Hard Place for Tough Kids

The first thing to know about the children at the MacLaren Children’s Center is that they have nowhere else to go. The 147 children now staying at the county’s emergency shelter for neglected or abused youngsters are there because they have severe emotional or developmental problems or a history of violence or they’re too old or difficult to be adopted or even successfully placed with a foster family. Some are repeat runaways, some are autistic or have other mental illnesses, some are drug-exposed.

Like those it houses, MacLaren is a neglected child, painfully slighted within the county’s child welfare system. A new director may alleviate some of the urgent problems at the El Monte facility, but lasting change requires county supervisors to come up with a broader reform plan.

MacLaren generally can’t kick out troublesome children, as a foster family might. Even so, children would not choose to go there. It was intended as a temporary residence on the way to a more permanent placement. But the children, generally 7 to 18 years old, end up in the sparse rooms for months, sometimes close to a year.

The 1970s buildings, which include cinder-block residential wings and a school, is no Dickensian dungeon, but years of hard use by troubled residents who threw chairs, marked on the cupboards and smashed television sets have left the place with a sad, institutional air. Confrontations and fights erupt daily. Many of the 150 or so staff members whose primary job is to work with the children do it well. Some do not. Inadequately trained staff members have allowed incidents to escalate and injuries to occur.

The question of how to fix MacLaren has preoccupied child welfare advocates for years. Only intermittently has it seriously worried county supervisors. Recently they hired an interim director for MacLaren, Bryce Yokomizo, from the county welfare department; they also adopted recommendations designed to minimize the time children stay at the shelter and to upgrade the social services they receive while there.

No matter what he does, Yokomizo can’t replace an aging, ugly facility. Nor can he change the population that MacLaren now serves. Real improvement awaits a commitment by the supervisors to grapple with the county’s whole Department of Children and Family Services. The problems of that ailing agency, responsible for 40,000 children in a variety of foster care settings, including MacLaren, are many and chronic.

A child can go weeks without seeing his or her social worker. Adoptions proceed far too slowly, leaving kids in foster care, where their medical, educational and psychological problems too often fester. Unless the county supervisors restructure the agency to better coordinate education, therapy and social services and do what it takes to bring down caseloads, the changes being made at MacLaren will do nothing to move the most troubled children into a stable home.