Grand Jury Cites Abuses in Group Foster Homes

Many of the nearly 5,000 foster children housed in Los Angeles County group homes are physically abused and drugged excessively while being forced to live without proper food, clothing, education and counseling, according to a blistering report by the county grand jury.

The deficiencies exist despite generous government funding of $238 million a year and despite the purported oversight of local and state regulators, says the report, which is scheduled for public release today.

The 50-page study, obtained by The Times, is a wide-ranging indictment of the operators of some of the county’s 476 homes for children and of the county Department of Children and Family Services and state Department of Social Services, the agencies that have primary responsibility for monitoring the facilities.

Group homes are essentially small orphanages with as few as six residents. They house children and teenagers taken from parents or other caretakers who abused or neglected them. But the grand jury concluded after a nine-month study that many of the children are suffering additional harm at the hands of their purported protectors--being bounced repeatedly from home to home, sometimes physically abused, often medicated without proper court authorization and offered little positive reinforcement for improving their lot in life.

County officials said they had not seen the report as of late Tuesday afternoon. But they contested many of its conclusions, including the number of children held in the homes, which the county pegged at fewer than 3,500.

The report says grand jury members were so unhappy with group home performance--and the contrast between the extreme cost of care and the low level of service--that they questioned some of the facilities’ claims of nonprofit status.

Among the outrages the grand jury said it found at homes that earn up to $60,000 a year per child: a boy whose only new clothing in two years was a single pair of socks; a widespread failure to seek court authorization to administer powerful mood-altering drugs; the abuse of children by caregivers who sometimes slapped, hit and even threw shoes at their charges.

“Huge sums of taxpayer dollars are being paid to these nonprofit small group home owners,” the report says. “Supposedly this money is to provide quality services for the children placed in their care. But there is little monitoring for quality and accountability.”

The effects of the scathing critique remain to be seen. The report was released this week and not at the end of the jury’s term June 30 because the county is now negotiating contracts with all of the more than 200 companies that operate the homes. Child welfare advocates said privately that they hope the report will be used as leverage to set more stringent criteria for homes that hold the county contracts.

But several administrators with the county children’s welfare agency insisted that their department has already been working aggressively to protect the welfare of children.

They noted that the department started its own internal audits of group homes more than two years ago, despite the fact that the state Department of Social Services has primary responsibility for reviewing the performance of the homes.

The county department has already proposed adding a total of 107 employees to its auditing staff and out-of-home care unit to keep closer tabs on the homes, said Jennifer Roth, budget chief for the county children’s agency. That would cost $6.4 million a year, with nearly $2 million of the expenditure coming from the county and the rest from the state and federal governments, Roth said.

Group home operators said Tuesday that they had not seen the report but that the head of one of their largest trade organizations, the Assn. of Children’s Services Agencies, said it unfairly lumps all the homes together.

“I know that the grand jury focuses on problems and not successes, but it concerns me if their report ignores the successes, extrapolating from their negative observations that all of group care is substandard,” said Linda Lewis, executive director of the association, which represents 35 of the largest group-home operators. “That is inaccurate and unfair.”

Lewis acknowledged long-standing concerns about the overuse of medication and other problems and said her members, most of which are nationally accredited institutions, have been working to make improvements.

The seven-member Juvenile Services Committee of the grand jury began its review of group homes last summer. It visited more than 30 of the facilities, studied county audits of 32 home operators and had its own auditors review the financial files of another half dozen homes.

Wide-Ranging Problems Found

The problems described by the group were wide-ranging, including:

* The use of excessive force, including slapping, hitting and dragging children across floors. Even “point” systems meant to reward children for good behavior tended to be administered punitively, with children seldom rewarded for compliance.

* Children were given a variety of medications without the proper consent of a guardian or judge in nearly half of 158 audited cases. In another instance, a group home withheld drugs in hopes that a child would be ruled severely emotionally disturbed--thus drawing a higher rate of government payments.

* Inadequate psychotherapy for children. Sometimes sessions of as little as five minutes were held, although therapists billed for a full 40- or 50-minute session. One therapist reportedly made the same boilerplate reports, month after month, to describe every child in a six-member group home. In other cases, therapists would complete copious reports, only to have their recommendations ignored.

* Home operators would pay outside consultants up to $2,000 to write mission statements for their facilities that the operators seemed not to understand or follow.

But not all the homes it reviewed were troubled, the grand jury said.

“In one instance we saw a group home which was providing a loving environment, had wonderful ties with the local schools, and the owner had even adopted some of the children,” the report says. “However, this was the exception.”

The report states that a lack of funding is not the problem.

It notes that--besides standard monthly payments ranging from $1,200 to $5,000 per child--many of the residents of the homes also qualify for free school meals, tutoring and psychiatric care that are reimbursed from other government funds.

Grand jury members said that they had trouble seeing the impact of those payments during their home tours. The report describes child care workers paid just above the minimum wage and homes slipping into disrepair. Children, meanwhile, received paltry allowances of $1 a week or less and many did not appear to receive the $50-a-month clothing allowance.

The grand jurors reported that they had a “strong suspicion” that some of the more than 200 group home operators were making lucrative profits by leasing back their homes to themselves--receiving, for example, a $1,500 government reimbursement on a property they rented for $300 a month.

Summarizing the contrast of the high government payments and inadequate services, the grand jury concluded: “This is not consistent with a nonprofit activity.”

About $5.9 million in government overpayments to group homes were noted in the report, but the Department of Children and Family Services has been lax in recovering that money, the report says.

The report spreads blame for the shortcomings liberally, laying much of it at the feet of the Department of Children and Family Services.

Among other problems, the report says that social workers miss their prescribed meetings with children--which normally occur once a month--about 14% of the time. (County administrators said they make meetings in all but about 7% of cases, which they said is better than in many counties.)

Even when they made their visits, the workers did not offer enough background information about children to help the homes draw appropriate plans for their care, the report says. And when they did identify a problem home, other workers were not always notified and they would continue to place children there. County child welfare administrators said that after complaints from their own social workers and others, they created a special audit section in December 1994 to keep tabs on group homes. Senior Deputy Director Beverly Muench said Tuesday that the section has helped expose many shortcomings of group homes, leading to at least one closure and many corrective actions.

But the grand jury concluded that the audit section, although enthusiastic and helpful in finding problems, had not gone nearly far enough. It suggested that the staff of six and budget of just $308,177 is inadequate to track a $238-million program.

The auditors also need to share their information much more often with state licensing officials and with law enforcement officials, the grand jury said.

Recommendations for Change

The report makes myriad recommendations for the homes. Among them:

* Homes should be shut down quickly when they are found to be out of compliance with state regulations or their county contracts. Short of that, reimbursements should be reduced to reflect the lower level of services being provided.

* The county should move swiftly to get children out of group homes and back with their natural families or into standard foster homes. Not only would the care in “family” foster homes tend to be more personal, but it costs much less--$345 to $1,515 a month, compared to as much as $5,000 per month for group homes.

* The county should cut paperwork for social workers and assign them cases closer to their home offices so they have more time for priority tasks, such as visiting children in group homes.

* A policy that allows group home operators to remove children with little notice should be modified or eliminated. Children currently bounce from home to home, with little prospect of bonding with their caretakers.

Finally, the county needs to track more closely what becomes of the children in its care. The grand jury report speculates that the outcomes are not good. It notes, for instance, that just 14 of the hundreds of teenagers “emancipating” from the system have received college scholarships over the last year and a half, far short of the county’s goal of getting aid for all the 18-year-olds who leave the system.