County Cuts Its Ties With Beleaguered Foster Group

Los Angeles County’s child welfare agency moved Wednesday to sever its relationship with a private foster care operation in whose care two children have died over the past three months.

As a so-called foster family agency, Grace Home for Waiting Children got its funding by receiving children from the county Department of Children and Family Services and placing them in individual foster homes. Grace Home certifies those homes as safe and is supposed to monitor them.

The county’s decision Wednesday to place a “do not use” designation on Grace Home will effectively put it out of business, because the county will no longer send children there and will remove those already there from Grace Home’s oversight.

Gene Gilden, the department’s official in charge of monitoring foster care agencies, said that about seven of the foster homes have been shut down, but that the rest of the approximately 100 homes used by Grace are good places for children.

Gilden said that to provide the children in the good homes with continuity, the county will not move the children from those homes, but simply shift supervision of them to other foster family agencies. She added that the management of Grace Home had agreed to assist with this effort.

“They are not the issue,” Gilden said of those foster homes. “It’s the agency and the management of the agency.”

Since February 1996, the county and state have received numerous complaints and issued scathing reports on Grace Home. The recent deaths have led two county supervisors to call for a blue-ribbon commission to review the county’s entire foster care system.

Speaking Wednesday before the county announced its decision, Grace Home’s executive director, former Family Services administrator Saundra Turner-Settle, said the deaths were “an aberration” and defended her agency.

“We’ve provided all the mandated supervision we were required--in fact, excess supervision,” she said.

The county’s decision was signed by outgoing Family Services Director Peter Digre on his last day at the office. It is the result of probes begun after the first Grace Home death in March. In that case, an infant was killed when the truck he was riding in--driven by a narcoleptic--hit a light pole. The county’s actions were accelerated by last month’s death of Gilbreania Wallace, who was allegedly beaten to death by her foster mother. The woman subsequently pleaded innocent to the girl’s murder.

The move against Grace was announced hours after protesters assembled in front of its offices in Inglewood to assail close ties between the nonprofit agency and Family Services.

“This agency was set up by [county] insiders,” said Anthony Samad, who said he worked for Grace Home as a consultant during its formative years. “It continues to be run by insiders who hope this thing will blow over.”

Samad provided new details about the founding of Grace Home, which was formed by a coalition of community activists headed by a Family Services employee who had been granted a lengthy leave of absence by then-Director Digre.

The coalition’s stated objective was creation of a place in which the burgeoning number of black children in foster care could be placed with black families, Samad said, “But it was just a money game,” he alleged.

Grace Home received millions of dollars in county funds for the more than 200 foster children it eventually placed and supervised. A scathing 1996 audit found that some of that money was questionably spent by the agency’s then-director, the former Family Services official, Girma Zaid.

Zaid paid for a subscription to Travel & Leisure magazine with foster care funds, as well as travel to Georgia, where Grace Home has a sister facility; Louisiana; Washington, D.C.; and--for six weeks--Africa. Zaid told auditors these trips all involved foster care issues.

The audit also found dozens of safety violations, including a failure to check foster parents’ homes, failure to conduct required psychological evaluations and failure to obtain authorization before giving children psychotropic drugs.

County officials said the audit led to Zaid being replaced with Turner-Settle. In an interview last week, Zaid said he stepped down because of political pressures.

Gilden last week described the audit as having found “start-up” problems but said Wednesday that she had only been referring to technical financing difficulties.

On Wednesday, she said the county had demanded that Grace change its policies and procedures in response to the audit and that it had done so.

But Samad said Grace Home was not shut down because of its political ties, which included former Rep. Mervyn Dymally (D-Los Angeles) serving as its president. Instead, Samad said, it continued to grow.

“Grace Home was receiving so many children they did not have homes to put the children in,” he said. “They were just pulling parents off the street.”

Gilden said the county has monitored Grace as well as it can, given the fact that she only has three auditors for more than 150 foster family agencies. The fact that Grace was the first such agency the county audited shows that it received no favoritism, she added.

One parent certified as a foster mother by Grace Home was Doris Jean Bennett, who is accused of murdering Gilbreania.

Before the girl was placed in her home, Bennett cared for three infants, all of whom suffered severe injuries. In each case, however, county social workers found that Bennett was not responsible.

Sandra Johnson recalled Wednesday that in 1997 her infant granddaughter, Evadne White, suffered a broken arm and later a broken leg while in Bennett’s care. But, according to Johnson, county social workers said they believed Bennett’s story that the girl kept falling.

“Next thing I knew her neck might end up broken,” said Johnson, who eventually was able to get Evadne placed with a relative through the county’s Dependency Court. She said county social workers opposed her efforts, contending that the infant should stay with Bennett and that there must be something wrong with Evadne’s eyes that led her to hurt herself.

Johnson said letters she sent to Family Services and the Board of Supervisors, warning them about Bennett, were returned unopened.