Foster-Care Safeguard Hits Snag

Los Angeles County’s foster-care program was partly disrupted Tuesday as officials struggled to comply with a new law requiring more fingerprinting of prospective caregivers.

The change, aimed at protecting children from abuse, has wrought mild havoc throughout the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, which places about 600 children with relatives each month.

Under a state law that took effect Saturday, relatives willing to provide foster care for children removed from homes that have been deemed unsafe must undergo criminal background checks, including fingerprinting.

But only five of 19 fingerprinting centers were up and working Tuesday, leading to frustration and delays. Background checks under the new system could take up to 72 hours, potentially forcing children into temporary foster homes. The agency only operates one fingerprinting site in the San Fernando Valley, in North Hollywood, and the scanners there are not working yet, according to agency officials.

Neil Rincover, a spokesman for the Department of Children and Family Services, said all the scanners will be running within two weeks. Many of them are still being tested by contractors, agency officials said.

“They’re all real close to being operational,” Rincover said. “We haven’t had any waiting or any backup in the first four days.”

But Paula Gamboa, president of the local social workers union, disagreed. “There’s been a disruption of services,” she said.

Gamboa said she has fielded dozens of calls this week from social workers complaining about problems with the new system.

“We’ve supposedly been preparing this for over a year, but all these sites are not up and working,” Gamboa said.

Judging from the hectic scene at the agency’s Emergency Response Command Post downtown, one of the few centers where scanners were actually working Tuesday, the agency can use all the breathing space it can get.

A small knot of relatives waiting to be fingerprinted Tuesday morning sat patiently for more than an hour. Some tried to entertain small children. Raymond Alvarez, a jovial grandfather waiting with his wife, Maria, said he did not mind the delay.

“The only inconvenience is there’s no parking around here,” he said as his wife played with three of the seven grandchildren they have been caring for, trying to distract them with a few grubby plush toys in the agency’s makeshift play center.

Meanwhile, agency workers struggled to straighten out the documents necessary to process requests. They couldn’t fingerprint the Alvarezes without paperwork from another social worker, who had yet to fax it to them.

“We haven’t gotten the fax. What fax number do you have?” one worker said into the telephone as another shuffled through a stack of papers. “We’ve been waiting for a very long time.”

Another social worker, who declined to be identified, dropped by in the midst of the confusion to ask whether her clients needed to set up an appointment to be fingerprinted. She was told that they do, an answer that conflicted with information she’d been given earlier.

“Nobody knows what the hell’s going on or how we’re supposed to be doing it,” she said in frustration as she left. “What they’re telling us now is not what they said before.”

Until the new law was passed in 1997, criminal record checks were required for foster parents but not for relatives providing foster care. Proponents argued that expanding the checks would shield children from family members who had a history of drug abuse or molestation.

“We have to know who these kids are going to,” said Jayne Murphy Shapiro, president of Kids Safe, a Granada Hills-based child advocacy group. “The perpetrators on the street are just as dangerous as the ones behind closed doors. . . . Obviously, we do not want the kids to have any delay getting into a home, but a 72-hour wait is better than, God forbid, going into the wrong hands.”

So far, the demand for the service has been relatively light, agency officials said. The downtown center, the only one open during the New Year’s weekend, processed nine sets of fingerprints on Saturday and Sunday, said Marilyn Brown, a senior manager at the department. The background checks were completed in a matter of hours and the children were released to the relatives, she said.

Under the new system, if a background check reveals an old criminal charge or some other blemish, the county must temporarily place the children in emergency care shelters or foster homes until the relatives are cleared.

The county has enough beds available to care for children in the interim, said Amaryllis Watkins, acting deputy director for resources at the Department of Children and Family Services.

Gamboa asked the county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to review the law to see if the county could temporarily resort to its old system, sans fingerprints, until the problems are resolved.

“Presently, what it’s doing is discouraging placements with relatives,” she said. “If the department’s priority is to keep families together, they’re defeating the whole purpose.”