Panel Urges Reforms for Foster Care Programs

For 15 years, Dennis Mooney was a foster parent, caring for the emotionally scarred, physically neglected children who were the castoffs of drug addicts, abusers and petty criminals.

Seared into his memory is the plight of newborn twin boys severely addicted to the heroin ingested by their mother during pregnancy. Simple feedings, Mooney remembers, took hours as the babies’ bodies fought to reject life-sustaining nourishment. But the real horror, he said, came three days after they entered his life. “To my shock,” he recalled, “these two very needy babies were returned to their mother.”

Mooney’s story, the testimony of dozens of caseworkers, local officials and children’s advocates, and an accumulation of statistics and studies prompted a state panel to conclude Thursday that the government apparatus for protecting abused and neglected children still needs major reforms.

Reporting to the Legislature and the governor, the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state watchdog group, said that despite billions of dollars and numerous efforts to make the protection system more effective, abuse and neglect of children is increasing dramatically in California.

The number of children placed in foster care, the commission said, has grown from 71,675 in 1990 to more than 111,000. By 2005, researchers predict, it will reach 167,456. Government is required to intervene and place children in the care of others when it is found that they are being abused or neglected in their own homes.

Most disturbing, the commission said, were statistics showing more and more children cycling through the system. Nearly one in four children who leave foster care and return to their parents, the panel said, come back into the system within three months.

“Despite benevolent intentions and billions of dollars, the government has proven to be a poor surrogate parent in these cases--seemingly incapable of ensuring that these children receive the education, medical care and counseling [they] need,” the report said. “In the end, troubled children often [become] troubled adults. The personal anguish becomes a public calamity.”

The 13-member, bipartisan commission, which includes citizen members and state lawmakers, blamed the problems on a disjointed bureaucracy so hamstrung by its rules and regulations that no single entity has responsibility for evaluating the total needs of the child.

Nor, the commission said, is there anyone at the state level who can take successful programs pioneered in one county and carry them to another.

“We know a lot of programs that work,” said Assembly Human Services Committee Chairwoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley). “What we haven’t learned for some reason is how to organize things so that we can replicate these programs.”

Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) said Ventura County developed a model plan to provide comprehensive mental health services for foster children with severe emotional problems. Yet, she said, that program has not been copied in critical counties like Los Angeles even though it produced startling results, substantially reducing the number of children who needed to be placed in foster care or who ended up in the criminal justice system.

“I hope this report wakes up legislators,” she said. Improving programs for children “is not a sexy political thing that you can go to the ballot box with and say, ‘I did this,’ but it shows in the children’s lives.”

One solution proposed by the commission was the creation of a special office in the Health and Human Services Agency empowered to oversee and coordinate government’s efforts to care for neglected and abused children.

For Mooney, who never learned what happened to the newborn twins who were returned to their drug-addicted mother, any improvement in the system would be welcome.

“When you’re a foster parent, it’s always hard when the children leave, but it’s easier when you feel like they’re going to move on to somewhat of a promising future,” he said. “But when separation is under unhappy circumstances, it’s very difficult.”