Children’s Home Still Has Problems

MacLaren Children’s Center is a puzzle that Los Angeles County has yet to solve.

Designed as a temporary shelter for children on their way to foster homes, group homes or psychiatric hospitals, MacLaren instead has become a virtual home for about 170 troubled youths.

Children stay far too long there--as much as a full year when county policy is that stays should be kept to 30 days. Dozens of disturbed children live side by side in crowded rooms. The state cited the facility last month for violating policies on treating juveniles by, among other things, keeping them in beds in a hallway. And a recent lawsuit alleges systemic abuse of children by the MacLaren staff that has left several with broken limbs.

To address the problems, the county has repeatedly rearranged the pieces, trying new management ideas to improve conditions at the facility, located in El Monte.

In 1998, MacLaren was taken out of the hands of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services and placed under the control of a consortium of county agencies.

On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors embarked on yet another management structure for MacLaren. Prior to Tuesday, the director of the facility, John Robbins, did not have authority to hire or fire its 582 county employees. Nor did any single social worker have responsibility for any single child at the center. Now each child will have a case manager responsible for what happens to him or her.

Supervisor Gloria Molina, in whose district the shelter lies, and several children’s advocates said they hoped the new changes improve the situation.

“I don’t know if it solves all the problems,” said Molina, “but it begins a system of accountability that we have not had there before.”

Supervisor Mike Antonovich was more skeptical. He said the repeated failure of the county to run the shelter well means it should be contracted out to a private organization.

“I have seen attempts to reform, and reform, and reform, and reform the system,” Antonovich said. “It’s time we take a radical approach. . . . A private agency would not be allowed to have the kind of record this county has.”

Antonovich’s privatization proposal got a cold shoulder from his colleagues on the board, even though some were withholding judgment on the changes. “Reports are a dime a dozen,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said. “We have to judge by results. . . . Now we’ll see if accountability was the issue.”

Nonetheless, Yaroslavsky said he opposes contracting out MacLaren. “If we can’t handle this in-house, then we can’t handle this out-of-house,” he said. “The job is our job.”

Opened in 1961 as the county’s sole shelter for abandoned children, MacLaren has slowly metamorphosed into a warehouse for the most disturbed and abused of the nearly 40,000 children in the county dependency system. County officials say that when private group homes are confronted with children who are too emotionally disturbed to handle, they send them to MacLaren.

“As the years went by, MacLaren became a convenient dumping ground for the difficult to deal with children, and no one was watching the store,” said Bill Newman, its first administrator.

As part of the reforms adopted by the board Tuesday, MacLaren will now be able to refuse transfers from other facilities in the county system. But the county will remain in a bind because the courts hold it responsible for finding a home for children it will not take at MacLaren.

“It’s pretty clear to all of us involved in this that you can’t solve the problem of MacLaren just by focusing on MacLaren,” county Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen told the supervisors. “There frankly aren’t enough suitable placements” for children with severe emotional problems, said Janssen, who also heads the consortium that runs the shelter.

Children’s advocates, who for 10 years have been studying the situation at MacLaren, said more steps should be taken to improve the facility. Most important, they said, is remodeling. Currently, dozens of children bed down in “cottages.” The building needs to be reconfigured to put children in smaller rooms that staff can still monitor.

“It does not take a PhD in child development to know that if you place 25 to 30 youths with serious emotional disturbances . . . all in one space, you’re going to have problems,” said Nancy Shea, an attorney with Metal Health Advocacy Services.