Troubled Group Home Is a Study in Foster Care Woes

Star View Adolescent Center in Torrance has racked up a lengthy and troubling record in its five short months as a home for emotionally and mentally disturbed teenagers.

Among the problems cited by state officials, police and child advocates: Some children were punished with injections of a powerful tranquilizer after they ran away. A boy’s collarbone was broken during a “takedown” by youth counselors. A girl was reportedly groped in a “time-out room” by the facility’s maintenance man. And unruly teenagers bolted into the surrounding community, sometimes in droves.

In some ways, critics say, the home for as many as 56 youths appeared to mirror some of the worst characteristics of the group home business--as described last week in a withering critique by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury. The report described a system in crisis where teenagers are needlessly drugged, and where they run amok without proper care and are all too often bounced from home to home.

Star View’s operators protest that characterization and vehemently deny the charges against them. They say they are the victims of a Torrance city administration intent on shutting them down and of state regulators who make judgments on psychiatric medications and other treatments that they don’t understand.

But the story of Star View is not simply a debate over whether the home should be open or closed or even over how to handle society’s most difficult young people. It is, instead, a lesson on the sad conundrum that is the foster care system. Many of the authorities who have criticized Star View are also working desperately to help it succeed. They say there simply is no place better to send the youths. And if Star View failed, those experts say, teenagers who are deeply mentally and emotionally disturbed would have their lives thrown into turmoil all over again.

“This place is worth making an effort for,” said Amaryllis Watkins, who oversees group homes for the county Department of Children and Family Services. “These kids have to have treatment. We can’t just move them a million times or send them back to the shelter. While we are talking and talking, these kids are growing up.”

Watkins referred to the homelessness, addiction and imprisonment that await many foster children who don’t get help before they leave the system. “If we don’t deal with them now,” she said, “we are going to have to deal with them later.”

Several of the 36 current residents recently have told their court-appointed attorneys and counselors that their lives seem stable for once. A few even dare to hope that they are stepping off a lifelong merry-go-round of shelters, psychiatric clinics and foster homes.

Their hopes center on a complex of low-slung, white stucco buildings set in an apartment enclave of Torrance, just south of the Del Amo Fashion Center. There, they are tended to around the clock. During the day, the staff of full-time counselors, teachers, nurses, doctors and supervisors swells to about 90.

In recent weeks, after complaints and subsequent inspections identified serious problems at the home, several trouble-shooters from the county departments of Mental Health and Children and Family Services have been assigned to support the staff.

Today, a plan for even more oversight may be drawn in a meeting of Torrance Mayor Dee Hardison, police officers, county officials and the home’s private operators. Hardison rejected suggestions by the private company that runs the home that the city is intent on putting it out of business. “As a city we don’t even have the power to do that,” said Hardison. “But I sure as heck can make sure they operate in a manner that is a credit to this community.”

Dramatic Reversals of Fortune

City officials and other outside observers describe the short history of Star View Adolescent Center as one of dramatic reversals of fortune--opening with great promise late last year, only to be quickly overwhelmed by the most difficult of clients, then gaining an increasing command in the last two months.

In the past few weeks, however, two troubling incidents again put regulators on their guard--the alleged molestation of the girl by the maintenance man April 2 and, last Sunday, the arrest of a 15-year-old resident on charges of lewd conduct and oral copulation after she allegedly forced herself on the 12-year-old girl who was her roommate.

“We solve one problem and then another one seems to get bigger,” said Hardison.

Star View had originally been proposed more than a year ago by a Northern California-based company that operated other facilities for troubled young people, including Harbor View Adolescent Center in Long Beach. A combination of for-profit and nonprofit firms headed by registered nurse Mary Jane Gross would combine a group home of 40 beds with a psychiatric facility of 16 beds, which would house the most disturbed residents behind locked doors.

Gross and her supporters--including Peter Digre, head of the county’s child welfare agency--believed the combination of psychiatric facility and group home would help keep youths in place and allow them to be given classes, therapy and other treatments to make them better.

The county had another motivation. Its lone children’s facility, MacLaren Children’s Center, was staggering as its population reached near double the preferred capacity. And the county was forced to pay from its own treasury for every child who remained in the shelter more than 30 days. In private homes, the state and federal governments pick up most of the tab.

So county officials were pushing hard for a new home that could take runaways, suicide risks and young sociopaths that no other foster family or group home wanted.

Star View Executive Director Kent Dunlap says the facility was delayed for several months, however, while it tried to assuage the concerns of Torrance officials. By the time the home was licensed in November, it began taking eight to 10 children a week from MacLaren and was quickly near capacity.

“In retrospect, that was way too many,” said Dunlap. “We underestimated the acuity and the challenge that these kids ultimately presented.”

Complaints From Neighbors

Complaints began to crop up almost immediately. The Torrance police were being called continually by neighbors about teenagers from the home who were out in their neighborhoods unattended, sometimes committing petty crimes like shoplifting.

Inside the home, lawyers for children complained that their clients were being over-medicated, often with the powerful tranquilizer Thorazine. Those complaints continued into this year when, in February, officials from the state Department of Social Services wrote a report substantiating complaints by some residents that they had been injected with the drug or forced to take it in tablet form after they returned from unauthorized forays into the community.

The teenagers insisted that they were given drugs even if they calmed down when they returned to the home. State records showed that, in some instances, the required court authorizations had not been obtained before or after the medication, which reportedly put some residents to sleep, even while they were in the on-site school.

Dunlap, the Star View executive, said he and his employees were “dumbfounded” when state officials found that allegations of over-medication were credible. He insisted that the licensing officials do not have the proper training to judge the therapeutic use of Thorazine and other medications. And he said that the drug had been administered, with caution, after other alternatives for calming children had failed.

In January and February, licensing inspectors also “substantiated” complaints that one boy was physically abused by counselors and suffered scrapes and bruises while being pinned to the floor, and that staff members verbally abused clients and were sometimes unavailable to break up fights and other incidents.

The problems at the facility that crested earlier this year seemed to be on the wane in the last six weeks, said a wide range of outsiders who have visited there. Dunlap a month ago took over the day-to-day supervision of the facility and even more employees have been brought in to oversee the children, he said.

Claims that children were excessively medicated have almost disappeared. AWOLs--youths running from the facility without permission--have been greatly reduced. Some less experienced youth counselors have moved on and, as the staff gained seasoning, many of the hardened adolescents became more comfortable and made progress in their therapy.

But Star View has not been given a clean bill of health by its critics. One lawyer, who asked not to be named, said she went to court late last month and secured an order that a 14-year-old boy should be taken off Thorazine altogether. The lawyer said the boy was being administered high doses of the drug and then left alone in a room for hours to sleep it off.

Dunlap acknowledged that one boy, by court order, had been taken off medication. But he denied that the drug had been used excessively and said the lawyer had been meddling in an area in which she has no expertise.

Other advocates for Star View’s residents said their greatest concern is the potential for the locked, psychiatric portion of the facility to be used punitively against teenagers who act up. To assuage these fears, Dunlap has recently agreed to a procedure that is supposed to place youths in the psychiatric facility only voluntarily or if a psychiatrist determines that they are an immediate threat to themselves or others.

Regulators and the home’s operators said they have tried to respond to each new crisis with such flexible policymaking. That strategy has been tested, once again, by the developments of recent weeks.

On April 2, a 29-year-old maintenance worker for the facility was accused by a teenage girl of cornering her in the secluded time-out room, police said. The facility reported the accusation to police. The man allegedly tried to kiss the girl and then raised her skirt and put his hand on her thigh before she ran away, said Torrance Police Sgt. Ed La Londe.

Dunlap called the incident troubling and said that no staff members had seen the maintenance man inside the girls’ wing that early afternoon. The worker was fired immediately, although he later denied the allegations, Dunlap said. Police continue to investigate the case and have not referred it to prosecutors.

Star View also imposed an even higher level of scrutiny immediately after the incident, Dunlap said. In addition to the other counselors and nurses, a roving staff member now patrols halls and checks rooms, looking for problems.

Policies Still Being Amended

Even that improvement, though, had to be modified after the latest crisis, which came just last Sunday. That is when the 15-year-old girl allegedly forced her younger roommate to stimulate her sexually--an incident that took place between the routine, 15-minute sweeps by the roving staff member, Dunlap said.

The girl was transferred to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall and faces lewd conduct and oral copulation charges, police said.

In the last few days, the employee has continued the patrols, but on a sporadic schedule that is supposed to be more difficult for residents to outsmart.

“It’s part of the evolution of the program,” Dunlap said. “This sort of acting out is not something we were dealing with before, but many of the kids are dealing with these [sexual] issues in therapy and then they may act on it more. It’s all the more reason to have constant surveillance of the children.”

Before the recent incidents, Star View was finally beginning to make progress, said Robert Stevenson, an attorney whose firm represents several youths at the home. But he urged continued improvements, including the quick hiring of a special education expert to head the on-site school, which recently lost its principal.

“In the last six weeks things had gotten much better,” Stevenson said. “They are making a huge effort to make things better. . . . But we can’t accept mediocrity for these kids.

“There are a lot of lost souls out there, but some of them are salvageable.”