Forging Strong Adults From Hard-Knock Kids

On a Saturday in September, Maria gathered with her eight children, ages 3 to 16, for their weekly meeting at a Hacienda Heights park.

Today Maria was worried that her oldest daughter, Nan, had a boyfriend. She scolded her, saying that 15 is too young for romance, that she could get pregnant and ruin her life.

She also scolded Nan’s foster mom, with whom Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services had eventually placed the girl and three of her siblings after Maria was hospitalized last year.

Getting together each week on neutral turf was supposed to help the family move toward reunification. Maria says the meetings have gone smoothly. “It gives me joy to see my children.”

But documents and interviews suggest that by last summer tension increasingly undercut the gatherings, as Maria complained that the foster moms were gossiping about her -- “talking chisme.”

So, when Nan muttered every teenager’s mantra, I don’t need to listen to you, Maria ripped off a necklace and threw it. She hurled her purse. Then she collapsed, sobbing.

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A Plan for a Child

It was a year ago, three weeks before Christmas, when Nan and her siblings were taken in by the system that Los Angeles County established to save children from the forces conspiring to keep them from successful futures: abuse, neglect, abandonment and other forms of absent or awful parenting.

What Nan didn’t know on the day social workers loaded the children into the big white van was just how overwhelmed the agency that was taking over their lives is -- and, as a result, how many of the young people in the agency’s care turn 18 with a lousy education, a dearth of skills, no goals and nowhere to turn for help.

In two years, for instance, Nan’s oldest brother, Jorge, 16, will reach adulthood. If the shy, beefy boy with spiky hair and a hint of a mustache hasn’t been returned to his mother or been adopted, the agency will dump him as summarily as it did 1,400 young men and women last year.

About four in 10 newly minted products of Los Angeles County’s child welfare system drop out of high school, and an equal number wind up on welfare. Fewer than three in 100 will earn a college degree.

Within two years, a third have their own children, and almost one in five lands in jail. All too often, in other words, the system saves children from rotten parents, only to create another generation of rotten parents to continue packing foster homes with neglected, abused and abandoned kids.

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A Plan for a County

Several quick changes would give these teens a better shot at doing well -- at becoming taxpayers rather than continuing to drain other peoples’ earnings.

* For one thing, state law requires child welfare agencies to come up with detailed plans to lead each teenager toward his or her goals: passing algebra, say, if college is on the horizon, or learning job skills. Most of the plans on file, however, are boilerplate that swamped social workers have slapped together on the run. Limiting caseloads will give workers the time to make these plans mean something -- if their bosses encourage them.

* Even with more hours, however, social workers can’t do everything -- which makes it vexing that agency administrators have stubbornly resisted efforts to link foster teens with volunteer mentors, such as the lawyers the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. has recruited to help guide struggling youths.

* For years, administrators were too disorganized to create more transitional living centers or steer teens to existing ones, such as the YWCA home in Santa Monica that six young women fresh out of foster care are using as a springboard into adulthood. It’s getting better. About 1,000 teens take advantage of such programs. Space for 3,000 more is needed.

Improving the agency’s 11th-hour efforts to guide teens is important. Even more important, however, is addressing the needs of every child at every step. That will take several reforms:

* Find the right director. The supervisors need to mount a search that’s as thorough as the dragnet Mayor James K. Hahn cast for a police chief. The job is that important.

* Save families worth saving. The supervisors should harangue Washington, as hard as they have over health-care money, to cut the red tape that keeps them from spending more of the millions in federal dollars the county receives on preserving and reunifying families -- a strategy that has proved economical in all but the most intractable cases.

Flexibility will encourage these additional reforms:

* Streamline adoption. Social workers often don’t start looking for adoptive parents until the court legally severs a child’s parental ties. That can take years. So why did the department hire someone to spur the process only to shove him aside a year later? Insiders say it’s because some top administrators are comfortable with the status quo.

* Replace easy-to-lose hard-copy files with “Internet-passports.” These would let authorized teachers and doctors read a child’s history online and enter their latest grades and tetanus shots. Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill last year to test a Web-based passport and threw in $3 million to make it happen. But the feds have a say in this, too, and they’ve refused to give the OK. Start lobbying, supervisors.

* Stop hiding behind confidentiality. Children in public care have a right to privacy. But the public has an obligation to scrutinize the agency it pays to protect those children. In 2000, the Los Angeles supervisors backed a bill to open most court proceedings involving these children -- as is the case in 20 other states. The department opposed it and the bill failed. A new one is needed.

* Publicize opportunities for people to pitch in, such as by contributing to a fund social workers now fill by throwing bake sales and begging from corporations. This money sends kids to camp, buys uniforms so they can play on a school team and addresses other needs that would otherwise go unmet.

Nan, for instance, needed a front tooth crowned. But Medi-Cal covered only a silver tooth -- not something to encourage smiles from a shy adolescent in a new school. When Nan’s social worker appealed to the fund, it came up with the $1,000 for an enamel crown. Send checks to:

The Children’s Trust Fund, c/o the Department of Children and Family Services, 425 Shatto Place, Los Angeles, CA 90020.

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A Family’s Fate

Maria’s youngest children, Leticia, 3, and Armando, 5, spread out black, zippered binders in the small, neat bedroom they share at their Moreno Valley foster home. Chattering enthusiastically in Spanish, they thumb past the paperwork that follows them -- school and immunization records and the like -- to photographs. In one they splash in a wading pool; in another they pose with towering dinosaurs at a nearby amusement park.

When asked by his foster father to name his siblings, Armando’s eyes roll to the ceiling and he faithfully recites: Jorge, Nan, Noe, Marisol.... Asked about their mother, he and Leticia glance at their foster mom and seem confused. It has been a year since they last lived with the woman who gave birth to them.

For her part, Maria says she is feeling better and that the return of at least some of her children would make her feel better still. “To be with my children, to take care of my children, I need that to not get sick,” she says.

On Jan. 3, a judge at Los Angeles County’s Edelman Children’s Court is scheduled to decide whether to return Leticia and her siblings or sever their ties, leaving some in foster care or on track for adoption.

Sad as their situation is, these children are lucky. Their mom, for all her problems, is not an addict or abusive. All appear to be doing well in foster homes. But too many of the 50,000 children in public care in Los Angeles remain caught between a bad family and a fate that is potentially worse.

Agencies nationwide wrestle with caring for the children of parents who failed them. All but a few -- Florida comes to mind -- have, by every account, managed to put their houses in far better order than Los Angeles.

The county’s adults need to demand that their elected officials hire an experienced, goal-oriented director and arm her or him with a clear plan to achieve the reforms that will give a measure of hope for happier endings to the boys and girls in the nation’s largest household.