All Their Many Children

Early in the evening, Los Angeles County adoptions worker Joyce Alignay is sitting in the bedroom of a cheerful 4-year-boy she placed with an adoptive family in Pomona, nearing the end of what she describes as a relatively slow day.

Alignay started plowing through paperwork in her downtown office at 7:30 a.m. By midafternoon, she’d written up a report for a court hearing on terminating the custody rights of parents of an 8-year-old boy.

She gathered information on five siblings she was trying to place. She finalized adoption papers for a 6-year-old boy and paid a visit to another applicant’s adult son, whose background check turned up a criminal record. In between, she followed up on fingerprint checks, meetings with families and phone calls from prospective parents anxious to adopt.

Now she was listening attentively as the Pomona boy showed her his new toys. After bouncing between several foster families for years, he had finally found a permanent home.

But Alignay didn’t have time to celebrate. Today she’d tackled just a small fraction of 90 active cases she is supposed to monitor--more than four times the size of the workload recommended by national experts.

“When you have so many cases, there’s always a fear that you’re going to miss something,” she said. “You just really hope you catch everything.”

Alignay, like many public employees, is fighting a never-ending battle against burgeoning caseloads: A school counselor advising 700 students, a social worker monitoring dozens of neglected children, a probation officer tracking 1,000 convicts.

Some critics say excessive workloads contributed to the deaths of two young children earlier this year while wards of the Los Angeles County foster care system. The tragedies--along with the death of a third child--sparked an ongoing review of the agency that has just three investigators to supervise 150 privately run foster family programs.

Caseworkers Are Spread Thin

Alignay and other front-line employees fret endlessly about the safety of the children in their care. But one adoption worker grimly compared the situation to playing Russian roulette with young lives.

Currently, Alignay is trying to find permanent homes for 60 children and suitable children for 30 families hoping to adopt. That far exceeds the 60-caseload maximum negotiated by her union with the county Department of Children and Family Services.

The children in Alignay’s charge are scattered throughout the county; she says her car feels like a second home. Often, she has only 45 minutes a month to spend with each child. It sends her home exhausted, her voice sore from talking. But questions still trouble her: Did the child tell me everything? Is the family a good match?

Pressure to place more foster children in permanent care began to build on a federal level two years ago when President Clinton announced the Adoption 2002 initiative, aimed at doubling public adoptions to 40,000 a year. That and other state and local pushes have created more cases for county adoption workers.

In 1998, about 1,700 Los Angeles County children were placed in adoption, up from about 1,000 the year before. As a result, more than half of the adoption workers in the county are carrying caseloads above the negotiated level.

Diane Wagner, the department’s acting division chief for adoptions, said the department needs an additional 100 workers along with the current 251 to bring caseloads down to appropriate levels.

County social workers such as Alignay, who help place children and work with adoption applicants, earn $39,800 to $46,900 a year and handle an average of 81 cases at a time, three to four times the number recommended by national experts and accreditation agencies.

Although neither the state nor the federal government maintains caseload statistics for different counties, experts say the adoption workload in Los Angeles is similar in other urban areas such as Chicago and New York.

New standards being published by the Child Welfare League of America recommend a full-time caseload of 20 to 25 for workers helping place infants, or 12 to 15 for workers helping place older children.

Piling on cases increases the chance that children will be placed in new homes without enough visits by an adoptions worker to guarantee that the child and the new parents are properly adjusting to each other, said Ann Sullivan, the league’s adoption program director.

“You’re increasing the likelihood of disruption,” she said, “That’s just going to be another scarring experience for a child.”

Jorja Prover, a UCLA professor who trains county social workers, thinks their caseloads should be no more than 20, allowing workers to spend at least a day a month per child.

“When they are overburdened, they empty out . . . when there’s so many [cases], you cannot devote yourself to the details,” she said.

Department officials acknowledge that consequence, but insist that there are enough caseworkers to ensure the prime goal: the physical safety of the children.

Wagner said: “When you’ve got caseloads very high, that’s where you have to focus the bulk of your energy.”

High Pressures and High Turnover

In an effort to bring down the load, the department is hiring more workers, with 24 starting at the end of July. In addition, officials launched a pilot project in April to forward fewer cases to adoptions workers. The workers will get new cases only when the birth parents’ rights have been terminated.

“I think with the implementation of the pilot and the new hiring, we’ll have these caseloads down,” Wagner said. “But [the workers] are doing a terrific job with the caseloads they have now.”

Union leaders, who are negotiating for lower caseloads, contend the situation is dangerous.

“Chaos,” said Margaret Lipton, an adoptions worker and union steward. “Families are in limbo, and workers are in real stress. We know things are going to happen to kids on our caseload. . . . It’s like Russian roulette. You just don’t know where it’s going to hit.”

The pressures have created high turnover, union leaders said. With two years on the job, 26-year-old Alignay is considered a relatively seasoned worker by some.

Even though she is optimistic about her job, she acknowledges that the number of cases, plus the sheer volume of paperwork, create a workload not everyone can handle. “You can never go home for the day and say, ‘I’m done with work.’ ”

Alignay said she sticks it out because of her passion to help children.

“In order to do this job, you have to have that sense of commitment because the work is so difficult, so stressful,” she said.

Alignay schedules her visits with children and families geographically in order to cut down on driving time. She’s mastered all the freeways and the traffic patterns; the Thomas Bros. map book in her car is ripped and worn.

“Sometimes I get stressed,” she said. “There are horrible cases when you want to crawl under a rock and call it a day.”

She worries because she doesn’t get to know the children as well as she likes, or to take them out for lunch or an outing. “That’s supposed to be the joy of this job--working with the children.”

As a reminder, Alignay keeps a photo album in her desk with pictures of the children she has helped.

On a recent evening, she beamed as the 4-year-old boy living with his new family in Pomona gave her a bear hug goodbye.

“It is definitely a lot of work for any one person to handle,” she said. “But you get to see happy endings.”