County vows to comply with foster home rules
The head of Los Angeles County’s foster care agency vowed on Tuesday to comply by June 30 with federal rules on monitoring the homes of foster children living with relatives, to solve a problem that has cost the county an estimated $6 million over the last year.
Social workers are behind in conducting assessments and annual reassessments of about 3,200 homes to ensure that they meet health and safety requirements, said Patricia S. Ploehn, director of the Department of Children and Family Services.
About 200 of those are homes in which foster parents receive monthly benefits from the county that the federal government will reimburse if timely reassessments are completed, she said. Failure to comply with federal rules has cost the county about $6 million over the last year.
A team of social workers has been working on the backlog for the last few months. But Ploehn said she is drafting 60 more workers to clear the backlog by the end of June.
The department handles 700 new assessments and 600 reassessments each month.
“It’s a massive undertaking,” Ploehn said. “We are bound and determined.”
The backlog is happening less than two years after the county promised, under a legal settlement with children’s advocates, to improve the way social workers monitor the homes.
About 11,000 foster children in L.A. County live with relatives, who receive from a few hundred dollars to up to $1,500 a month, depending on the child’s needs.
Officials have blamed an inadequate computer tracking system for some of the problems, along with confusion over which social workers were supposed to update the computer system.
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