavyset blond, is smoking and watching cartoons. Garza asks for records of the child’s immunizations. There are none. Another potential Section B.

Garza wakes the child. “How old are you, sweetheart?” she asks gently, introducing herself as Jenny. The girl holds up three fingers. Garza asks about what goes on in the house.

“Does anybody smoke stuff that smells yucky?”

Yes, the child says. Daddy does.

But Garza decides not to detain the child. Royce holds two jobs, one at an auto parts store and one tending bar at the local Moose lodge, and seems determined to get her act together. “We’re fair but we’re also stern,” Garza tells her. “Trust me, you don’t want to lose your child. So work with me.”

Garza orders the mother to clean the apartment and have the child immunized. She will be back to check--unannounced. Royce must enroll in 20 parenting classes at the department’s West Covina office.

When the father gets out of jail, he must enroll in a drug program, submit to random testing and attend class. If any of these conditions are not met, Garza said, she will take the case to court.

The routine is similar at the next house, where there are four children, from 10 months to 6 years. This is Garza’s second visit. In the 10 intervening days, Sandy Davis has cleaned her house, so filthy the last time that Garza shed her purple silk suit and matching pumps in her garage when she got home. But the immunizations are still not in order, keeping Davis’ oldest child from enrolling in school.

By now, night has fallen over the San Gabriel Mountains. Two case files remain on the back seat, left for another day. Back in the office, Garza fills out her log, calls the juvenile court to schedule a detention hearing on the Hernandez children, and assembles information about the impending court proceedings for the relatives who must appear.

Normally she would deliver the packets--maps to the Monterey Park courthouse, custody agreements, permissions for medical treatment and the like. But tonight she and her husband are taking a 9 p.m. plane to Phoenix to see the Suns play Chicago.

A colleague has offered to deliver the material. Meticulously, Garza marks each form that needs to be returned.

“This is what people mean by monotonous paperwork,” she says. “If the state comes to audit and I don’t have Form 561, I’m the one who gets dinged.”

She takes the Hernandez file to Ontario airport. She will write the detention petition on the plane and fax it to court in the morning.

THURSDAY, FEB. 8

Garza stops at the hospital to see the Hernandez baby, who is ready for discharge.

No one has visited, which suggests that the mother is without remorse, the father lying about his intentions and the paternal grandmother indifferent. Will the maternal relatives take another baby, Garza wonders? Or is this one headed for foster care?

Then it’s back to Rowland Heights. At Davis’ house, she finds the medical records in order and extravagantly compliments the mother. At Royce’s apartment, the boyfriend is out of jail.

Royce and her boyfriend have already sought a Narcotics Anonymous group, found a lab for drug testing, joined a church. They are curious about the parenting classes, which Garza teaches weekly, confiding that they were both abused as children and fear repeating their parents’ mistakes.

The class will show them how to replace spankings with time-outs, Garza tells them. And it will allow the department to monitor the family for 10 more weeks.

Now Garza tackles the cases she didn’t get to on Monday. The first is in a bleak corner of El Monte, where a 17-year-old runaway girl has reported domestic violence at home.

Garza finds an immaculate apartment, with wind chimes on the porch, a computer, embroidered house rules hung on the wall, an umbrella folder of medical records, a fat toddler in bed watching “Aladdin” on the VCR, a well-scrubbed 13-year-old boy and a 35-year-old mother from El Salvador who speaks halting English.

The mother asks for a Spanish-speaking social worker, but in the meantime gives Garza a synopsis. The daughter is incorrigible, Isabel Quezada says, and “wants to do what she wants to do.” She has run away and filed false complaints before.

“We get a lot of these,” Garza says. “Kids running wild and then reporting child abuse.”

Next Garza tries to pay a call on Melissa Keller in Rosemead, who recently gave birth to a drug baby but was so remorseful the social worker thought it worth trying to keep the family together. This philosophy--”family preservation”--has been the prevailing credo for child welfare systems across the nation for a decade.

“We’re not supposed to snatch them all,” Garza says. “A lot of families you can work with. They just need a scare. But Mom has to comply 120%.”

Keller, her 9-year-old son, 4-year-old daughter and infant are not at home. Two tough-looking men lounge on the stoop. Garza is having second thoughts.

The last stop of the day, long past dark, takes Garza back to the warm circle of relatives caring for the Hernandez children. They have been to court and were awarded temporary custody. Mother and boyfriend were hostile at the hearing and the great-aunts are nervous about home visits. Garza offers to organize the visits in her office, a time-consuming task for a caseworker supervising more than 40 children.

Now comes the hard part. She tells the family the baby is ready to be discharged and will go to a foster home unless they take her.

“You know she’ll get pregnant again,” one of the aunts says, explaining that they had not gone to the hospital lest the sight of the child melt their hearts. “Let’s say we take this baby. Who’ll take the next one? And the one after that?”

Garza commiserates: “I understand your dilemma and I can’t guarantee I won’t be back here next year.” The family has until morning to decide. The baby winds up in foster care.

MONDAY, FEB. 12

Today Garza works with her partner, Elba Covarrubius, who speaks Spanish and bristles with cynicism about their job.

The workers discuss a new case of Garza’s, a drug-exposed infant born to Cecilia Washington in West Covina. Garza will petition the court to give legal custody of the newborn and an 8-year-old sibling to the grandmother. They all live together already, and the grandmother claims ignorance of her daughter’s addiction.

“Ridiculous,” says Covarrubius, an 18-year veteran. “She’s covering up. She’s using the system and paying her rent with the [welfare] check. But she’s the best we have.”

Covarrubius and Garza re-interview Quezada, mother of the runaway El Monte teen. And in the comfort of her native language, she tells a terrible tale.

Raised in a convent, she fled El Salvador at 15 and was raped and impregnated by the man who took her across the border. He beat her, Quezada says, but she stayed with him long enough to bear a second child, now a model teenager who sings in the school chorus and looks after his little brother.

The 4-year-old has a different father, who is married to someone else. Quezada swears he is not a violent man but the workers are skeptical given her history. He comes to visit as Garza and Covarrubius are about to leave and they take his Social Security number to run a criminal check. This is another of the department’s new requirements, based on the fact that boyfriends who do not live in the home seem to be disproportionately involved in severe abuse cases.

Next the pair pay a call on the elusive Keller family. In the intervening days, criminal and social service records have landed on Garza’s desk. Keller had six drug arrests in 1983. She has also been reported for child abuse before, by a neighbor who charged she threw her own children against a wall and hosted gang parties.

Garza is not troubled by the arrest record because it is so old. But she cringes at the fact the previous social worker closed the case on the spot as “unfounded,” with a notation that the children showed no bruises.

The current situation is also worrisome. The house is a shambles. The mother, 12 days after her first meeting with Garza, has yet to enroll in a drug program. She forgot about parenting class later that night. She is sulky, makes lame excuses.

The 4-year-old dashes about, yelling at the top of his lungs--a likely case of attention deficit disorder, Garza speculates. The 9-year-old hunches over her math homework and says she wants to live with her father, who leads a quiet married life in San Francisco and recently lost a custody battle.

The workers exchange sad glances. “This kid could have a white-picket-fence life,” Covarrubius says regretfully.

But Garza gives the mother one more chance: “If you don’t get something accomplished by next week, I’ll be back here with the car seats.”

Keller will not be at Garza’s class, but several of her other clients show up, as commanded.

Washington is dressed to the nines, despite giving birth days ago. She is attentive as Garza uses gory pictures to illustrate the 10 types of child abuse in the penal code. Washington says she’d like to be a social worker.

“Let’s see if she finishes parenting class and then we’ll talk about college,” whispers Garza’s supervisor, Virgie Boykin.

Royce and her boyfriend, also show up, dazzled to discover the class offers care for their toddler and someone to help older children with homework.

“Wow, what a program!” her boyfriend says. “All that’s missing is dinner.”

Garza chuckles, her last meal a dim memory. It is past 9 p.m. She must pick up her own children at her sister’s house. At home, court petitions await her.

Next: How the system looks from a client’s perspective.

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Child Deaths

Deaths caused by child abuse or neglect in Los Angeles County have fallen below the national rate in recent years. New safeguards by the Department of Children and Family Services are credited for some of the improvement.

Deaths per 100,000 children

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L.A. County National 1994 1.51 1.92

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Sources: L.A. County Multi-Agency Child Death Review Team, National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse

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Children’s Agency Makes Major Turnaround in 5 Years

When Peter Digre assumed the post of director of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services in 1991, it was on the verge of a state takeover. The agency was rocked by charges of mismanagement, defending itself in a lawsuit filed by a law center and reeling from a rising number of deaths of children in its care.

Since then, Digre has transformed the department. It is widely hailed by children’s rights advocates as the nation’s best child protective agency in a major urban area. He has turned the agency around, experts agree, by codifying safety requirements that once were discretionary or loosely enforced, grabbing every available state and federal dollar and creating a more professional cadre of caseworkers who are trained in an academy run jointly by three local universities.

The lawsuit--over claims of failure to monitor children in foster care--was settled in 1993, as a result of Digre’s improvements.

The agency still has problems--including an antiquated paperwork system and staggering caseloads for social workers. But the numbers attest to the progress Digre has made: Despite soaring rates of poverty, drug abuse and teen pregnancy--all predictors of child abuse--the death rate for abused or neglected children in the county--1.51 per 100,000--is below the national average.