Child Services System in Crisis, Report Says

The protection Los Angeles County extends to the mentally ill, emotionally troubled and delinquent children legally in its care is so disjointed, ineffective and inefficient that tens of thousands of them may be in “crisis,” a team of national experts on child welfare services has concluded.

In a report to be released this week, the team--led by a nationally respected consultant based in Washington--sharply criticizes oversight of the “non-system” of care provided by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services and its embattled director, Peter Digre. It is sure to escalate the intensity of calls for an overhaul of Digre’s mammoth department, which has 70,000 children in its care on any given day.

But the report also criticized the other county departments working with Children’s Services, including the departments of mental health, health, probation and education, saying they need to do a far better job of providing a cohesive safety net for troubled children.

The experts chose to focus their study on the 100 or so children in the MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, the county’s lone shelter for children. But they said in their report that the problems they encountered in a detailed analysis of 25 case studies of those children underscore far more fundamental problems within the entire system.

At MacLaren, the review team found “a large group of children in crisis whose needs are not and cannot be met by the delivery systems of the public agencies as they are currently configured!”

In a summary letter to the Board of Supervisors, consultant Robert F. Cole of the National Resource Network for Child and Family Mental Health wrote: “Our primary finding is that the problems of the MacLaren facility are symptomatic of the problems of the larger system of child-serving agencies.”

The report itself concludes that the five county departments may serve most of their clients well, but that they “are not organized to effectively meet the needs and challenges of children with severe emotional, mental, and behavioral disturbances and their families.”

There are at least 8,000 such children in the county’s care, but potentially tens of thousands more, said Digre, who agreed with the report’s findings, which he said he would use as a blueprint for reform.

“It gives us some real helpful direction” in how to reform that system, Digre said.

Two county supervisors who have been sharply critical of Digre’s management of the department said Monday that the report confirms their worst fears about children placed in the county’s care.

“If this was my child being treated this way, I’d go crazy,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who persuaded the board to hire Cole as a consultant earlier this year. “If these were our children, we would not tolerate such behavior, such shabby and inadequate attention to [their] needs--and they are our children for better or worse, because they have no parents.”

Yaroslavsky, who also persuaded the board to launch a full-scale audit of Digre’s department, described the report as “a broadside” not only against care at MacLaren, but “part of a larger trauma that is afflicting the Department of Children and Family Services.”

“I think this is perhaps the most alarming social and human crisis that we face as a county and as a society,” he said.

“This report indicates an agency that is unable to meet the needs of these young people,” added Supervisor Mike Antonovich. “They are not working aggressively to cut the red tape and provide loving, suitable homes for these children.”

The report concludes that the county, like MacLaren itself, is caught between two conflicting and “irreconcilable roles”--that of an emergency shelter for all children in crisis, and of providing long-term treatment for troubled children.

About 2,500 of the hardest to place children in the county’s care go through MacLaren’s doors each year. Most are sent on to foster homes, group homes, secured children’s shelters and mental health institutions, such as Metropolitan State Hospital.

But hundreds are transferred in and out of MacLaren, which was designed to house 124 children for 30 days or less.

The facility’s population often has swelled to more than 200 children, prompting some critics and even some county officials to describe it as a place of almost Dickensian horror, with severe overcrowding and poor staff oversight of a volatile mix of juvenile delinquents, the emotionally disturbed and victims of child abuse.

Last October, for instance, a 12-year-old boy there died after inhaling from a pressurized can of hairstyling foam.

Digre has significantly cut the number of children housed at MacLaren, and the report praised the institution’s caring staff and its “rich mix of resources” in comparison to other shelter programs nationwide. The report also lauded MacLaren’s strong cadre of outside volunteers, eager to help the children within the system.

But the experts’ report found that other serious problems remain, essentially flunking the children’s center in each of six “core values.” It identified those values as safety; individualized care and treatment; respect for children’s rights; social interaction; quality of life; and growth and development.

“Crisis grows in the lives of these children,” the report says, “through a series of official [and well-meaning] decisions which are distracted by the fragmentation of responsibility and authority among the agencies, by issues of turf, and by the inflexibility of resources.”

There is little or no integration of the five county departments with responsibility for children, and the health, mental health and education of many children need to be better addressed, the report said.

MacLaren also needs to improve its special education programs, to better train its staff, and to institute more accountability--over the children and how they are being assessed, taught and treated, it said.

Digre concurred. “These are kids who need it desperately and need it right now,” he said.

Digre also agreed with one of the report’s fundamental conclusions--that the county essentially “slots” at-risk children based on problems such as mental illness or delinquency.

If the child has more than one problem, as most do, the system cannot easily accommodate them, Digre said, adding that the county sponsored legislation that was recently signed by Gov. Pete Wilson that will address some of those problems.