State Agency Fails to Monitor Foster Care, Lawsuit Charges

California foster children are dumped in one home after another, some of them unsafe, and receive only sporadic visits from social workers, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday against the state Department of Social Services.

The suit, filed here by two child advocacy groups, charges that the state has failed to monitor county child welfare systems to bring them into compliance with state and federal rules. State officials refused to comment, saying they had not yet seen the complaint.

Filed by four former foster children, the suit paints a harrowing picture of neglect: children placed in homes where they are abused and where social workers who are supposed to monitor conditions visit only twice a year.

Robert Campbell, assistant chief counsel for the Department of Social Services, said: “The state is fully meeting its responsibility under state and federal law to monitor.” A hearing on the complaint has been set for June in San Francisco Superior Court.

Rene M., one of the plaintiffs, said she was placed in foster care at age 14 after being sexually molested by an uncle and other male visitors to her mother’s home in Concord.

During the next four years, she lived in four homes. In the first, her foster mother pulled her hair, threw bottles at her and beat her with a belt, she said. Her social worker visited twice a year and did not remove her from the home until finding welts on the girl’s legs from a belt lashing, she said.

“The only person who would listen to me was my social worker,” said Rene (not her real name), 18, a retail saleswoman, in a telephone interview. “That is who you turn to to get help, and when that person isn’t there for you, it’s really hard.”

According to the suit, the state has not audited child welfare services in 23 counties, including Orange County, since 1986. Of those, Orange County and 16 others failed to meet requirements, and little state action has been taken since then, a lawyer for the children said.

Orange County Social Services Agency Director Larry Leaman said he doubted that years had passed without a state audit of Children’s Services.

“We have so many state and federal auditors in here at any given time micro-managing our operation that my initial reaction is that, while I can’t lay my hands on an audit schedule, I find that hard to believe.”

Audits over the years have found fault with county foster care procedures, Leaman said, but typically the faults were technical in nature.

“I’ve seen audits that are . . . not quality of care audits. For example they’ve found non-compliance because a form was not signed by the social worker’s supervisor even though all the information was there.”

Whether children in foster care were being monitored with the appropriate frequency by social workers became a major concern for the agency when its budget was slashed after the county declared bankruptcy in December 1994, Leaman said.

At one point, the agency feared that the layoffs necessary to balance the budget would mean unmanageable caseloads for the remaining social workers.

“We made a big deal about compliance, saying that one day auditors may come in and say we’re out of compliance,” Leaman said. “But we’ve been able so far to maintain acceptable caseload levels in the foster care system.”

But the foster care system is not foolproof, he said, noting that the ills children endure with their biological families sometimes are also present in foster care.

Nine of 12 counties audited in 1991 and 1992 were out of compliance with state and federal requirements, but the Department of Social Services worked to remedy violations in only one of them, San Francisco, the suit alleges.

State audits are supposed to determine whether families and foster children are seen by social workers, the suit said, and whether the children receive health care.

Los Angeles County tightened its foster care program and created an internal monitoring system in response to a 1988 lawsuit, becoming one of only three counties in California to meet visitation requirements.

But a new audit ordered by the Legislature of 24 cases involving Los Angeles County foster children, 12 of whom died in foster care, found that the county did not meet its own standards in several of the cases. The audit was released Wednesday.

California’s counties are responsible for placing children in homes, but the state is required by law to monitor the counties’ performance. California has about 95,000 foster children, said Carole Shauffer, director of the Youth Law Center, which filed Wednesday’s suit with the National Center for Youth Law.

Shauffer said many foster children are placed in group homes with dozens of other children. The homes receive about $3,000 a month for each child, but sometimes little effort is made to ensure that the children are safe and receiving health care, she said.

Families who take in foster children receive about $330 a month for each child.

Once the foster children become adults, “lots of them wind up in the criminal justice system or homeless,” she said, and “lots of these kids just make it.”

She conceded that the required monthly visits by social workers will not solve all of the problems facing foster children.

The state budget allocates about $1.6 billion for child welfare services and foster care.

Also contributing to this report was staff writer Lisa Richardson.