County Foster Care Program Is in Disarray, Report Finds

Los Angeles County’s foster care system is in such disarray that the county cannot guarantee the safety of the 13,000 children it has placed in foster homes, according to a report from a blue-ribbon task force delivered to the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

The long-awaited report is a searing description of a disjointed, overburdened system that fails to monitor the quality of care in foster homes countywide.

“In taking these children into foster care, Los Angeles County has exercised perhaps the most intrusive power it has,” said Andrew Bridge, executive director of the Alliance for Children’s Rights and the head of the panel. Yet, he told supervisors, “Los Angeles County simply lacks the ability to protect the foster children from re-abuse and re-neglect. . . . The children who are in the care of foster homes in Los Angeles County have no greater protection than the children at large in the community.”

The flaws have led to tragedy, said Dr. Robert Splawn, vice chairman of the task force. “A lot of injury and abuse that happened to kids could have been prevented had we had a better mechanism together,” he said.

The task force was created after a spate of deaths of children in foster care last spring. On Tuesday, supervisors asked the new director of the county’s troubled child welfare agency, Anita Bock, to review the panel’s findings and 25 recommendations and report back in three months on how they can be implemented--and how much it would cost.

“This report is timely; it’s largely accurate,” said Bock, who is viewed as a reformer and whose first action when she took the job last month was to publicly release a scathing internal critique of the Department of Children and Family Services. “I’m very confident that, resources permitting, we can begin to implement these recommendations.”

Bock said the agency already has begun implementing some of the suggestions, such as incorporating standards for the quality of life for foster children in its contracts with foster care agencies.

Some of the recommendations would require legislation in Sacramento and possibly reformatting of the state’s child welfare computer database to link up with county computers and provide better data on foster parents. Others can be done on the county level.

The panel’s recommendations include:

* Creating a statewide database of foster homes to track problems and quality of life.

* Requiring county social workers to visit foster children monthly. Currently, some foster children are visited only twice a year by social workers carrying high caseloads--though Bock said Tuesday that the precise number was not immediately available.

* Increasing training given to foster parents from the current eight hours a year to 15.

* Creating a quality of life “scorecard” for foster children’s care.

Supervisors were optimistic that some of these ambitious recommendations could be implemented.

“I’m confident a majority of the Board of Supervisors will implement the recommendations,” said Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who with Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky proposed creating the task force. He said the report paints a picture of a system that “cries out for reform.”

Splawn acknowledged that some of the proposals may take time to implement and would be dependent on state legislation, but he said others are elementary. “Some of these things are easy to do” with the data the county now has, he said.

The report, entitled “Los Angeles County Foster Care: Children at Risk,” is the product of the 11-person task force, which included representatives from private foster care agencies and various county and state departments.

Bridge said the lack of consistent data on where foster children suffer injuries, how often they are visited by social workers and other key issues makes an evaluation of the quality of foster care difficult. “We’re left with anecdotal information,” he said, which can be “all too inflammatory.”

There are two types of foster homes in Los Angeles County, those licensed by the state and those run by private foster family agencies that contract with the county.

Though the foster family agencies are considered the better of the two because they are more closely monitored, the county does not evaluate foster children before choosing the type of foster home to which they are sent.

The report also states that the state and county mechanisms for monitoring care in each of those systems do not mesh, meaning that the county cannot check on its computers whether a foster parent is in trouble with the state.