County Task Force Will Suggest Ways to Reach More Children at Risk

Nearly 20 Los Angeles County agencies are devising a detailed strategy on how to better identify and assist the tens of thousands of children endangered by substance-abusing parents.

In one of the most extensive government efforts to help children of drug addicts and alcoholics, the group this week will provide its preliminary recommendations to the Board of Supervisors, which ordered the unprecedented examination.

Dubbed the Task Force on Alcohol and Other Drug Affected Parents, the group includes the Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office, education officials, the county’s child welfare agency and others. Members hope that some of their many suggestions will be enacted into law when the supervisors meet next week.

“People are focused on the issue and want to do something to correct the problem,” said Nancy Young, who represents the Children’s Planning Council, a member of the task force created in November after publication of The Times’ “Orphans of Addiction” series.

Among the task force’s recommendations:

* Every government office that provides services to children or parents should attempt to determine whether a substance-abuse problem exists. Now, most public agencies in Los Angeles County--welfare offices, emergency rooms, health clinics--do not screen for parental drug use or attempt to determine whether children may be at risk, according to task force member Barbara Ahmad of the Department of Children and Family Services.

One concern about this recommendation is that it might disproportionately target poor families, who have far more contact with government agencies than middle-class or wealthy families with substance abuse problems.

* Government employees--such as police officers who respond to domestic violence calls or doctors who treat injured drunk drivers--should be better trained to identify whether any children in the affected households are in need of help.

* A public education campaign should be launched to encourage the public to notify child welfare authorities of suspicions they may have that youngsters are being abused or neglected by addicted or alcoholic parents.

* There must be better coordination among government agencies that work with children. This would enable a public hospital doctor, for example, to see whether databases of other agencies have reports of abuse involving a child being treated for bruises.

Task force members say all these recommendations probably will produce a surge of abuse reports and more work for social workers and drug treatment programs already stretched thin.

“There are concerns that if more children are identified, we would create a need that the system may have problems totally responding to,” said Paul Freedlund, a deputy director of the Department of Children and Family Services.

But the alternative, he said, is that society will pay huge criminal justice costs as these neglected and abused children filter into jails, like some of their parents.

“The cost of these cases on the back end,” Freedlund said, “is much higher than on the front end.”