Child Welfare’s ‘St. Peter’ Under Fire for Agency’s Sins

A few of the nation’s top child welfare advocates call him “St. Peter,” a tribute to the man who rode to the rescue in 1996, when Congress threatened to slash payments for abused and neglected children.

Some of his own employees turn out a newsletter depicting Gerald Peter Digre, in contrast, as a horned devil. They say that he saddles social workers with too much work, too much blame and not enough power to help children and families.

Seven years after being hired to salvage Los Angeles County’s abysmal child welfare system, Peter Digre, a onetime divinity student, inspires nearly biblical adoration and loathing. The director of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services began his tenure as an acclaimed reformer, but has increasingly found his own performance at the center of the debate over how to improve one of the nation’s largest child welfare agencies.

Now, Digre is under fire again, this time in the form of a management audit released Thursday after details had already been disclosed. It describes a sometimes demoralized, incommunicative organization that lacks the leadership its boss so adeptly demonstrates on the state and national scene.

The audit recommended that Digre be teamed up with a powerful second-in-command, a suggestion that his bosses on the county Board of Supervisors are expected to approve. The new “chief operating officer” would have power to run the children’s agency day-to-day and to help draw a five-year plan to move the agency forward.

In typical style, Digre already has co-opted the audit’s suggestions as being “very helpful” and said he has no plans for a career change. “This is a great job,” he said, “and a lot of wonderful things are happening.”

Digre’s performance is of much more than academic interest. Nearly one in every 15 foster children in America counts on him and his department for health and safety. If any one of those 50,000 foster children is injured, or dies, Digre can be held accountable.

Critics Call for Plan to Spread Good Programs

Many child welfare advocates interviewed by The Times said Digre, 54, deserves high praise for: a massive expansion in the size of his department as the recession fueled a surge in reported child abuse; rigid adherence to safety standards, such as once-a-month visits by social workers to foster children; and the creation of a network of community programs that bolster unstable families.

What is missing, critics said, is a grand plan to spread successful programs to more children and to cut the workloads of social workers so they can make meaningful contact with needy children. Digre also must be careful what he promises, because he too often has not delivered on expectations, said many who spoke to the auditors.

“Peter is a most charming, visionary person, quite brilliant on child welfare issues,” said Jo Kaplan, whose law firm represents thousands of foster children. “Sadly, there is often a huge gap between his vision and what actually takes place.”

The walls of Digre’s sixth-floor, corner office west of downtown are lined with commendations, pictures from the six Los Angeles Marathons he finished and a shot of him at the wheel of his cabin cruiser, Therapy.

Beside his desk rests another memento: a tall white can of styling mousse. A 12-year-old boy under the care of Digre’s department inhaled some of the hair gel last fall while at the county children’s shelter. He died.

“I don’t know why I keep it there,” Digre said of the canister. “It’s just something horrible that happened on my watch. And I don’t want to forget it.”

That wouldn’t be likely. Even before the death of Jason Pokrzywinski, child welfare advocates had been attacking Digre as being too slow to recognize the changing clientele at the shelter, MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte. They called for more intensive psychotherapy and home treatments for mentally unstable adolescents, who over the years have supplanted the younger, more malleable orphans who once filled the shelter.

The population at MacLaren has since been reduced and programs have been installed to give some teenagers more intensive therapy. But the explosion of controversy over MacLaren is just one of many over the last three years that have tainted Digre’s achievements.

A System in Disarray

It wasn’t always this way.

When Digre (he pronounces it Day-gree) arrived in 1991, the 7-year-old county children’s department was in near collapse. Endangered children were often not visited, parents did not receive court-mandated visitations and some emergency abuse calls languished without an in-person response. State authorities threatened to take over the entire operation.

Initially, Digre’s work ethic calmed those waters. It was nearing midnight on New Year’s Day 1991 when he arrived in Los Angeles--driving straight to the county’s emergency response command post to meet with workers.

Digre soon had workers meeting the state required minimum of monthly visits to foster children. He established a checklist of measures to ensure child safety.

Backed by Nancy Daly--now married to Mayor Richard Riordan--he championed “Family Preservation.” The network of community organizations has grown to 30, supplying counseling, parenting classes, day care and other support to stabilize the families of as many as 18,000 at-risk children. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton praised the program during a 1994 tour.

His department also proved ingenious at tapping state and federal funds and continuing to grow during the recession, when most county departments were shrinking. The children’s department now spends $1 billion a year, more than double its budget when Digre arrived.

“I think that Peter has done a tremendous amount of good for children in this county,” said Daly Riordan, who frequently jetted to Washington with Digre and Anna Murdoch, wife of News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, to lobby for children’s legislation.

New Demands Take a Toll on Staff

But back on the home front, on the sometimes bleak and sad streets of Los Angeles, Digre’s social workers and supervisors have grown increasingly disillusioned. Up to one-third of the 2,600 social workers were over their contractually specified “cap” of cases in 1996, and that load was already 25% above the level recommended by the state. (Despite a recent hiring surge, one in 10 workers are still overseeing more children than their contracts allow.)

The burden of extra cases has led to burnout, higher rates of attrition and a general disdain for Digre’s seemingly ever-increasing demands for reports, safety checklists and audits.

Some political leaders and reviewers believe that the extra paperwork has increased child safety. But workers say they are so busy filling out forms that they have trouble making more than spot, “drive-by” visits with endangered children. “No More No. 1 Priorities,” read the picket signs of workers disgruntled by all the new demands.

In late 1995, as case overloads were peaking, Digre took an action that is still cited as a watershed within the department. An 18-month-old girl named Destiny was shaken to death by her parents.

He quickly fired not only the girl’s social worker, but also the worker’s supervisor and the deputy administrator for the department in that region. Although some politicos cheered the swift accountability, social workers and managers said Digre acted rashly.

“You could not talk to him or reason with him,” said one employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It was sort of chilling to see this happen.”

Digre defended his actions and said he still believes “we did everything wrong in that case”--allowing a pre-verbal child to be in the care of parents with criminal backgrounds without regularly visiting the toddler.

Although two of the employees were later reinstated, many workers said the incident resonates in the 5,500-employee children’s agency to this day. They described themselves as demoralized and fearful of returning children to their homes. More children are, therefore, pushed into a foster care system that has been found deeply flawed.

Digre denied this. He cited statistics that show that the vast majority of children who come into the system are reunited with their families, not left in foster homes.

Six months after the firings, in mid-1996, a consultant working with middle management warned Digre in a personal letter that his power structure could “implode” if more weren’t done to build teamwork. Many managers told the consultant that they were deeply angry, in part because they were saddled with what they felt were nonsensical or duplicate assignments.

A series of other disturbing reports has followed: In late 1996, the California state auditor found that the agency sometimes failed to make monthly visits, screen caretakers’ criminal records or provide medical checkups.

Shortly afterward, The Times reported that workers at MacLaren children’s shelter sometimes mistreated children and that the facility was overcrowded with a volatile mix of juvenile delinquents, mental patients and vulnerable foster children. Last year, the county grand jury said the agency was not doing enough to oversee about 3,000 children in group homes. And this January, The Times reported on the failures of the county’s child abuse hotline--callers sometimes waited an hour on hold; other calls were lost and workers sometimes gave only cursory review to cases.

Once the hotline shortcomings were publicly noted, Digre responded feverishly, even shifting employees from other assignments to answer phones. The hotline situation has also improved as the number of child abuse reports in Los Angeles County has finally begun to level off after years of increase.

But critics on Digre’s own staff, the county children’s commission and the Board of Supervisors said Digre was caught off-guard by each crisis because he was not tending to daily operations.

Digre is one of the brightest and most articulate public officials at work today in Los Angeles County, even his enemies agree.

When cornered by a hostile audience, Digre often reaches for a yellow legal tablet and disarmingly asks what he can do to resolve the problem. The trouble is, the audience is always asking. And Digre is often promising.

Many Promises Are Unfulfilled

The array of Digre pledges and unmet expectations is extensive, according to his critics, including his calls to:

* Hire a national child welfare organization to study how to cut the paperwork load of caseworkers via computerization. Nearly two years later, the computer system finally has reached all the department’s offices, but it has bugs and many workers remain resistant, doubting it will be a timesaver.

* Do psychological screening of all foster parents. The proposal was dropped when county attorneys said it would be illegal, Digre said.

* Have social workers make visits once a month to the 2,700 children and teenagers who live in group homes. The added workload would have been overwhelming, so the idea has been shelved, Digre has said.

* Create the position of an independent ombudsman to help foster children in group homes with school problems, health care and other personal dilemmas. Digre said he still supports creating the position. He noted that there are already ombudsmen overseeing adoptions and children at MacLaren.

Digre said that in many of those cases, he never made firm promises. The Price Waterhouse auditors found that the perception of unfulfilled expectations is harming the director and his agency. Digre has pledged to be more careful in the future.

“Little words and gestures from me mean a lot,” Digre said. “I think if I say something is a good idea, people think we are going to implement that tomorrow. I have to be very careful.”

Campaign to Raise Adoption Figures

The children’s services director’s latest preoccupation is increasing the number of foster children who leave the system through adoption.

Digre’s office is shrouded in large sheets of butcher paper--monthly statistical updates on the adoption push. The numbers show the department is well on its way to doubling the number of adoptions annually, from about 1,000 to 2,000.

But social workers and supervisors cringed recently when Digre said he could increase adoptions to 3,000 a year. Already, many worry, some families that are not appropriate are being pushed to adopt just to meet statistical goals. Even one worker who supports the drive said: “Peter is on the warpath.”

Virtually all observers of the agency agree that reducing the burden on social workers is Digre’s most critical task. He has pledged to have all his workers down to their caseload cap by the end of this year so that children can be attended to more thoughtfully.

A recovering state economy holds out the prospect of increased funding to hire more workers. The department also hopes new workers can eventually be redeployed in smaller units to serve individual communities in a plan called “Family to Family.”

“He has done some things relatively quickly and done them well,” said John Mattingly, a senior associate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which is helping create the new program. “Now he has to turn to those other things that take longer and more blood, sweat and tears and many years to complete.”