Far fewer children in county foster care

Los Angeles County’s child protection agency has cut the number of children in foster care by half over the last decade, driving detentions down and speeding the time it takes to return children to their parents -- without an increase in abuse reports, county figures show.

This year, the number of children in the county’s foster care system fell below 25,000 for the first time since peaking at more than 52,000 in 1997, even though the number of children in the county has risen over the last decade, according to the county’s Department of Children and Family Services.

The change marks a notable success in remaking the county’s long-troubled child welfare agency, which once emphasized removing children in the name of safety -- leaving many in foster care for years, where they sometimes suffered more abuse and neglect.

Today, social workers are encouraged to keep children at home by helping parents deal with problems believed to underlie abuse, including drug addiction, unemployment and mental illness. At the same time, the county has doubled the number of adoptions, increased the number of child-parent reunions and reduced the time such reunifications take.

In 2000, social workers took an average of two years to return children to their parents. Last year, it took them nine months.

“I think we’ve come to realize that a child’s need to be in their own home and in a permanent home is important,” said Patricia S. Ploehn, director of the county children’s services department. “I don’t think that there’s been a time in the last 30 years where there’s been so much hope that we can actually do it right this time.”

Despite the changes, Ploehn acknowledged that much more work is needed. Hundreds of children live for years in group homes, and a federal court has concluded that the county fails to provide adequate mental health services to thousands of foster children.

Ploehn said her department is addressing the problems and pledged more reforms to continue reducing the number of children in foster care. But some critics have expressed concerns about the pace of change.

A prominent group of children’s rights advocates has accused social workers of dismissing some abuse reports too quickly in their zeal to keep families together. And a sharp rise in child detentions over the last two years has raised concerns that the reforms may be losing their effectiveness.

After declining in the early 1980s, the nation’s foster child population began a steady climb, fueled in part by the explosion of crack cocaine that swept thousands of children born to addicted parents into institutionalized care.

The numbers continued to rise through the economic recession of the early 1990s as more families grappled with poverty -- a factor often linked to child abuse. In Los Angeles, high-profile killings and abuse by parents also reinforced the belief that separating children from their families was the safest option for children.

“There was a mantra: When in doubt, detain,” Ploehn said. “That was the message in the ‘90s. Take no risks. Take no chances.”

But a growing body of research pointed to the disastrous effects of such a mind-set. Children in foster care are more likely than other children to drop out of school, commit crimes and experience mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness.

The findings prompted child-welfare advocates to urge local governments to find stable homes for foster children. In the late 1990s, national and state legislators passed laws making it easier to adopt such youngsters and providing financial incentives for local governments to accelerate the process. The number of kids in foster care began to fall gradually.

In Los Angeles, the effect was more dramatic. Three factors drove the change: an increase in adoptions, a decrease in the number of children separated from their parents and a rise in the number reunited with their parents.

Social workers began by clearing a massive backlog of pending adoptions and moved to find new parents for children in care. Local attorneys and other volunteers donated their time to help.

From 1998, the number of annual adoptions tripled to 3,069 by 2001 before falling back to about 2,000 -- nearly double the figure of a decade ago.

Social workers now reach out to relatives, churches and community groups in search of adoptive parents. The county has hired retired workers to scour the files of teenage foster children for relatives willing to take them in.

The county also embarked on an ambitious plan to change the culture of its child protective agency. Parents were no longer the enemy. Social workers were encouraged to help families stay together by linking children with mentors and parents with drug treatment, employment training, anger management and parenting classes.

The county boosted the number of children returned home from fewer than 5,000 in 1998 to more than 6,000 last year. At the same time, the rate of reunified children returning to foster care remained flat, except for an uptick in 2005.

Doris Haley lived the changes firsthand.

Addicted to crack cocaine, she lost her four children -- ages 3 to 12 -- to foster care in 1993. She ended up sleeping in a cardboard box on downtown’s skid row.

After four years on the streets, Haley found a drug rehab program through a worker at a downtown shelter. She enrolled in parenting classes and started seeing a therapist. She called the county and asked a social worker about getting her children back.

“He told me, ‘Haley, your kids will be in the system until your kids emancipate into adulthood,’ ” she recalled. “He said to me, ‘All you have done, it’s for nothing. And you’re not worth having your kids.’ That’s how I interpreted it.”

Haley fought the county in dependency court. At each step, she said, the county blocked her. But slowly, she persuaded a judge that she had turned her life around. In 2001, the first of her children returned home.

Today, Haley works for a nonprofit organization providing advice and help to parents of children in the county’s foster care. She said she has seen a change in social workers’ attitudes since she was on the other side.

“I think that the mind-set has changed,” she said. “Kids are coming out of residential placement and going back into their homes because now there is a collaborative effort.. . . They’re aiding the parent to accomplish this.”

County officials said they hoped to reduce the number of children in foster care by an additional 8,000 by 2020. Under a plan started this year, the county’s federal funding no longer depends on how many children are removed from homes, thus eliminating the financial incentive in foster care placement.

But some child-welfare advocates question the pace of reform.

Officials at the Alliance for Children’s Rights have recently brought several abuse reports to the county, saying social workers dismissed them too quickly.

In one case, they said, a 16-year-old was struck and choked by her father, who promised to attend counseling with his daughter, take anger management classes and enroll in an alcohol-addiction program. He never did.

Lara J. Holtzman, managing attorney for the alliance, said she called the county when a social worker failed to intervene. Only then was the girl removed.

“Generally, it is better to keep kids out of foster care if they don’t have to be there,” Holtzman said, “but that does leave us with some concerns that some kids are not put in there who should be.”

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, applauded the county’s efforts to reduce removals but said he was alarmed by the most recent statistics. The number of children removed for the first time fell from 9,500 in 1998 to a low of 7,000 in 2003. But removals have since jumped to more than 8,800 a year.

County officials said they were surprised by the rise, which coincided with the expanded use of two new child assessment tools they had expected would reduce removals.

The first includes meetings between social workers and a child’s extended family and others familiar with the child, such as neighbors, friends and teachers.

The second is a questionnaire using data from previous abuse cases to help social workers determine how various factors -- such as domestic violence and drug abuse -- affect the risk of keeping a child at home.

Ploehn said she believed that the tools have helped social workers make better decisions about separating children from their parents and noted that the foster care population has continued to fall.

“I really think it’s because we’re doing a better job out there,” she said.

Wexler disagreed, faulting the county for churning children through foster care rather than keeping them at home.

“You still have a system that, for all its many failings, is probably better than most in this country,” he said. “But it is not as good as it was a couple of years ago.”

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jack.leonard@latimes.com