Foster Care System Begins Overhaul

The agency that protects endangered children in Los Angeles County has launched a far-reaching overhaul, instituting what it calls a new era of community-based foster care that will put its employees in closer contact with the public and keep children closer to family and friends.

Taking a page from the many police departments that have installed community-based programs with success, the overburdened, oft-criticized Department of Children and Family Services will assign social workers to small neighborhoods, attempt to recruit thousands of new foster parents and place foster children in their existing neighborhoods.

If such changes succeed at the nation’s largest child welfare agency, foster children and their families will benefit.

When taken from problem parents, the children would no longer be scattered to the far corners of the vast county.

Instead, they would remain in their own neighborhoods, in their own schools and close to friends who could help support them in coping with the trauma of being removed from their parents. And the parents would be encouraged to remain in close contact with their children, even as the government is overseeing their care.

“This is going to change the whole way we do business around here,” said Peter Digre, director of the department, which oversees the care of 73,000 children. In recent weeks, he has been promoting the concept in meetings with foster parents and social service agencies.

An array of child advocates, social workers and lawyers--including those who have tried the approach in other cities--said they believe that many of Los Angeles County’s children will benefit from the initiative.

The same observers cautioned, however, that community-based foster care can only help some children. It will not be a panacea for an agency that cares for an estimated one in every 15 foster children in America, they said. And they believe that it will be almost impossible for the approach to be instituted countywide in just two years, as Digre has proposed.

Cleveland--the biggest city thus far to decentralize its child welfare system--has managed to place many children close to home. But after five years, the program still reaches fewer than one-third of new foster children.

Adam G. Jacobs, who heads the largest private children’s services agency in Ohio, said Los Angeles should expect much the same.

“When it’s fully implemented, it will be a good idea. It will help children,” he said. “But you can’t expect one program alone to solve all your problems or build a greater society.”

At least four significant changes will be at the core of community-based foster care. The philosophy calls for:

* Assigning social workers to small neighborhoods, perhaps centered on elementary schools, instead of eight broad regions that each now oversee about 1 million residents.

* Launching an exhaustive drive to recruit new foster parents to serve the poorest communities, which produce the vast majority of the county’s foster children. Officials hope to add 2,000 foster families, a nearly 40% increase.

* Placing foster children in their own neighborhoods, when possible, so their removal from parents doesn’t mean they also lose contact with their teachers, ministers, coaches and friends.

* Encouraging foster parents and birth parents to work closely together so the children can maintain contact with their biological families.

Room for Improvement

Digre says that it will take just two years to have all of the department’s 3,000 social workers reassigned and to complete the foster family recruitment drive.

But Los Angeles has a long way to go. The dearth of foster homes in the poorest neighborhoods provides the most graphic example of the shortcoming.

There are 530 children from Bell, Bell Gardens and Cudahy in foster care, for example, but those communities have only a handful of foster families, who maintain beds for 19 children.

A long swath of South Los Angeles just west of the Harbor Freeway has more children in foster care than any other ZIP Code in Los Angeles County. There are more than 1,600 foster children who have been pulled from homes in the 90044 ZIP Code, but foster families in the area have room for just 273 youngsters. (Some of the children sent out of the neighborhood go to relatives, an option that child welfare experts consider less disruptive.)

“Those neighborhoods can support their own children,” said John Mattingly, a senior associate with the Casey Foundation. “We don’t have to send those kids out to middle-class or upper-middle-class neighborhoods.”

The lack of community foster placement creates real pain for children, says Amaryllis Watkins, a deputy director of the children’s agency.

“What could be worse than to be a child and you finally tell your teacher about abuse in your home. Then you get yanked from your home; you never see your teacher again, or your neighborhood sports team or your minister or your friends,” Watkins said. “And all that after you finally had the courage to talk about the abuse.”

Some child welfare advocates say that Los Angeles County could do more to recruit foster parents if the state simply increased its payments, which begin at $375 a month and are low by national standards. There are also calls to loosen rules that now require foster homes to have a minimal number of bedrooms, so that more parents in poor neighborhoods can qualify.

But the “Family to Family” philosophy maintains that greater community participation can be encouraged without raising foster care pay.

Testing New Approach

The community-based strategy has been employed on a small scale locally for three years--in a pilot program in Pacoima and several other communities scattered around the county.

In Pacoima, there are now about 100 beds maintained by local families for foster children, compared to only about 25 three years ago. Still, there is a long way to go. Pacoima has 402 children in foster care.

The neighborhood approach has been employed on the largest scale in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland. There, up to 30% of new foster children are placed with families who live in the same ZIP Code as their parents, compared with fewer than 15% previously. The county also reports a 58% increase since 1993 in the number of foster families, from 501 to 790.

Judith Goodhand--a strong supporter of neighborhood foster care who recently left as director of the Cuyahoga County children’s agency--says working with neighborhood organizations is “a much slower process than we had thought. . . . We had to build bridges back into communities where we had been playing the Lone Ranger and making our own decisions for years.”

In Los Angeles County it’s likely to be no different. Many social workers in the children’s agency say that when they arrive in poor, downtrodden neighborhoods, they are often greeted like an invading army, whose faceless bureaucrats come to snatch babies and break up families. Reversing those feelings may take years, many social workers predict.

“This is the way social work used to be when I started out in the 1960s,” said children’s service administrator Watkins. “People knew you and trusted you. We have to get back to that.”

The neighborhood foster care plan also envisions improving trust in another critical foster care relationship--between foster and birth parents.

Typically, in Los Angeles and many other places, children placed with foster families have been forced to make a fairly clean break with their birth parents. Foster parents have also tended to steer clear of biological families.

The Casey Foundation and others now suggest that children will be better served if birth and foster parents work together.

A Working Relationship

Foster mother Cora Pearson, who is in a pilot project in the harbor area, said she has enjoyed a solid relationship with the mother of the 11-year-old twins and 6-year-old boy who are now in her care. The birth mother is in rehabilitation for drug addiction. But she visits Pearson’s Harbor City home on weekends and sometimes does the laundry or makes lunch for her children.

“The kids enjoy that,” Pearson said. “They see their mom busy and at work and they like that.” The children, in turn, are easier to manage, because they are not always agitating to return to their birth mother’s home.

The community-based pilot program in her neighborhood has also made it easier for Pearson to connect with teachers, public health nurses and others to get services for her kids.

“There is a lot of support now,” Pearson said. “I like that I am not out on a limb by myself, trying to get things done.”

But others say Pearson is unusual among foster parents.

“I can’t tell you how rare it is, the cases where birth parents and foster parents get along,” said one county social worker who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Do we want to promote that closeness, when the [birth] parent very well could manipulate or steal from the foster parent the first chance they get?”

Foster parent activist Lupe Ross said: “If we have more contact between foster parents and parents who are so dysfunctional, sparks are going to fly. Many foster parents are not trained to deal with that.”

Critics say that lowering the caseloads of social workers will be crucial in making the community approach work. Digre insists that is a possibility, since child abuse reports are declining after at least a decade of increases. And new state funding should make it possible to hire more social workers. About half of all his social workers are currently overseeing more children than recommended.

The small world of social welfare activists in Los Angeles has become skeptical of programs touted as the “solution” to the problem of abused and neglected children. In previous years, the program of the moment has been foster care adoption, or “family preservation” via neighborhood organizations that provide classes, counseling and other services on behalf of 14,000 foster children and their birth parents.

Community-based foster care will probably help some children, perhaps thousands, most experts agree. But advocates say that the real challenge will be to coordinate the new approach with all those other programs, which may have faded from the spotlight but still operate and do work in some cases.

“We are all very supportive of this idea and of putting social workers in communities,” said Trish Curry, chairwoman of the county Commission on Children and Families. “But we have to make it work with all the other programs we have. Someone has to weave it together, so there is one system of care.”