Judge Orders New Rules for Placing Foster Children

More than three years after it was supposed to have completed the task, the state Department of Social Services has been ordered by a judge to draw up procedures to help find better homes for foster children.

A ruling last week by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Raymond D. Williamson means that social workers statewide should soon have more information about children before they pick a group home, or other place, for them to live.

Advocacy groups such as the Youth Law Center, which sued the state agency, said more information about the children’s health, education and past traumas will help the government keep children safer.

“This ruling means that we will finally have a system to ensure that thousands of children who are placed in foster care each year . . . have access to residential services that will meet their needs and will not be living with other children who are dangerous to them,” said Maria Ramiu of the Youth Law Center.

Williamson, in an order signed Tuesday, gave the state Department of Social Services until March to develop an “assessment tool” to measure the needs of foster children. The judge said county social workers should be using that system by July 1.

Advocates at the Youth Law Center said the ruling, most significantly, will be applied to children who are placed in group homes. The facilities care for the 5% to 10% of the state’s 95,000 foster children who have been most traumatized.

Concern about the treatment of children in the homes has peaked in the last year, with a Los Angeles County Grand Jury report criticizing many of the facilities. Sensational cases--including the killing this year of a 12-year-old boy, allegedly by two of his teenage housemates--have also fueled calls for reform.

The top lawyer for the state Department of Social Services said that despite the ruling the agency is not convinced that creating guidelines for judging children will work.

One early draft of such guidelines tried to rank children’s levels of need on a point system, to match them with group homes that are also ranked, from Level 1 to Level 14, for the level of pathology in the children they house, said Larry Bolton, chief counsel for the Department of Social Services.

But a panel of experts rejected the idea of ranking foster children numerically, saying it was not descriptive enough, Bolton said. He said the department may ask the Legislature to reconsider whether the assessments are needed.

The state agency has focused on other initiatives to improve the lot of children taken from their families because of abuse and neglect, officials said. In particular, the Department of Social Services has encouraged keeping children out of group homes and returning them to birth families or foster families. Those families should, in turn, be bolstered by intensive interventions by therapists, tutors and others, Bolton said.

“We are concerned that if we have just a few months to just come up with some assessment tool, it might not be a good system,” Bolton said.

But Carole B. Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center, said the state has had more than enough time to complete a set of regulations or to write a form for counties to use. The law requiring the assessments was enacted in 1989, with a deadline for implementation in 1994.

“Hopefully this system ordered by the judge will give everyone a rational way to make a decision where to put a kid,” Shauffer said.

It will also allow government authorities to hold group home operators more accountable and require them to continue caring for children who get in trouble, she said. Some group homes in the past have kicked children out, saying they never would have taken them if their full histories had been revealed.