Despair of the ‘System Kids’

Jessica’s childhood is etched in shiny scar tissue. Each thin slash on her forearm is a memento of another stint in the county’s home for abused kids. Each lumpy burn--a smiley face seared with the metal top of a disposable cigarette lighter--another group home that didn’t work out.

“Some were because I wanted to make my mom feel bad,” Jessica says. “Some were because my life sucks.”

Since Jessica was a toddler, social workers and police officers have never been far from her life. In February, a judge reluctantly sprung her from the county’s care after the slender, bleached-blond teen with the heavy black mascara and alabaster skin threatened to hide where they would never find her.

At 18, she was free to go. No job. No high school diploma. Another angry kid prepared for nothing.

Her life can be found in volumes of battered court files.

County social workers first encountered Jessica when she was 3, after her mother’s boyfriend whipped her during a drug-fueled rage. Her mother’s screams drew police six times before she entered second grade. When Jessica was 8, a social worker placed her with an aunt, while her mom kicked her methamphetamine habit.

A year later, she was back home. At 10, the boyfriend’s father sexually abused her during a camping trip, according to court records. By 12, she was running away for days, sometimes for weeks at a time. She fought with her mom. If her mom fought back, Jessica filed child abuse reports. Twice, her mom put her in a psychiatric hospital. One night, her mom drove to Orangewood Children’s Home, the county’s shelter for abused kids, insisting they take her daughter.

At 14, Jessica became a “system kid.”

She joined the legions of children now inhabiting Orange County’s child welfare system, which is supposed to provide a surrogate family when a child’s own family disintegrates.

Instead, more than a thousand of these kids--some as young as 18 months--find themselves stuck and forgotten in group homes.

To examine their plight, The Times obtained unprecedented access for the better part of a year to the county’s child welfare system--normally closed to public scrutiny. The Times found an antiquated institution struggling under the weight of too many children and too little oversight. A system that all too frequently fails the very children it is charged to protect.

The problems found in Orange County, according to judges, attorneys, social workers and children’s advocates statewide, are identical to those faced by kids caught up in the child welfare system throughout California.

Orange County, though, is unique in one respect: Belying its reputation as a suburban haven, the county has become the state’s child abuse boom town.

Arrests for willful cruelty to a child in Orange County leaped 121% between 1990 and 1996--more than double the rate of any major California county and 30 times higher than the statewide rate. Sexual assaults on children rose too, as did the number of number of battered kids entering the system.

No one knows exactly why. Police and others say abuse has multiplied as Orange County’s demographics more closely mirror those of its urban neighbor to the north, and that county residents have become more inclined to report such abuse.

Whatever the reasons, thousands of kids are losing their childhoods to an institution that sprang from a well-intended 19th century belief that society had the obligation to protect and nurture its battered, neglected and needy youth.

With increasing frequency, though, these youths wake up, as Jessica did, in group homes filled with strangers.

Orphans of the Living

Originally conceived as a haven of last resort for the system’s most troubled children, Orange County’s group homes now house the unwanted as well: the children thought to be too old, too frightened or too angry to place with the scant supply of foster and adoptive families.

These homes are society’s modern-day orphanages. Wrested from parents who abused or neglected them, Orange County’s system kids are the orphans of the living.

Jessica blitzed through every Orange County group home that would accept her, gulping 70 Prozac in a suicide attempt, shaving her head, running away, trashing a staff member’s car. She cried herself to sleep more nights than she can count. One home stopped being coed after Jessica and two other girls had sex with six of the boys. In 1996 she moved 14 times, so many places she can’t remember their names, from barely furnished six-bed group homes to coed facilities with 28 kids to hospital psych wards and back to Orangewood again and again.

Every doctor she encountered tried something new to fix her: antipsychotics, antidepressants, drugs to battle manias, pills for anxieties, inhalers to control drug-induced shakes and an injection of Thorazine that she remembers burning as it flowed up her arm. Nine different psychotropic drugs in all, as far as Jessica can remember.

The Department of Children and Family Services’ files on Jessica stand a foot and a half tall. There’s the social worker who took a liking to her and the worker who wants to send her to a highly restrictive facility in Utah and the worker who barely stops to say hello.

Disparate Diagnoses

One psychiatrist reports that Jessica suffers from bipolar disorder. Another says she experiences “chronic depression.” Another diagnoses “oppositional defiant disorder.”

“We haven’t done anything for her,” says Irene Briggs, a supervisor with the Orange County Social Services Agency. “We had her in protective custody and we released her back to be abused again. There’s probably a thousand like her in the system, bouncing through group homes, running away, put on medication.”

Each year more children with more severe problems spill into a system hard-pressed to track them, treat them, or even to know what psychiatric medications they are on and why.

In Orange County, the number of kids living away from their families by court order has grown from 2,600 to more than 3,800--more than 45%--since 1993. Nearly one child in five has spent more than five years in the child welfare system. Some have never lived anywhere else. On average, these children will move at least four times, though some--like Jessica--will migrate from home to home eight or more times in a year. Statewide, some 22,000 children are growing up in group homes.

Orange County houses many of its kids in any of more than 200 group homes, most located within the county, but some as far away as Texas and Utah. In too many of these homes, food is scarce, the surroundings are filthy, schooling is poor and the surrogate parents are $7-an-hour employees who rarely stick with their jobs longer than a month or two. In some homes, violence is prevalent, with children--and sometimes staff--assaulting one another.

“Some of these places,” says Willia Edmunds, a court-appointed children’s advocate, “are not at all the type of place I’d send my animal to.”

Most of the homes, says Joe Huley, who is in charge of group home monitoring for the Department of Children and Family Services, “are warehouses. Nothing more. By no stretch of the imagination are we getting our money’s worth. Sometimes, we’re fortunate that they’re serving them food that will fill them up.”

At 18, these children are unloaded on the world with less than the state accords a convict who has done his time. A prison parolee receives $200 and a bus ticket. The children who graduate from the county’s child welfare system are given a duffel bag of household supplies, if they’re lucky. “Basically, they are set out on the curb with a bag of graham crackers,” says Sondra Nelson, program manager for group homes at the Department of Children and Family Services.

Study after study shows that these children later turn up in disproportionate numbers in prisons, mental hospitals and drug treatment centers. By one estimate, more than 50% end up homeless. Sixty percent leave the government’s care without a high school diploma. Lacking a sense of family, many duplicate the mistakes of their own parents and produce yet another generation of system kids.

“They are cheated from the moment of birth,” says one longtime social worker, “then the system cheats them too.”

First and Last Resort

For the children of the system, their first stop, and the place they return to every time they “fail” at a group home, is Orangewood Children’s Home, the county’s Spanish-style shelter in Orange.

When Orangewood opened in 1984 at a cost of $7.5 million, it was hailed as a model facility where the county’s most vulnerable victims would be temporarily sheltered. Sandwiched between the Theo Lacy Branch Jail and the Betty Lou Lamoreaux Juvenile Justice Center, the leafy eight-acre campus includes 10 tile-roofed cottages, a pool, gym, play areas and a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school.

These days, though, the campus is a volatile, overcrowded institution, whose resources are stretched to the limit.

Designed for 236 children, Orangewood regularly squeezes in 40 or 50 more, with mattresses on the floor and cribs wedged wall to wall. Last summer, as many as 321 children packed the cottages. The “pop,” or population--one of many terms taken from prison lingo--ranges from 2-day-old infants to developmentally disabled 19-year-olds. Invariably, 40% are under 6.

About 27% of the children are admitted and then sent back to their families within days or entrusted to relatives or foster parents. The rest, though, may wait weeks or months for social workers to find a place for them to live.

No Room for Normal

A final refuge for children not even the system wants, Orangewood is no longer just a children’s home, but a mental institution and jail as well. Freshly battered or molested newcomers share rooms with children who have been returned by foster or group homes. Children haunted by hallucinations mix with Orangewood runaways who have stolen cars, set fires or prostituted themselves.

Several times a day, children as young as 4 line up for psychotropic medications to control their depression or rage. Some adolescents are asked to sign “no suicide contracts.” If they refuse, they are automatically sent to a psychiatric ward for observation. One winter day, nearly half the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade girls in one cottage acted as if they might, or threatened to, kill themselves.

“Every child that enters Orangewood loses what it means to be a normal kid,” says Linda O’Neil, an attorney for children in the system.

On average, 20 children “go AWOL” every month, most leaping over the back fence to the dusty Santa Ana riverbed. Some are never heard from again; others return shellshocked from gang-rapes or simply too tired and hungry to run anymore. During a single month three years ago, 130 children slipped away to the “outs.”

Children who misbehave end up on “basic,” confined to their cottages and forced to wear pink pants. Rarely a day goes by when four or five staffers don’t “take down” a child, wrestling him or her to the ground.

One 14-year-old son of a crack addict has been restrained six times in one month. “You think it’s my fault I’m in here?” he snaps. Hanks of hair he cut himself hang past his nose.

These children, says Javier Chavez, a senior social worker at Orangewood, “are functioning now on survival instincts. Their best friend now is anger.”

One night in the adolescent boys cottage, the pop is mostly Orangewood veterans. Danny, who is about 13, has been in and out of Orange County’s care for years. With shaggy hair, an impish smile and a tiny body, he could pass for 8. He’s back in Orangewood because he pulled a knife on a group home staff member.

Danny’s dad ran off when he was born. His mom died in an automobile accident when he was 5. His grandmother couldn’t decide whether to keep him. “She’d want me one month, then the next month she wouldn’t,” he says. At 10, she gave him up for good.

Barred by Orangewood rules from wearing his own clothes, he puts on a pair of castoff striped pajamas, which flop several inches past his wrists, and gets ready for bed. Then, as he does most nights, he fantasizes.

“If I had a mom right now,” he says, staring at a spot high on the wall, “I’d probably be lying in her arms talking, probably asking her for a couple bucks for the movie tomorrow.” Or, he goes on, he’d be asking to go to an Angel game with the buddy he’s sure he’d have if he had a family.

He pauses to fetch his evening dose of Paxil “to keep me from being down.” Upon returning, he explains how he “failed” at two group homes, so he’s not likely to get a foster or adoptive family to take him. “They want to get me an assessment team to figure out what’s wrong with me,” he says, using the telltale jargon of a system kid. “I just need lots of attention and nourishment. I just need a mom. It’s hard to get that in a facility.”

Four months later, Danny is still in Orangewood, though children are not supposed to stay there longer than 30 days. He’s still wearing someone else’s too big clothes. He’s still hoping to get out. “When I turn 18,” he says, “I’m going to have the biggest party you’ve ever seen.”

Labeled and Left Behind

When children are taken into the county’s custody, their cases, background and behavior are assessed by social workers. The best mannered, the youngest or the ones with relatives who can care for them are quickly moved out. Those considered too defiant or disturbed, or too old for foster or adoptive families, are sent from Orangewood to group homes.

Intended for only the most problematic children, group homes now house more than a quarter of the kids in Orange County’s custody, twice as many as Santa Clara County which has a similar population. More than 100 of the children are under age 5. Recently, Orange County has placed several children as young as 18 months old in group homes. Tucked into middle- or low-income residential neighborhoods, the homes typically bunk six kids.

“Do the social workers label them and leave them?” asks one therapist at a home for young children. “Absolutely. They just forget them here.”

Many of these children feel branded by living in the homes, as if there is something wrong with them--not the parents whose misbehavior put them there. Ryan, a hulking teenager softened by baby fat, freckles and a goofy smile, will tell you matter-of-factly why he’s there: When he was 10, he came home from school one day to find his mother had packed up and returned to a boyfriend in Maine who had beaten them both.

“Social workers couldn’t understand how I felt,” he says. “I used to tell them things--like I wanted to kill my mom’s boyfriend--and they’d think that was strange and that I needed to be put away.”

In five years, he’s lived in 10 group homes, done several long stints at Orangewood, sliced his arm with broken bits of audio cassettes, fought with staff members and been heavily drugged with a powerful antipsychotic called Risperdal.

“When Ryan goes to a new place,” says Willia Edmunds, a volunteer who was appointed by the court as Ryan’s advocate, “when they can’t deal with him, their response is, ‘We need to medicate him to stabilize him.’ So where does the anger go?”

Ryan walks with a rolling swagger and raps about running with a Santa Ana gang, seeing a friend shoot a rival, smooching girlfriends on “the outs” and his new baby he’s named Justice. “Oh damn, I’m 15 and a father. I know it’s a big, big responsibility.”

None of what he says is true.

“Listen,” he leans close and confides encouragingly, “I’d be just like a normal kid. Only I’m in here.”

Ryan’s imaginings make him typical of a system kid.

“How do they learn how to have a girlfriend or boyfriend?” a therapist asks. “They can’t just go on a sleepover.” Friends can’t come over unless they are approved ahead of time and their parents come too. Some homes strip-search their charges following visits with even court-approved guests.

The children are picked up from school by a staff member in a group home van, if they go to regular school at all. A 6-year-old at one home tells classmates that the staffers are “my aunties, ‘cause the other kids have moms--and my mom’s in jail.” At one home for children under 12, a sign on the wall reminds “Bobby” not to “hump” the girls.

Few would argue that some of the system’s most disturbed children could function in any other than a group home setting. Some, in fact, need facilities with greater security and therapy than the system can offer. But, for many kids, says Joe Huley, who supervises the county’s group home monitors, even the best homes are hardly the right place for children.

In Orange County, landing in a good home is largely luck. Some of the big chains provide comfortable environments with devoted staff, as do some mom-and-pop operations. But Huley says many of the homes, even those run by prominent providers, provide only the barest of basics, hiring ill-qualified workers who seldom stay long and have not been trained to work with children who have been abused.

Nonprofits’ Big Bills

The problem isn’t money. Most child advocates agree that the state provides ample funding to care for these children. On average, group homes used by Orange County receive about $4,000 to feed and house each child per month from state and federal welfare funds. Some receive as much as $5,013 apiece.

All of the homes are nonprofit, but in too many of them little of that money goes to upkeep, food or staff, says Deborah Abrecht, head of a program that provides volunteer advocates to troubled foster kids.

Typical is the Child or Parental Emergency Services, or COPES, home in Tustin, a generally well-regarded home for children age 2 to 5. The government pays COPES $26,538 each month to care for six children in the pale green ranch-style house.

Inside, the family room contains a beige couch, a TV strapped down to a battered stand and two mismatched, beat-up tables. Two children share the largest of three bedrooms, decorated with Mickey Mouse stickers and faded Mickey Mouse bedding. Two scarred white dressers hold their clothes. The closet is padlocked, and the room smells of urine. One night, dinner consists of cut-up hot dogs, canned succotash, toast and a half a banana each.

Last year, at an Olive Crest group home for adolescent girls in Mission Viejo, former staffer Regina Armstrong says the chain provided her with only $175 to feed six girls each week. Sometimes, she says, she could get an extra $30 on Wednesdays for perishables. “The food was horrible, a lot of canned food,” she says. “How can that be healthy?”

Armstrong says most of the staff, paid between $7.25 and $8.50 an hour, stayed only a few months. “We had to work 14-hour shifts. There were a lot of problems, a lot of pressure. Most people just quit.”

This home, like COPES, was paid $26,538 a month.

Violence is another problem in the homes. According to state records, children sexually assaulted other children in at least four group homes during the last two years.

At two residences run by Hart Community Homes in Orange, boys forced other boys to perform sex acts on them while the 24-hour staff slept, state licensing records show. The state cited Hart for violations.

At the 56-bed New Alternatives group home in Tustin, a 17-year-old on probation held down a 12-year-old victim of abuse in February, forcing him to orally copulate a 15-year-old boy, according to state licensing reports. It was the fourth incident involving sexual activity between children in eight months at the home. The state cited the home for violations as well.

“We have kids that have no history of perpetrating learning to be perpetrators at [New Alternatives],” says Patrick T. Smith, the state licensing official who oversees the home.

Last summer, a group home for disturbed teenagers on the grounds of UC Irvine Medical Center was forced to shut its doors following the alleged sexual assault of a mentally disabled 13-year-old boy by other home residents. Before it closed, campus police were called to the home more than 200 times, mostly for runaways and fire alarms, but also for assault and battery, vandalism and vehicle theft. The home, which sat just down the street from Orange County’s juvenile court, received more than $60,000 per year for each child.

At the Hudson Lyndsey home in Anaheim, staff members swung kids age 2 to 11 by their legs as discipline, hit them or withheld food as punishment. The state put the home on probation and demanded new management.

“This stuff happens all the time and it never gets reported,” says Abrecht. “The community thinks these kids are safe. They’re not. The system hides its problems.”

The county has just four social workers to monitor the 200 group homes. State officials also check for health and safety violations once a year, unless complaints bring them more often.

Within the system, though, group home companies hold the upper hand, because local beds are in short supply. Social workers say they have no choice but to place children in homes they believe are doing a poor job.

Harold LaFlamme, who runs the law office representing foster children in Orange County, says the situation creates “a real conflict of interest for all of us [who are tempted to] go out and raise hell about a bad group home. You don’t want to upset the apple cart when it’s the only apple cart in town.”

In some homes, children who throw tantrums or fight with staff are returned to Orangewood in exchange for other kids. The county doesn’t keep track of which homes regularly dump kids back. For the children it becomes a numbing cycle: the more times a child is moved, the harder it becomes for the child to form attachments. When the children lose this ability, they lose their capacity to trust.

“These kids are searching for unconditional love,” says Eric Pittman, a senior counselor at Orangewood. “What they find are a dozen places that will cash them in if they misbehave.”

“The group home system stinks,” adds Karen Cianfrani, an attorney for children in the system. “They get lots of money for these kids and the kid says, ‘F--- you,’ and they kick him back for a nicer kid. . . . These places are supposed to be like families. They aren’t. Families don’t throw kids back.”

High-Level Trauma

In a cramped office in the Department of Children and Family Services complex in Orange, social workers Linda Pflaster and Brain Smith decide which kids belong in group homes, and what level of care they require. Pflaster and Smith are known as “the levelers.”

In California, group homes are ranked in “levels” depending on a child’s emotional trauma. A level 1 home houses children who simply need a place to live. The level 14 homes, the highest, are theoretically reserved for those who are “severely emotionally disturbed.”

In Orange County, children are rarely housed in anything lower than a level 10. Recently, a researcher who analyzed 80% of the state’s group home placements found that Orange County puts twice as many children into level 12s as the rest of the state. Level 12s are designated for extremely troubled children.

Smith, the state licensing official who oversees Orange County group homes, says his investigators are increasingly finding children with vastly different needs housed together: the traumatized next to the violent, a mentally ill kid next to one whose parents were more concerned with drugs than with him.

Often, Smith says, the children’s social services files lack information on their background. “If you read a file and you watch a child and the two match, you’re lucky,” he says.

Last August, Smith cited one level 10 group home for taking in a boy with a history as a sexual predator who had been assessed as needing a level 14 home. “[When] you get a perpetrator and a victim together,” he says, “you got a problem.”

Pflaster, a 30-plus-year veteran, says she doesn’t know whether some children may be harmed by living in homes for the extremely troubled. “It’s hard to say if a kid would perform just as well at a lower-cost [and] lower level, because we just don’t have many.”

From Homes to Streets

For group home operators, though, there’s an economic incentive to open only the highest-level homes. The government pays $4,423 per month to house a child in a level 12 home, while the rate for level 1 is $1,183 per month.

Child welfare officials acknowledge that many of the group homes are overwhelmed by the severity of the emotional, medical and behavioral problems of some children. The system wasn’t designed to handle children who set fires, rip at their skin, hallucinate and attack their caretakers and roommates. Orange County only has two level 14 homes.

But where the system fails these children most is in the end.

Many of them wind up as homeless adults. At the Teen Challenge men’s shelter in Santa Ana, one 19-year-old, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, is trying to get a fresh start, after spending seven years in the system.

“When I got out, I’d never taken a bus before. Which bus do I take?” says the teenager, who has bounced in and out of group homes and spent time in juvenile hall after a fight at Orangewood. “They put me in an emancipation program, but it didn’t really prepare me for living on my own. I was just out there floating on the ocean.”

John Peel, executive director of Santa Ana-based Family Solutions, a chain of 13 group homes in Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties, says his company has applied for funding to provide beds for 18-year-olds until they get on their feet.

“For so long in this state, the success of group homes is simply keeping the kid alive until they turn 18,” Peel says. “I don’t think Orange County wanted to tell the world what a failure its [group home] system has been.”

“We’ve been in business for 20 years,” says Denise Stevens, executive director of the COPES chain, “and we keep saying we’ve yet to have that one success story. We’ve yet to have that one kid come and say, ‘I remember living here and you took such good care of me.’ ”

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Inside the Series

When children are taken from abusive parents, they enter a secret and frightening world--ostensibly for their protection. To see how well the theory works in practice, Times staff writer Tracy Weber and photographer Robert Gauthier spent most of a year behind the closed doors of Orange County’s child welfare system.

Ronald Owen, presiding judge of Orange County Juvenile Court, granted The Times unprecedented access to group homes, shelters, closed hearings and court files. The paper observed children interviewed behind one-way mirrors and lined up for their morning doses of mind-altering drugs; we went along on arrests and heard judges, social workers and kids speak about the horror they confront.

The Times found a system that too often inflicts pain on the children it is supposed to protect. Although the system examined is in Orange county, there’s no reason to think it works any better elsewhere in California.

No child in this series is identified based on confidential information or without a release form their parent or guardian.

* TODAY: Abused children as young as 18 months old are mixed together in group homes designed for some of the system’s most disturbed children--though many of them do not suffer from mental problems--ignoring state laws aimed at correcting such problems.

* FRIDAY: Dependency court judges cross their fingers as they take families apart or put them back together, making decisions with what is sometimes scant or inaccurate information.

* SATURDAY: Social workers, some saddled with three times the number of child abuse cases they should have, often face a cruel dilemma: Should they leave children at risk of further abuse in their homes, or expose them to abuse of another kind in what everyone agrees is an overburdened system.