Supervisors Force Out Child Welfare Director

Two years after she undertook the task of reforming the nation’s largest foster care agency, Anita Bock has been forced out of her post as head of Los Angeles County’s child welfare department.

The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday in closed session to instruct the county administrator to negotiate Bock’s departure, according to two county sources, but the decision was not announced until she submitted her resignation Wednesday.

Supervisors in recent months had grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress at the agency, publicly criticizing the department’s continuing failure to properly staff the child abuse hotline, quickly investigate alleged abuses by workers, streamline one of the country’s slowest adoption programs, and help children who grow up in the system prepare for independent adulthood.

“It’s pretty self-evident from a number of the things we’ve been struggling with that we’re frustrated with the pace of change,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

Bock will stay on until August, then receive a nine-month severance package. The county administrator is recommending Marjorie Kelly, former head of the state’s child welfare division, as an interim replacement.

In a news release, Bock said the decision to leave her $182,000-a-year job was her own. She took credit for a decline in the number of foster children entering the system and said she has stabilized the department. “I am immensely proud of what we have accomplished,” she said.

Bock had been recruited from Miami, where she had run the largest of the state’s 15 welfare divisions--a program currently under fire for losing a foster child, among other problems. She resigned under pressure when a new Republican administration took over in 1999 and found a backlog of child abuse investigations.

She is the third person to lead the Department of Children and Family Services since it was spun off from the county welfare department in the 1990s, itself an effort to stimulate reforms in the problem-plagued foster care system.

The agency is still dealing with some of the same issues as it struggles to protect the county’s 35,000 abused and neglected children.

Some child welfare experts say Los Angeles’ problems persist in part because of its size and in part because of politics.

Unions, child advocates, a county commission, the board and individual supervisors’ staffers all exert considerable pressure on the department leadership, robbing it of necessary autonomy and authority, said John Mattingly, a national child welfare expert with the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

“At some point the Board of Supervisors needs to make it clear who runs L.A. County’s child welfare system, and it can’t be the 25 to 30 people who feel they have that authority now,” he said.

Indeed, Bock often lamented the rigidity of the county bureaucracy and the growing chasm between her and the advocacy community.

“I have to prioritize. That’s my job,” Bock said in an interview earlier this year. “It’s my job to sift through the hundreds--thousands--of recommendations we have. They want me to say we’ll do it all, and I think the one area where I know I have not won fans is saying I can’t do it all.

“I have to balance the union with the county with the budget with the staff. I understand that people who are passionate about children want someone to say, “Let’s do it.’ But then I wouldn’t be an effective director. I’d be a yes person.”

It was that directness and passion that led the board to hire her on a 4-1 vote in 1999.

They have said they thought Bock’s business background--she has master’s degrees in business administration and law, not social work--would solve some of the perceived problems of the prior director, who was seen as an idea man who started a number of revolutionary pilot programs but failed to run the shop effectively.

Before she arrived, a number of internal and external audits diagnosed the department as suffering from unfocused, ineffective management, a lack of planning, a siege mentality, overloaded social workers and myriad other fundamental breakdowns.

G. Peter Digre had abruptly resigned as director in 1999 under the pressure of those negative reports and allegations that he had used his influence to keep on the county payroll a political ally and foster mother accused of abusing her wards.

To Bock, a self-described “change agent,” taking on the job of reforming the mammoth system was an irresistible challenge.

At heart, she said, her plan was simple: Use statistics rather than emotion to guide decisions, and stay focused by doing constant long-range planning.

She required managers to attend training in the Baldridge management method, which focuses on customer satisfaction and excellence. She began semimonthly staff meetings requiring managers to present key statistics on how their divisions are running. She has required them to write business plans, action plans, budget proposals and detailed reports on how those plans affect the rest of the department.

She had an intense focus on creating and maintaining computer systems.

She tore down the chain of command, freely giving out her e-mail address and inviting workers of all levels to bring her their concerns.

She also reorganized the 7,000-employee department. She created a division of social workers who investigate child abuse complaints, separating them from those who supervise foster children.

Supporters said she turned a poisonous environment into a friendly one, that she is an intelligent woman with an impressive ability to see all the angles and keep her eye on the big picture.

But a vocal faction of the management complained for months that her focus on management technique came at the cost of all else.

They complained that she promoted staffers from the bowels of management who lacked experience, lost valuable experience by marginalizing some staff and undermined management through direct contact with social workers.

“There are four management levels above me. I’m the last person [in my hierarchy] who ever carried a case, ever made a home call, ever wrote a court report,” one manager complained in a recent interview. “It’s crazy-making that you’d have everyone in charge who don’t know the job. It’s very, very frustrating.”

Some complained that Bock violated internal policy against having personal relationships with clients.

Six months after she arrived in Los Angeles, she invited an emotionally troubled 18-year-old foster youth to live with her in her Hollywood home. She found the young woman a job in her department’s headquarters.

The controversy resulted in two internal investigations, the results of which have remained confidential. Bock said she was absolved of policy violations.

Perhaps her biggest problems have been political.

Shortly after her arrival, she inadvertently derided the county’s Commission for Children and Families, referring to their members as a “group of ladies.”

“The advocates and stakeholders were all ready to work with Ms. Bock and change the system in a positive way,” said Amy Pellman, head of the nonprofit Alliance for Children’s rights. “Instead she wanted to do it her way. She didn’t want to hear from anybody.”

Most of the board initially backed her in those battles--telling advocates to be patient and work with her. Most of the supervisors interviewed earlier this year said it was too soon to judge her performance.

A turning point may have came in February, when Bock faced off with Yaroslavsky, who until then had been one of her biggest supporters on the board and a swing vote on issues involving her department.

Bock was trying to persuade the board to allow her to appeal a judge’s ruling requiring judicial consent before social workers can reduce the number of times they visit children below once a month.

Yaroslavsky thought it was the wrong way to go, and pushed her to justify herself.

Rather than backing down from a public fight with her boss, Bock pressed her case.

“I’m just giving you the reality, Supervisor,” she replied. Bock said the court was overstepping its authority, dictating to the department how often it had to visit wards. She thought it was up to the Legislature to make and fund those mandates.

The county has lost all three of the appeals it filed in that case.

Times staff writer Garrett Therolf contributed to this report.