Reforms Voted for County Children’s Group Home

Faced with accusations that conditions at the county’s only public group home for foster children are so bad that mentally unstable youngsters are made sicker when they stay there, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted to reduce the population at the MacLaren Children’s Center and to provide treatment for children who need it.

“If this were a licensed facility, it would be closed and we would all be marching off to some kind of incarceration,” said Nancy Daly, who serves on the county’s Commission on Children and Families. She said that cottages at the El Monte facility meant to house 16 children are home to as many as 39, and that mentally ill and delinquent children live with youngsters who only need temporary shelter.

“It’s not an emergency,” said Daly, “it’s an abomination.”

Under the plan adopted Tuesday, the county will reduce the number of children housed at MacLaren from an average of 180 per day to 124 by May 1, at a cost of about $19.5 million next year to provide foster care, therapy and other expanded services for the children to be moved.

The board backed away, however, from a proposal to hire a children’s mental health czar to oversee the process and make sure that the children are cared for properly. Daly and other advocates for children pushed hard for such a position, but the county officials whose job it is to oversee children’s services and mental health programs strongly opposed it.

The board also rebuffed a proposal by 5th District Supervisor Mike Antonovich to consider purchasing a now-shuttered site for two group homes in Van Nuys as a way to alleviate overcrowding at MacLaren.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who withdrew the proposal for an outside czar from his motion setting up the new programs, also led the opposition to reopening Pride House and Lion’s Gate, the Van Nuys group homes. Anticipating criticism that his relatively affluent Westside and San Fernando Valley district will not accept such homes in its midst, Yaroslavsky also vowed to find a site for a new home.

“I will personally go out and find a piece of property that is appropriate” in the 3rd District, Yaroslavsky said. “I will take the heat from the communities.”

Critics say problems at MacLaren, which was opened during the Depression as a home for adolescent girls, have been brewing since it was reconfigured in 1975 to provide temporary shelter for children entering the foster care system.

Societal changes in that time, coupled with deep reductions in funding and facilities for mental health care for indigents, have wrought dramatic changes in the shelter’s population.

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Now, instead of children who need a temporary home because of parental death, neglect or abuse, a third of the residents at MacLaren are so mentally ill that they require full-time, one-on-one attention from an adult. About half of the children have a history of delinquent or chronic runaway behavior, and 10% are developmentally disabled.

The number of teenagers has increased by two-thirds over the past decade, while children under 10, who are on the same campus with the older youths, make up 15% of the population.

Although children are meant to stay at MacLaren for just a few days at a time, many remain for up to 60 days. They then are moved to group homes or psychiatric hospitals, but if they run into trouble or their Medicaid benefits run out, they are sent back to MacLaren.

“It’s become a psychiatric facility for teenagers,” said Peter Digre, the county’s director of Children and Family Services. “It’s been breathtaking to watch the change.”

The changes--and the county’s inability to cope with them--came into tragic focus in October, when 12-year-old Jason Pokrzywinski died at MacLaren after inhaling a pressurized can of hairstyling foam.

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As a result of his death, the county departments of Mental Health and Children and Family Services have worked together to develop a new approach for MacLaren, including the appointment next month of a medical director.

The first group of children to be removed will be the youngest, followed by pregnant teenagers and those who are mentally retarded. MacLaren will then become primarily a short-term care facility for children who are severely delinquent or disturbed.

Key to the success of the program is a new approach in which children are kept in their own homes or with relatives or foster parents, while the county provides extensive support services for them, including daily therapy, respite care for parents or relatives and even tutoring.

The cost is high: $36,000 per child per year. According to Digre, about 50% of that will come from the federal government, 20% from the state and the rest from county coffers.

Digre estimates that for the 541 children he expects to place in such care next year, the total cost will be $19.5 million. He said he expects to absorb that from within his department’s budget, which this fiscal year is about $900 million.

In addition, he said, the county hoped to slow down what, for some children, has become a revolving door of psychiatric hospitals and group home placements. To achieve this, he said, the county would send therapists and social workers to children who are having difficulties in group homes, in order to help them through crises or psychotic episodes without being kicked out or sent to hospitals.

At the meeting, Helen Kleinberg, a children’s advocate who also serves on the commission, told the story of a teenage girl who has spent several years on a rotation from MacLaren to group homes to psychiatric hospitals and back again.

“She’s far worse than when she came into our system,” Kleinberg said. “Every time she gets into trouble, it’s a new hospital, a new therapist.

“These are kids’ lives we’re destroying,” she said.