Foster Care Chaos

Los Angeles County child welfare officials last week severed their ties to the foster care group known as Grace Home for Waiting Children after the deaths of two children in the last three months. That was the only possible decision, despite the protests of Grace Home’s executive director, Saundra Turner-Settle. She argued, “We’ve provided all the mandated supervision we were required [to]--in fact, excess supervision.” Unintentionally, she put her finger on a major problem--when it comes to foster care, the fox guards the henhouse.

The county’s proposed blue-ribbon panel to study foster care hust delays action. The system’s chaos has been copiously documented in three audits since 1996 and in a 53-page grand jury report released in 1997.

On Thursday, veteran county bureaucrat Sandra Davis took over as the interim director of the Department of Children and Family Services. Davis should not look on her interim status as caretaking. She should immediately begin cleaning up an inefficient and evasive managerial system that a recent internal county report blamed on her predecessor, Peter Digre. Davis’ toughest job, however, will be to resolve more insidious problems that run throughout the foster care sysem and that have eluded reform for decades.

Three problems stand out:

* Conflicts of interest. Turner-Settle’s reluctance to acknowledge the obvious problems in her agency illustrates the glaring conflicts of interest that are built into California’s foster care system. Grace Home is one of approximately 150 foster family agencies in Los Angeles County: social service clearinghouses that find and oversee foster parents who care for neglected or abused children.

Since their funding grows with each new foster bed they oversee, foster family agency directors gain from hiring as many new foster parents and setting up as many new foster homes as possible. They have a disincentive to be tough and objective critics of the foster facilities they create and profit from. Nevertheless, state law gives them the sole authority to do just that. A new state inspection system is being created, but it is sorely underfunded.

* Inadequate tracking systems. Social workers in California are virtually unable to track the computer records of a child from one county to another. The workers can’t discover whether a child transferred to their care has been abused elsewhere because the state’s Child Welfare Case Management System, which tracks individual foster children, is not directly connected with the Community Care Licensing Board or the state’s central child-abuse index, a list of all child-abuse charges made in California and maintained by the state Justice Department.

* Failure to detect early signs of child abuse. More than 60% of child abuse is reported by public school teachers, but often late in the process because few educators are taught how to detect signs of early neglect. County and state officials should develop teacher training and home visitation programs.

California has a unique opportunity. Caseloads are declining statewide and the economic boom has made money available. Los Angeles County supervisors, for instance, now have more than $500 million in welfare, tobacco settlement and other funds that can be earmarked for at-risk children.

The resources are there, the problems are known. What’s needed is not another study, but bold leadership to change the foster care system.