6 Foster Kids Have Fled Office

Six teenage foster children improperly kept in a county office waiting room because social workers couldn’t find shelter for them have fled over the last month, and at least one is still missing.

The youths ran away about the same time state inspectors concluded that having children stay more than 24 hours in the office amounted to operation of an illegal foster home, and ordered the practice stopped.

County officials said Friday they were trying to reduce the number of children temporarily housed at the office but had not yet found enough foster homes or shelter beds to end the overnight stays.

On May 5 -- the day the state issued its citation -- three teenagers bolted from the Wilshire Boulevard building, disappearing into a neighborhood plagued by poverty and crime near MacArthur Park. One was returned to the office five days later by police, only to flee again.

That 16-year-old boy suffers from severe depression and has been in foster care most of his life, county officials said. His pattern of running away began two years ago after his older brother was moved from the group home where they had been living, officials said.

County social workers use the waiting room to temporarily house the most difficult-to-place children while searching for relatives to take them or permanent foster homes in which to place them. The room is at the department’s command post, which is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Three shifts of supervisors monitor the children in the room, a roughly 300-square-foot converted staff lounge containing toys, a television and a crib. Children can freely visit the restroom or go get a drink of water.

State law prohibits county workers from using force to stop the children from leaving unless they become violent. County officials said some of the kids simply wait for the police officers who brought them in to depart, before then leaving themselves.

The instances of children running away were not mentioned in the state’s report, but at The Times’ request county officials provided numbers for this month.

David Sanders, director of the county Department of Children and Family Services, acknowledged that runaways had been a problem at the office for years. But the county could not provide specific numbers for the two years the office has been used as a makeshift shelter.

Most children who flee the site have repeatedly run away from their homes or foster placements, he said.

“It’s not that a youth who doesn’t have a history of running is brought to the command post and then starts running,” Sanders said.

Others, however, suggested that the county could have prevented some of the flights had it housed such children in better facilities.

Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, said potential runaways should be housed where they could be individually supervised and given intensive counseling, not in converted office space.

“This facility is in no way set up to adequately care for those young people or prevent runaways,” said Shauffer, whose complaints about the waiting room led to the state citation. “It’s completely predictable that they would run away.”

State officials voiced concern Friday about the runaways.

“That’s why it’s so important that facilities be licensed, so that we can make sure that the adequate tools and supervision are provided to the youth in their care,” said Andrew Roth, a spokesman for the California Department of Social Services, which licenses foster homes.

Typically, children are taken to the waiting room by police who have removed them from abusive homes or found them wandering the streets. Other children arrive on their own after fleeing a home or are taken there by social workers when foster homes refuse to keep them.

Although social workers don’t keep track of all youths who flee the command post, department officials released details about a handful, describing most as chronic runaways or children with serious psychiatric and emotional problems.

Just before midnight April 11, for example, Los Angeles police took a 16-year-old girl to the waiting room after picking her up from her house. The girl’s mother, after returning from a drug rehabilitation meeting, had called authorities and complained that she had found her daughter taking drugs and having sex.

The teenager denied the allegations and spent the night in the waiting room. With her were four other children of both sexes, ranging in age from 7 to 17.

The girl rejected a handful of placement offers by social workers, and at 7:45 a.m. walked out of the building. She returned eight days later and said her sister had thrown her out after they fought. She was taken to a foster home but ran away again a week later and remains missing.

On May 5, a 16-year-old boy arrived at the command post accompanied by probation officers, said children’s department spokesman Stuart Riskin. The youth had just been released from Juvenile Hall, where he had spent nearly two months after being arrested on suspicion of possessing marijuana and an illegal martial arts weapon.

Suffering from depression and allegedly a victim of sexual abuse, the boy had fled two previous foster homes earlier in the year. He left the waiting room an hour after arriving.

Police detained him May 10 and returned him to the office building. Social workers found him a home but he refused to go, Riskin said. The boy stayed overnight and left without permission at 9:30 a.m.

The county notified police but the boy remains missing, Riskin said.

Despite such instances of children running away, county officials said social workers were often successful in persuading children intent on leaving to stay. But they said they could do little if persuasion didn’t work.

“The workers try and follow them out and talk them out of it,” said Louise Grasmehr, a department spokeswoman. “Sometimes they’re successful and sometimes they’re not.”

Children began staying in the waiting room for extended periods after the March 2003 closure of MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, the county’s emergency shelter for abused and neglected youngsters.

That summer, department officials promised that they would stop housing children overnight at the office. But they blamed a lack of emergency shelters and foster home beds for continuation of the practice.

County logs released this week show that the problem has intensified recently.

In 2003, 108 youngsters spent more than four hours at the facility. Last year the number was 204.

This year, the number had reached 153 by the end of April. An internal department report warned that “at this rate, it is quite conceivable that over 400 youngsters will remain” in the office for more than four hours in 2005.

Department chief Sanders attributed the increase to new policies that call on social workers to first look for relatives to take the children rather than for foster homes.

That involves conducting criminal background checks and inspecting the relatives’ homes before placing children there, he said.

This week, his agency appealed the state’s licensing citation. But the department also told state officials Friday that it was working to dramatically reduce the use of the waiting room.

Social workers recently met with about 100 foster families willing to take in troubled children on short notice, he said. And the department hopes to sign a contract with a large children’s home in Hollywood to provide 10 emergency beds for hard-to-place youngsters.

“It’s absolutely clear that we need a better setting for these youth,” Sanders said. “I don’t want kids waiting any place.”