Welcome -- Now Get Busy

When David Sanders takes the helm of the county’s foster-care agency March 24, he’ll quickly discover that he’s not in Minneapolis anymore. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday named Sanders, who heads up children’s services for Hennepin County, Minn., to the big upholstered seat at the MacArthur Park headquarters of the Department of Children and Family Services.

That cushiony chair has become more like an ejection seat. The supervisors have fired three of the four foster-care directors. The last one, Anita Bock, cleaned out her desk in July after board members gave her the boot. Meanwhile, many of the 50,000 children that the department watches over drift. The department’s 2,200 social workers are often too overwhelmed to treat the children’s severe emotional, educational and health problems and to find them new permanent families. Too many children die or are abused in foster care.

To be sure, taxpayers ask the impossible of foster-care agencies: Fix the problems that drug-addicted, irresponsible or malevolent parents inflict on their children. Address their mental illnesses, deal with their disabilities and prepare them for adult lives of promise rather than more despair.

The job that awaits Sanders when he arrives in Los Angeles is especially tough. The county monitors more children and spends more money -- $1.4 billion this year -- than any other foster agency in the nation. Social workers and therapists drive ridiculous distances -- from Lancaster to Montebello or Torrance, for example -- to visit kids. These problems of geography alone will make Sanders’ job vastly more complicated than those he faced in Minneapolis.

Still, he did things there that need doing here: He got help to more teetering families before things got so bad that the children were in peril. He provided stability and support for kids in foster homes. He found new, permanent homes for children who couldn’t go back to their own parents.

To accomplish the same here, Sanders will need a reform plan that sets specific timetables and milestones and holds managers accountable if they fall short. He’ll also need to get bureaucrats in Washington and Sacramento to let him use more of the money that comes to his department to keep kids with their families and in their communities, when possible, rather than in a stranger’s foster home.

More ambitiously, he should consider integrating all the services the county currently provides to kids through its separate foster-care, welfare and health departments and put them in one child-focused agency broken up into community-based units. A similar restructuring has helped foster children in San Diego County.

Board members are hailing Sanders as a “turnaround artist,” but they used the same hyperbole to describe previous directors. Unless he can help more of this county’s most vulnerable and troubled kids, Sanders may find himself in the same place as his predecessors -- out the door.