Rhetoric and Reports Don’t Help Foster Kids

There wasn’t much new in the latest scathing report on the performance of Los Angeles County’s giant system of foster care:

The county fails to move children “promptly” through the system and back to their families or into adoptive homes. Some foster families are paid too much and some too little, because of slipshod methods of tracking funds. A growing backlog of kids available for adoption is costing the county millions in federal funds. Records are in such disarray, social workers lose track of the kids they’re supposed to be watching.

The charges, though troubling, are all complaints we’ve heard before. The audit, released last week by state Controller Kathleen Connell, is simply the most recent in a long list of investigations and studies that make it clear our foster care system--the nation’s largest, with 53,000 children under its control--is doing an inadequate job of protecting kids.

Connell’s office says she initiated the audit to see if the county’s Department of Children and Family Services was spending state money properly, after earlier reports found the agency was having trouble keeping track of its wards. California could be assessed up to $5 million in penalties when federal officials review the Los Angeles County operation this fall, Connell said.

“The controller stepped in because these mistakes can be very costly if they’re not corrected by then,” said Lisa Casalegno, Connell’s press deputy.

But some legislators and child-welfare officials are grumbling that the audit is little more than a grab for attention by a politically savvy elected official who will be turned out of office by term limits this year.

“It doesn’t surprise me that there’s not a lot of ‘there’ there,” said Hilary McLean, press deputy for Gov. Gray Davis. “The governor’s already demonstrating a strong leadership role on these issues. These are, after all, some of our state’s most vulnerable children.”

Indeed, they are ... which would make it all the more tragic if the issue of what happens to them, and their families, becomes another political football.

This was going to be the year for foster care. Three hundred million dollars had been set aside to reform the system and remedy its most glaring ills. A package of legislative fixes would have cut caseloads, increased incentives for foster families, cut hurdles for adoptive families and provided help for struggling families trying to keep their kids out of foster care.

But the cure was whittled to a $30 million Band-Aid when the state’s budget deficit set in, and Los Angeles County was left to limp along with too many kids, too few social workers and too little support for its fledgling commitment to change.

Two years ago, a local investigative panel pronounced our system in such disarray, that “Los Angeles County lacks the ability to protect its foster children from re-abuse and re-neglect.” In other words, children faced about the same level of peril in foster care that they’d faced in the homes they had been rescued from.

Department director Anita Bock, who came on board just one month before that report, has talked a good game of change. But few improvements seem to have taken place. A $22-million program to keep families together and children out of foster care was so ineffective and poorly managed that only a handful of families were able to get help. Last month, an appellate court stepped in to order social workers to stop skipping monthly visits with their wards. And MacLaren Hall, the county shelter for abused and neglected children, is still characterized by its critics as a house of horrors.

Bock says the agency is making progress, and she worries that the controller’s salvo will reinforce the notion that the foster care system is a shambles, a lost cause with problems too massive to solve.

“We’ve made a great deal of progress in the last few years, and it’s somewhat of a tragedy that people continue to define the system by its failures,” Bock said, after reviewing the report. “There are still many areas that need a substantial amount of reform, but this generalized anecdotal rhetoric about everything being in crisis isn’t doing anybody any good.”

My telephone call to Bock on Friday caught her in the midst of reviewing one family’s case--one among many that land on her desk because of complaints or challenges.

“Sometimes the family approaches my office, unhappy with a decision that’s been made. Sometimes it’s the social worker, sometimes the court,” Bock said. “I read the reports, meet with the family ... anything to try to determine what is truly in the best interests of the child. Because it’s a mistake to presume our agency always acts in good faith. Every case is different, every family is different, every situation is different. And at the end of the day, it’s always a judgment call.”

Bock has been under pressure on several fronts to improve her department’s performance. Next week, she is due to answer to the county Board of Supervisors on the slow pace of planned reforms.

She says her department’s statistics paint a different picture than Connell’s report: The number of deaths in foster care is decreasing, social worker caseloads have fallen, and the number of children taken from their parents and placed in foster care is down. “I think we’re overall on the right path,” she said. “Reform is difficult and slow, and this sort of nuclear rhetoric doesn’t help at all.”

But Bock must also realize that the stakes are high precisely because the work her agency does--taking children away, giving them back, shuffling them among from foster homes--produces nuclear explosions every day, in hundreds of families and homes.

*

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