Holes in the Forest Care Net

A team of child care experts has detailed the painful elements of a crisis in Los Angeles County’s ability to provide effective foster care at the MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, its lone shelter for children, most of them emotionally disturbed or physically abused.

The report, by psychologist Robert F. Cole and others, also outlined some viable solutions to problems across the foster care system.

Los Angeles County supervisors greeted the Cole report with howls of outrage. “If this was my child being treated this way,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, “I’d go crazy.” Yet the Cole report is only the latest to detail problems in the county’s foster care system. The supervisors have been outraged before, but it has not often led to real reform.

Last April, for instance, a Los Angeles County grand jury examined the county’s 476 group foster homes and called for reforms similar to those now advocated by Cole. Both reports faulted the county’s standards of care as minimal. While county foster care facilities generally succeed in immediate protection of children’s safety, the reports said, they fail to meet long-term needs for education, counseling and other social services. The problem, both reports said, is rooted in the failure of the county’s myriad agencies to communicate with one another.

The supervisors should act promptly on these problems. Meetings with county agency heads to elicit ideas for specific reforms are expected to begin this month.

Particularly valuable would be a computer network that would let social workers, psychologists, physicians and other child care professionals keep track of individual children in the foster care system and assess how well the county’s foster care dollars are being spent. It costs more than $6,000 a month to keep a child at the MacLaren Center--some money goes to programs that are more effective than others, but there are currently no objective measures.

Peter Digre, director of the Department of Children and Family Services, has asked the supervisors to increase his $1-billion budget so he can expand programs and hire 600 more workers. Digre notes that his department cares for more than 70,000 children on any given day, up from 43,000 a decade ago. The money should be tied to specific timetables and accountability procedures. But a fix is needed now; the supervisors can’t wait another year.