Children’s Aid System Gets Mixed Marks From Clients

His lower lip quivering, a little boy climbed out of the official van bearing the first of 136 children from emergency shelters around the county to Edelman Children’s Court in Monterey Park. He began to sniffle as the driver ushered the children swiftly from the dark parking structure inside the building’s secured back entrance. Beside the boy, a taller girl, ponytail askew, socks slouching, silently grabbed his hand. The driver took the other, assuring the boy, “It’ll be OK.”

With 2,400 social workers, 17 children’s courts, and 6,000 temporary homes, the county’s child protective system makes the same kind of promise to the 66,000 identified victims of child abuse and neglect in its jurisdiction.

From a client’s perspective, the promise is kept unevenly. Those swept up in Los Angeles County’s reformed system--a volatile stew of passion, value judgments and red tape--are variously sad, enraged, resigned, or occasionally grateful. Some simply say the job gets done, but at a soul-numbing price.

James Hill, 19, who spent six years in foster care, said: “No one really cares about how we feel. They do, but they don’t. No one ever cares about nothing.”

After three decades of a mandate that certain professionals report suspected child abuse, reports have soared to 190,000 a year. About a third are substantiated. The largest number of cases involve neglect, followed by physical and sexual abuse.

Faced with an epidemic of social problems, the system struggles to make progress amid ever-shifting regulations, labor disputes, changing funding sources and a continuing philosophical debate about how to balance the need to protect young lives and the desire not to tear apart families unnecessarily. At the same time, political winds are bringing welfare reform that promises even more turmoil.

All things considered, experts say, Los Angeles is doing better than most large urban areas. “In Los Angeles, we are blessed with probably the best child welfare system as they’re currently structured,” said Duncan Lindsey, professor at UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research.

But he said it suffers, as do most child protection systems, from the evolving role of social workers over the last two decades from helpers into “quasi-police.” Overwhelming responsibilities have forced them into a “triage” mode, too often allowing egregious cases to go unprosecuted while leaving borderline families to fend for themselves.

By focusing on cases better handled by police, he says, social workers have moved far from their original mission: to help troubled families.

Beverly Muench, a deputy director of the Department of Children and Family Services, said all social workers want to help families, but increasing legalization of proceedings makes some parents afraid to admit they need help.

The department is just now starting to measure the quality of its service. Lengthy interviews last year with children and parents from the first 200 cases randomly sampled showed no surprise--parents who were separated from their children felt it was wrong. But they tended to be positive about the parenting and therapy services they received, even as they continued to deny they needed them. At least 80% of the children, asked to name three wishes, mentioned that they wanted to be with their mother or father. Many tended to believe that the separation was their fault.

Most of the children shuffling into Edelman Children’s Court are under 12, but some are older and already have had their own children placed in the system. Some arrive with backpacks full of their belongings--either because they distrust their temporary caretakers or hope that they will be sent home, said Gail McFarlane-Sosa, shelter care director at the court.

Most, however, will not, court officials said. Their chances are then 50-50 that they will be placed with relatives who may or may not be an improvement, or with strangers in foster care. Only a few will be adopted.

In this system, being OK is a matter of degree, said the court’s supervising judge, Michael Nash. He compares the system to another overburdened bureaucracy: “Everybody complains about the post office, and yet they handle billions of pieces of mail every day and the mail usually gets there.” The occasional mistakes, he acknowledged, can be deadly.

Upstairs in the Children’s Court, the nation’s first legal facility dedicated exclusively to children’s cases, the public waiting areas are hives of fussy children, overhead TVs and consultations in various languages between parents and their court-appointed lawyers. Many parents are frustrated at jammed calendars or policies that stretch out their cases for years.

“This is my child. I just about died giving birth to her and you’re going to tell me I have to wait another three months because your court calendar is busy? No. That’s not acceptable,” said one Santa Monica mother, enraged at a system that she said has twisted her charge that the girl’s father abused her into a two-year investigation of herself.

Even though social workers made inconsistent evaluations about her, her daughter is now temporarily placed with the father, while she can only see her daughter in weekly monitored visits, she said.

The mother says her daughter’s well-being is being decided by an elitist clique of social workers, judges and attorneys. “They all have lunch together and drink. The bottom line is they collect their paychecks and they don’t care about the kids.”

Once a child is detained, state law dictates up to 18 months of “family reunification” efforts to patch up the biological family before an alternate home can be found. In reality, that window stretches out to 36 months, critics contend.

Like social workers, lawyers are also carrying huge caseloads, sometimes in the hundreds, Nash said. Moreover, there is a dire shortage of services, such as counseling or parenting classes, for most of the families who are told they need them.

Despite the problems, Los Angeles County has clearly made strides after five years of efforts to raise professionalism by Director Peter Digre, who was hired after state threats to take over the department. One measure of the recent success is the relatively low number of child deaths that occur once a case file is opened on a child. Between 1991 and 1994, 25.1% of the total homicides by parents or caretakers involved children who were in the system. By contrast, the national average from 1992 to 1994 was nearly twice as high: 45%. Some experts, however, believe that the raw numbers are too small to be statistically significant.

Nash cited a substantial increase in the number and quality of training programs for judges, lawyers and social workers in recent years. And turnover among dependency court judges has dropped.

When children aren’t helped as much as they are promised, the fault may lie not so much with the system as with social problems endemic to poverty and a lack of knowledge about how to fix dysfunctional families. At least 80% of the children in foster care have come from a family where one or both parents have major problems with drug or alcohol addiction, Digre says.

“We’ve only recently learned children can be depressed. Now they think most of the children coming through the system are depressed,” said Rita Cregg, director of the child advocates office at Children’s Court. “We still don’t know the best way to treat drug-addicted parents, or how to motivate people without work or parenting skills.”

A Mother on Drugs

Eight years ago, social workers knocked on Sandra Howard’s door for the first time. A neighbor had found two of her children, ages 2 and 3, running in a busy street in Long Beach and brought them home. Zoned out on drugs, Howard went back to bed and the neighbor called authorities. Thus began a case that eventually ended happily.

That day they removed all five of Howard’s children from her roach-infested apartment. Part of her was sad, she said, but another part was relieved. She recalled, “I was able to get out there and get on those drugs the way I wanted to.”

But two years ago, after a prison term for selling drugs and after delivering a sixth child who was also removed, she began going to court and paying attention to the services they were offering. She was pregnant again, and she recalls the judge saying, “Sandra, if you could have this baby with no drugs in the baby’s system, none whatsoever, that would look good on your record.”

She did. Now, after nine months of intensive services from the county’s pioneering family preservation program, Howard, 30, proudly displays certificates showing proof of her drug-free status and graduation from a 15-week “Love Is Not Enough” parenting class. An eighth-grade dropout, she is enrolled in Long Beach City College and supports her family with welfare and food stamps.

In October, a judge modified the court order that had set up four of her children on a track to be adopted by relatives. Now, all but one of her seven children have moved back to her two-bedroom apartment in Long Beach.

Less than 10% of families in the system pass the safety screening to volunteer for the community-based family preservation program, which uses a network of churches and service organizations to bring intensive in-home services to struggling families.

Of the dozen social workers who have visited her over the years, Howard despised one who she says didn’t respect her, and is forever grateful to the last one, Lani Espinas, who inspired her to turn her life around.

Espinas, a counselor intern with a caseload of nine, was sent by the Long Beach Youth Shelter to Howard’s apartment for nine months, sometimes twice a week. They sat on her torn green Leatherette couch in her spotless home and talked about Howard’s childhood in Arkansas, her own abuse by an uncle and how to manage her anger.

Howard said: “At first, I was, like, nah, she’s just sitting here talking just to be talking. But when I got to really know her”--her voice dropped to a raspy whisper--”she showed me I can be somebody if I wanted to. It took me a long time to realize this. Thirty years. And I love her for this.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.

In Howard’s case, the county’s family preservation program seems to have worked. But far more controversial are the rules under which certain families are reunified and others are not. State law requires courts to order up to 18 months of reunification services to all parents unless they have severely abused the child previously. Critics say that in practice, children are sometimes left with dangerous caretakers for years. Social workers were trying to follow such rules in the high-profile deaths of Lance Helms in Los Angeles and Elisa Izquierdo in New York.

State Sen. Richard G. Polanco (D-Los Angeles), responding to the Helms case, unveiled a package of proposals last week to reduce the reunification period to six months, open up family court records and change the burden of proof from the court to the parent.

The county is pursuing additional changes to refuse services to families where previous reunification attempts have been unsuccessful, where willful abandonment has resulted in serious injury and where parental rights have been previously terminated for another child.

Yet the debate over how far to go in preserving troubled families has hardly subsided. Cregg of the child advocates office contends that more family separation is not the answer. “That’s devastating for children. They’ve moved so often they lose track of their own families,” she said. When it’s time for them to leave the system, Cregg said, “They go home to nothing.”

Asking for a New Home

James Hill, 19, said his mother called him on his birthday this year from a homeless shelter in Bell. “She didn’t sound like she was drinking, which was good,” he said. He’d rather not talk to her when she’s drinking because it brings back memories of why he called the children’s department when he was 13 and asked someone to find him another home.

He said his foster home in West Covina, better than what he had, has been less than ideal. The father died after his first six months and the mother was also raising two drug babies. He spent most of his time in his room listening to music and watching TV.

He said he was visited by social workers every six months. “Some are cool, but they don’t call you back. My social worker only visited every six months. She never called to see how I was doing.”

High caseloads, he said, are no excuse. “If you have a kid and you know he has problems, you should deal with them, even though you have 200 more.”

Last year, James said he had just returned from visiting his biological father for the first time in North Carolina when he got a letter from his social worker saying his case had been terminated. That meant no more payments to his foster mother and canceling his health coverage. He was shocked.

There are currently 42,000 foster children in the system. Digre said every year about 900 foster youth are officially “emancipated” from the system when they turn 18. Very few are equipped for their independence. And those numbers are expected to increase dramatically if, as he expects, welfare reform places more poor families under stress and forces more children into the system.

In response to surveys of emancipated foster youth, the county has made efforts to help them with housing, scholarships and jobs. It has set aside 5% of all entry-level jobs for foster youth. A transition program, the Independent Living Program, also provides training for them until age 21. Former foster children are also being hired to advise social workers.

Moreover, Digre said his department is aiming, as with family preservation, to involve community organizations with foster youth. One pilot project in Pacoima has already succeeded in placing foster children back in their own community, so even if their home has changed, their school, teacher and friends remain the same.

Still living with his foster mother in an informal arrangement, James is struggling to find work, love and his place in the world. With the help of the independent living program, he studied mechanics, bought tools and got a job selling tires at Sears for $5.82 an hour. His hours, though, were recently cut back.

He had a girlfriend, but he said they broke up because he didn’t love her. Besides, he wondered how he would even know. “Even if my mom was to come up to me and tell me, like, ‘I love you,’ I wouldn’t feel the feeling like an ordinary kid because I wasn’t raised to be loved or something.”