Ideas Offered for More Responsive Child Welfare Agency

Endangered children in Los Angeles County would be taken off an “assembly line” of multiple social workers and placed in the care of as few as two workers under a proposal submitted Monday by an auditor to the Board of Supervisors.

The proposal is one of 65 in a 185-page audit designed to make the county Department of Children and Family Services more responsive to families and more than 50,000 foster children.

The auditor also suggests that:

* Social workers should be assigned to staggered shifts until midnight, rather than a standard 9 to 5.

* Services to families such as parenting classes and counseling should be expanded substantially through the department’s family preservation networks.

* Plans should be drawn to boost morale and stem attrition of social workers. Forty percent of those hired from 1993 to 1995 are no longer with the agency.

* The department should improve its internal assessment by increasing the tracking of how children fare in foster care and by surveying other “customers” such as foster parents and adoptive parents.

Peter Digre, head of the agency, said he agreed with many of the audit’s recommendations and is hoping that new state funds will allow the department to apply them.

The Board of Supervisors commissioned the audit by the consulting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers this year after serious concerns were raised about the performance of the child welfare agency, including long delays in answering a child abuse hotline.

The supervisors are scheduled next month to consider the proposals--which officials in the county auditor-controller’s office called “a blueprint for a fundamental change in the way the agency does business.”

Auditors said the plans should dovetail with the department’s recently announced initiative to reassign social workers to neighborhoods and to recruit more foster parents--efforts designed to keep foster children closer to home.

The auditors found that performance at the agency’s emergency response hotline has improved markedly since earlier this year. It also pointed to other encouraging characteristics of the agency, including: a high percentage of workers committed to their jobs; a thorough process for reviewing the safety of children; and management that has lobbied successfully for policies on the state and federal level.

But the audit also found in a survey of employees that social workers feel oppressed and do not trust management.

The public would perceive changes from the audit principally in relationships with social workers. Now, children who are believed to be the victims of neglect or abuse can be seen by five social workers--one who responds to an emergency call, another who evaluates the evidence, a third who works to preserve families, and perhaps a fourth and fifth who work to monitor foster care placements or to arrange an adoption. The number of contacts can expand dramatically as children remain in foster care and social workers leave the agency or are reassigned.

Price Waterhouse recommended that social workers be reorganized into teams. In one design, just two workers would handle the case. One would make an initial investigation and help decide whether a child needed to be removed from home. A second worker would then take over the case and follow the child’s progress--from attempts to reunify with parents, to placements in foster care, to potential adoptive planning. The second worker would get help from other team members more familiar with those functions.

“One worker would have the case all the way through, and the idea is that that would create more continuity for the workers and the public,” said Tyler McCauley, who oversaw the report for the county auditor-controller’s office.

In another suggestion to reduce the “handoffs” between social workers, the auditor proposed that some social workers be assigned night shifts, so more emergency calls would be handled in regional offices.

This would eliminate the shift of a massive numbers of cases from the emergency command post to social workers in the regions.

Wren Atilano-Bradley, spokeswoman for the social workers union, said workers previously operated on staggered shifts and would be open to doing so again.

She said working in teams and handing off fewer cases between workers also sound promising.

“If it helps the kids, we will support it,” she said, adding that both proposals need more study.

The auditors concluded that the children’s agency has enough social workers to do its job, using current techniques for counting cases. The report conceded, however, that the “yardstick” that measures appropriate workload is nearly 20 years old.

The auditors suggest that many of the proposals in the report be tested in pilot projects before being implemented throughout the 5,000-employee agency.