Fostering Better Care

Working out of a cramped schoolroom, a group of social workers and health and education experts have spent the past 20 months quietly trying to reform the beleaguered county foster care system.

Foster children are being placed in homes in their own neighborhoods. They are being given a voice in the proceedings. And foster parents and birth parents are encouraged to be friends.

Those innovations are part of the Community Based Placement Project, a pilot program designed to cut through the foster system’s notorious red tape by opening up the process to include schools, foster parents and, frequently, the children themselves.

The test program has radically reexamined some of the foster care system’s traditional goals and routines. It was recently extended by the county Department of Children and Family Services to Wilmington and San Pedro, Lancaster, Norwalk, Bellflower and South-Central Los Angeles.

The main objective: Move kids through the system more rapidly, and place kids in foster care close to home, so children will not be required to change schools or be cut off from siblings and friends.

The ultimate goal, the officials say, is to reunite family and child as quickly as possible whenever it is safe to do so.

The program is a bright spot for the county department, which has been a lightning rod for criticism of the services it provides for the 45,000 children under its care. In recent months, the department has been criticized by parents for not giving them enough information about their children, who were taken from them for the child’s safety. Supervisors last year appointed an inspector general to monitor the department.

“As a department, what we are seeing is an ever-increasing caseload,” said Evelyn Silvertsen, the project director. “We are especially concerned with the growing number of children placed in out-of-home [foster] care for 18 months or more. . . . The project allows us to do something early in the game and make every effort to keep children in the community.”

While the regular foster care system takes more than 18 months to place a child in adoption or reunite them with parents, the project’s goal is to perform the same task in six months to one year.

Because the Pacoima area has historically had among the fewest foster homes in the county--along with the largest number of children placed in homes outside the neighborhood--the northeast San Fernando Valley was selected to be the first Community Based Placement Project area in 1995.

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So far, the results have been beyond expectation, county officials said. In about two years, the number of foster homes in the Pacoima area has increased from nine to 43, for a total of 112 beds.

There have been 79 placements into local foster homes since the program started in May 1995.

Olga Rivera, 51, was the first foster parent to sign up.

The Pacoima resident, who has taken in more than 50 foster children since 1988, said the program is a vast improvement over the regular foster care system because it encourages frequent visits by a child’s natural parents.

“It’s better for the children,” said Rivera, standing inside her immaculate Pacoima home filled with pictures of children. “This way, they don’t feel they are away from their mother.”

Pausing, she added: “It’s also better for me to know the parents.”

But while foster parents and children’s social workers have embraced the project, Los Angeles County embarked on the program only after it settled the 1988 “Timothy J” class-action lawsuit, which required the county to do more to monitor the safety of the children in its care. Carole Shauffer, the executive director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center who helped file the “Timothy J” lawsuit, said the project is particularly important because it allows children to stay close to home.

“This keeps kids in their own neighborhood,” said Shauffer. “Before, the social worker would say, ‘It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault. But we’re gonna move you away from your home, your friends, everything you know.’ ”

The program works like this: If a social worker decides it is necessary to remove a child from a family living in the pilot program area--Pacoima, along with sections of Arleta and Lake View Terrace--the Department of Children and Family Services finds a foster home for the child in the same neighborhood.

The child is kept in the same school and, if possible, in the same foster home as his or her siblings.

Previously, it was not uncommon for children from Pacoima to be placed in foster homes as far away as Long Beach and Downey.

“You have already taken a child away from home, so you don’t want to place them in an [unfamiliar] neighborhood,” said Rex White, the children department’s regional administrator for the Pacoima area. “That way you don’t re-traumatize them. You maintain bonds, so there is stability.”

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At Maclay Middle School--center of the pilot project area--a meeting is held with parents, foster parents, social workers, a representative from the Los Angeles Unified School District, a county health official and representatives from local private nonprofits that provide counseling in a variety of specialties, including mental health and substance abuse.

Children over age 10 also attend the sessions and answer questions about the strengths of their family, the steps the child could take to help improve the situation and, finally, what the child wants.

School officials say the sharing of information is particularly valuable.

“Before, kids were just snatched out of schools, and we had to try to figure out what happened,” said Gerri Como, an LAUSD counselor who oversees attendance in 19 schools in the San Fernando Valley.

Once the major problems in the household are identified, the planning conference discusses whether family members need specialized counseling.

Typically, the conference will recommend that parents undergo several months of counseling and treatment for substance abuse or domestic violence--which are the most common reasons children are removed from their homes.

Though a judge makes all final decisions, the court usually follows the department’s recommendations.

If the court has decided not to reunify the family, parents are encouraged to visit their children at the foster homes.

And foster parents in the community project are given much more responsibility than those in the regular system.

They must invest longer hours, agree to allow parents to visit frequently and take nine additional hours of training tacked on to the 30-hour course required for all licensed foster care parents.

In return, the program’s foster parents get an extra $260 a month--$360 if they agree to make their home available to take in a foster child 24 hours a day. Foster parents collect a base amount of $345 to $509 per child a month.

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Marsha Loza, a 33-year-old Arleta resident caring for three foster children, said that while the extra money is helpful, the primary attraction was that the project foster families also receive more attention, including 24-hour access to a social worker.

“There is a lot more support and it is comforting to know that people are around 24 hours if I have problems,” said Loza. “Also, I was getting [foster] children from Long Beach lots of times, and the parents couldn’t make it all the way up here very often.”

Because the program encourages relationships between parents and foster parents, there have also been unusual friendships.

Rivera, for example, has voluntarily gone to parent-teacher conferences and doctor and dentist appointments with birth parents and the children she is temporarily caring for.

And after caring for three foster children--ages 4, 10 and 11--for a year before they were returned home in November, Rivera still meets the children and their mother regularly for dinner at Rivera’s house.

“This program is ultimately going to decrease the size of the department because we are getting out of these people’s lives,” said Rex White, the regional administrator of the department, “which, to the extent that you can do that safely, is not a hard sale.”