A Guide and a Friend in the Maze of Foster Care

It seemed like a simple enough request: A teenage girl being treated for cancer asked to go home to her mom when her hospital stay was

done. But that “mom” was the girl’s foster mother. And nothing is ever simple in the foster care system.

Because of the way the system works, this foster mother was no longer considered suitable to care for the medically fragile girl--who we’ll call Roberta--even though she had spent eight years raising the child. Suddenly, the foster mother needed training and the court needed paperwork . . . and Roberta needed someone to realize how desperately she missed the only real home she had known.

Enter Jan Miller, a volunteer with a private agency that works to help children in the L.A. County foster care system.

“When I met Roberta two years ago, she was 15 1/2, facing eight rounds of chemo,” Miller recalled. “She had lost her hair, was weak, depressed, with no fight in her. All she wanted was to go back home.”

In a system with more than 30,000 kids and half as many social workers as it needs, that simple transfer could have taken months after the mother finished training. But Miller went to work, making sure the paperwork was completed and processed.

“And an hour after her mother finished the last class, we had Roberta released to go back home.”

*

It might seem like a small victory, but it’s one of a long string for Miller, a former computer education specialist with three grown kids. She began volunteering eight years ago, after retirement and a divorce left her with too much to think about and too little to do.

Her first case “was not a big success,” she says. “It’s a wonder I stuck with it.” The 14-year-old runaway she was assigned to help got pregnant and disappeared with a 15-year-old boyfriend.

But Miller has plucked enough triumphs from her kids’ hard-luck lives to make that failure a distant memory. There was the tow-headed 6-year-old with severe emotional problems for whom she found a loving foster home. And the 2-year-old with broken bones from abuse, whom she helped free for adoption. And the sister and brother who had been separated for years that she reunited with their mom. Sometimes it means bucking social workers, lawyers or angry parents.

“I’m not an expert, but I’m not afraid to ask questions,” she said. “And I’m persistent. When it comes to the kids, I don’t give up easily.”

Miller is one of 300 volunteers in Los Angeles County--there are hundreds more in programs in Orange, Ventura and 30 other California counties--who call themselves CASAs, Court-Appointed Special Advocates. The group was started in 1978 by a Seattle judge who felt he wasn’t getting enough information to make wise decisions about the fate of children in the county’s care.

“Typically, children were referred to the child advocates’ office when things were going wrong in the case,” said Nancy Davidson, who heads the fund-raising group for the local agency, which recently changed its name from CASA to Child Advocates. Now, there’s a push to have advocates assigned early on, because research has shown that children with advocates spend less time in foster care and are more likely to have their needs met.

That has created a tremendous need for more volunteers, particularly Spanish-speakers and men, in Los Angeles County. “It’s not an easy job,” Davidson said. Volunteers go through 36 hours of training and are asked to commit to two years of service. The average case requires about 120 hours of volunteer time--a little more than one hour a week.

Sometimes the tasks are procedural, like making sure a child is signed up for counseling or gets tested for learning disabilities. Other times, they are personal: Accompanying a child on a visit with abusive parents or helping them deal with medical problems.

“I spend a lot time on the phone just keeping track of things,” Miller said. “Kids can fall through the cracks in a system this large, unless somebody’s specifically looking out for them.”

*

Sometimes it can mean just watching and listening, trying to fathom a child’s special needs.

For Roberta, who is often so weak from her illness that she cannot leave her room, there was a trio of wishes: a computer, a job she could do from home, and enrollment in a local private school that might help place her dream of college in reach.

Miller was able to deliver on all three, thanks to help from her friends and a grant from the Friends of Child Advocates’ Fund for Special Needs.

The fund--drawn from grants and donations--pays for big things, like reconstructive surgery for a boy whose face was disfigured by years of abuse, and a special computer for a child who is blind. And it pays for little things, like a prom dress, Little League equipment, a senior’s class trip to Washington, D.C.

“The county meets their basic needs,” Davidson said. “But we wanted them to have the kinds of things we’d want for our own children.”

Miller has seen firsthand how those small things can lift the spirits of a neglected child. “You know you can’t make their lives perfect,” she said. “But you can show them that life doesn’t have to be all pain and turmoil and disappointment.”

She can’t cure Roberta or take away her cancer’s pain. She can’t heal the teenager’s fractured relationship with her real mom and dad. She can only help make the life that Roberta has left as full as it can be.

“She knows I’m on her side, whatever comes,” Miller said. “And the hug I get every time I see her? That’s Roberta’s gift to me.”

*

Child Advocates may be reached at (323) 526-6329.

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.