County Lacks Shelter for Foster Children

One night in early May, a 16-year-old girl who had fled her foster home was picked up by police and taken to what has turned into an emergency shelter in Los Angeles County: the sparsely furnished waiting room of a government office.

The child, who suffered from spina bifida and bladder and bowel problems, stayed there overnight, left to sleep on an old plastic couch with dirty blankets, because it took social workers almost nine hours to find a foster home that could handle her medical needs.

Since Los Angeles County closed its only emergency shelter for abused and neglected children in March, more than 20 of its neediest foster kids have been offered the same overnight accommodations, according to interviews and county records.

In the past, the children -- many of them troubled teenagers who have bounced around the foster-care system for years -- might have been sent to MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, a shelter crowded with mentally ill, abused and delinquent youths.

But with the facility shuttered amid a class-action lawsuit, the county has been unable to find safe temporary homes for hard-to-handle children.

In May, 18 children spent at least six hours at the county’s emergency response command post on Wilshire Boulevard, the sixth-floor office of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, which is open around the clock to handle child-abuse complaints but is not equipped to house children. Seventeen kids stayed there overnight.

The logbook that recorded each stay highlights deep cracks in the foster-care system, such as limited services for children with serious psychological and emotional needs.

The entries include:

* A 17-year-old with “severe psychiatric problems” whose foster mother refused to keep him after a violent episode. The boy spent more than 10 hours at the command post.

* A 15-year-old who had run away from foster placement and was picked up by the police and taken to the post. The youth, who remained there for 30 hours, had a diagnosed psychiatric condition requiring medication.

* Two children, ages 5 and 9, who were removed from their mother’s home in the middle of the night because of domestic violence. They were kept at the post for six hours while social workers waited for results of a criminal background check on their relatives.

The problems at the command post cropped up as soon as MacLaren closed and worsened as the weeks went by, said Louise Grasmehr, a spokeswoman for the county agency.

Only one child stayed there for more than four hours in March, but seven did in April, she said. The difficulty continued through May and into June, when three children with mental health problems were removed from the same foster home after their foster mother was arrested.

“Foster mother failed to ensure that one of the children, who is schizophrenic and severely developmentally delayed, returned safely home from school,” the command post’s June 2 entry stated.

“When child called foster mother, stating she had missed the school bus and needed a ride, foster mother did not respond, made no attempt to ensure the child’s safe arrival at home and went out for the evening with her cellular telephone turned off.”

In an incident the next day, a group home called the county’s child abuse hotline to demand that a 6-year-old girl with medical problems be removed because of “destructive behavior.”

The child, who was unable to walk, then was taken to another placement home where the caretaker refused to accept her. Workers picked the girl up and took her to the command post at 3:35 a.m.

“The resources are so limited, they just don’t have a place to put these kids,” said Edward Saldana, a social worker at the command post who previously worked at MacLaren for 23 years.

“They didn’t think about what’s going to happen after they closed MacLaren, “ Saldana said.

David Sanders, the new Department of Children and Family Services director, said that the post never had been intended as a place for children to sleep.

In the last two weeks, Sanders said, he has ordered the county’s network of group homes to stop abruptly discharging children -- they are supposed to give seven days’ notice -- and he has identified four emergency shelter beds throughout the system that could accommodate kids with serious psychological, emotional or medical needs. As a backup, Sanders also had rollaway cots delivered to the command post.

“We need to solve this immediately,” he said. “But the underlying issue is that kids have drifted for too long in this system.”

MacLaren was a glaring symbol of that failure.

Meant to be a temporary haven, the shelter had become a virtual holding tank for disturbed children whom nobody else seemed to want. Violent outbursts were common, as were allegations of child abuse and lawsuits against the facility.

Children often lived there for months, sometimes pingponging from group homes to psychiatric hospitals and back to Mac, as the shelter was known.

Last summer, child-welfare advocates sued the county over its mental health services for foster children. County supervisors, frustrated by the slow pace of reforms, had just forced out child and family services’ latest director. The new interim director made closing MacLaren a priority.

In short order, the agency began steering children out of MacLaren and into new placements, primarily group homes.

By January, the shelter that had once been crammed with 150 kids was down to 33. By March, it was empty, and a week later the county settled the lawsuit by agreeing to provide prompt mental health services tailored to each child.

As signs emerge that some children are still sliding through the cracks, some child welfare advocates insist that closing MacLaren was a necessary step in a long march toward reforming the nation’s largest foster-care system.

“For Los Angeles to truly reach a stage where people felt that the capacity and resources were in place could have taken years, if ever,” said Miriam Krinsky, executive director of the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles, which represents foster children in dependency court.

“While the transition period has not been as smooth as everyone hoped for, MacLaren should have been closed years ago.”

Others argue that county officials have merely papered over the problem for the sake of settling the lawsuit.

“What good was that, if they didn’t have a place to put children with mental illness? You just move them around,” said Nancy Daly Riordan, a former member of the county’s Commission for Children and Families. “I always used to call MacLaren the ‘open wound’ of the county, because we could see the worst of what we were doing to children. The wound is still there, but it’s hidden now.”