Wanted: a Head for Our Largest Household

Five-year-old Armando has soft, curly hair and sleeps with Mickey Mouse at his side. Leticia, his 3-year-old sister, sports pigtails, cuddles Minnie and delights in mimicking the English words her brother learns in kindergarten. They’re sweet kids, and guess what? They’re yours -- although you pay Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services to do the parenting.

As it happens, the Board of Supervisors is looking for a new director for that department, someone to head what is, in effect, the most enormous and beleaguered household in the nation. But anyone brave or foolish enough to have responded to the county’s ad for the vacant post should peek inside a foot-thick set of accordion files in the agency’s crowded Santa Fe Springs regional office.

This finger-smudged stack of multicolored folders contains the lives of Leticia, Armando and their six siblings. And those lives, fragile and at a dangerous moment of familial flux, offer a glimpse into the agency that serves as uber-parent to the 50,000 county children who, seldom through fault of their own, have wound up in the public’s care.

Over the next two days we will follow Leticia and her siblings’ two-year odyssey into the county’s labyrinthine child welfare system. Clogged with the de facto orphans of sick, addicted or just plain irresponsible mothers and fathers, the agency burns through $1.4 billion a year in other families’ tax money as it struggles at a task that must often seem impossible. Some of its obstacles, however, are self-made: Too often it breaks up fraying families without first trying the more economical approach of helping (and then badgering) parents to do the job themselves; it keeps “yanked” children in its Bermuda Triangle of bureaucracy twice as long as other counties, shuffles them through an average of four homes, does less than it might to help these kids negotiate childhood and adolescence and then pushes far too many into adult life unprepared.

In many ways, the story of Leticia and her smart, exuberant brothers and sisters presents the agency at its best. Still, their tale offers insight that could help the next director and the supervisors do better at the county’s most staggering and important mission.

Eight Lives on Paper

To page through the binders that social workers have compiled on Leticia and her siblings is to flesh out eight budding individuals, ages 3 to 16, the progeny of at least six fathers and one mother. Maria, now 42, was 14 years old and living in Durango, Mexico, when a doctor first diagnosed epilepsy -- a problem she continued to wrestle with after arriving, in 1983, in California, where she gave birth to all her children.

Today, the children describe the rented, two-bedroom Whittier house they called home for much of their lives as woolly but warm, with kids wrestling on the floor and incessant squabbling over whether to watch the “The Simpsons” or play “Tony Hawk”video games. For dinner, Maria or Javier, the two youngest children’s father, might cook enchiladas or tacos. They’d feed the little kids in one shift before tracking down the others as they played in the neighborhood.

But outside the family, teachers and others were growing concerned about the sorts of things to which kids can be oblivious: ragged clothes, dirty faces, crashing grades. On Oct. 17, 2000, an elementary school counselor called the county’s child-abuse hotline. Marisol, 10 at the time, still didn’t have the eyeglasses she needed, despite a teacher’s repeated notes home. The counselor paid a visit and found a foul-smelling house swarming with cockroaches and flies. Maria complained that she was losing her mind.

Over the next two years, concerned neighbors and teachers made at least 17 more calls, and social workers began grappling with their key question in trying to protect children: how forcefully to impose the mighty power of the state on a struggling parent -- knowing that wrong decisions too often prove tragic.In 1998, for example, the county took in the children of Ronald Collins after a custody dispute. Collins says he agreed to the temporary arrangement, trusting the county to care for his children at a moment when he couldn’t. To his and his children’s everlasting torment, their foster father sexually abused Collins’ son.

But keeping children with their natural parents can backfire too. In 1999, after allegations of neglect, social workers put toddlers Breanna Lewis and her sister Joan in temporary foster care. The next year, after agency attorneys neglected to bring the foster parents and friends to court to report on continued brawling and depression in the home, the biological parents regained custody. Just before Christmas 2000, the girls’ mother led them to the ninth-floor observation deck of the Los Angeles County Courthouse. She shoved them off, then jumped.

It’s unlikely that Leticia and her siblings knew of the agency’s failings as it entered their lives. Yet there they were, caught in an unsettling limbo, between a mother who increasingly couldn’t care for them and a county that sometimes takes in children and plops them into worse situations than they left. Meanwhile the agency was chewing through its third director in 15 years.

Call for a Superhero

For years the massive bureaucracy’s problems have overwhelmed it, while the children it is charged with helping radiate out to overwhelm other civic agencies. Rootless children bog down school systems; neglected kids swamp public health clinics; system-hardened youth exhaust police and flood the courts. None of which is surprising, given how many of the children the county takes in were previously raised by convicts, cokeheads, pederasts, drunks, layabouts, losers and louses of every description.

Into this breach step the county’s 7,000-child welfare workers -- 800 administrators and supervisors, a sadly small army of 2,800 clinical social workers, assorted clerical employees, outside therapists and a director with the massive task of running the whole show.

In July, the supervisors dumped Anita Bock from that position, angry that in her brief tenure she had not cut enough of the red tape that makes social workers’ hard job harder or the unacceptably long two years most children in Los Angeles County spend in foster care. Now every taxpayer has a stake in seeing that the board finds a goal-oriented leader with a solid record of making sure children failed by their natural parents are not again failed by the government. Some of the supervisors, however, seem to view the department as just another, yawn, county bureaucracy. They aspire only to fill the director’s position quickly from the national management pool. That doesn’t mean, however, that finding a superhero of a leader would -- as other supervisors fantasize -- solve the agency’s myriad problems.

What the agency really needs is a plan for getting its own household in order, a director who can look into files like those of Leticia and her siblings and find motivation to take on a superhuman task and a Board of Supervisors ready to insist on the sort of reforms that would make success possible.

An Unhappy Holiday

It was at Thanksgiving dinner, a year ago, that Leticia’s family wobbled into such trouble that social workers felt they no longer had choices to make. Maria, who according to interviews and documents had by now been diagnosed with depression as well as epilepsy, worked only sporadically in restaurants or cleaning motel rooms. Javier, who had a record of alcohol abuse and run-ins with the police, had moved out. So the family crammed into an apartment with one of Maria’s friends.

The woman was preparing the traditional Thanksgiving feast when Javier showed up drunk. “You can’t stay here like that,” Maria shouted in Spanish. The couple fought. The children cried. On Friday, Maria wandered aimlessly through the neighborhood. That Monday, a social worker showed up for a regularly scheduled visit.

“Everybody says I’m crazy but I’m not!” Maria shouted. She pointed at her temples and said her head hurt. She said she was numb. Then she stopped talking.

That afternoon, two social workers took Maria to County-USC Medical Center. Others gently loaded the children into a white county van. Even the older children joined in with Armando and Leticia’s sobbing as they stared out the windows. They were leaving the only family they knew and had no idea of what to expect from the people of Los Angeles, who had just, albeit indirectly, taken them under their wings.

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Tomorrow: Fixing Bad Families: A Job for Heroes or Fools?