Article Published: Monday, February 16, 2004 - 6:44:41 PM PST
Foster care shake-up weighed
Supervisors set to vote today on plan to keep families together.
By Troy Anderson
Staff writer
Long Beach Press-Telegram 

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is set to vote today on a proposal to radically overhaul the county's child protective system, placing an unprecedented focus on providing services to help keep troubled families together.

The proposal is similar to one that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is seeking to radically change California's foster care system to end financial incentives that critics say encourage counties and their contractors to make money off children in their care.

The governor's proposal follows recent reports in the Daily News of Los Angeles a sister paper of the Press-Telegram that some officials' estimated that as many as half the 75,000 children in the county's foster system and adoptive homes were needlessly placed there in a system often more dangerous than the homes from which the children were taken.

State and federal laws create financial incentives for placing children in foster care because counties receive $30,000 to $150,000 annually in state and federal funds for each child, officials and critics say.

"We're calling for significant reforms in the program because we believe it's pretty clear that when the state failed 12 out of 14 outcome measures when the feds reviewed the foster care system, you've got issues with the way the program is managed,' said H.D. Palmer, a state Department of Finance spokesman.

The state's Little Hoover Commission has described the foster-care system as a "public calamity.'

Century City attorney Linda Wallace Pate, who has won a number of lawsuits aimed at reforming the system, said the governor's plan is a "courageous effort.'

"It's scandalous that the California foster care system has been reduced to a 'kids for cash' system driven by perverse financial incentives,' 

Pate said. "It's contrary to common sense that children are removed from their parents for little or no reason 80 percent of the time and placed in a system where they are more likely to be abused, all to service this sacred cash cow foster care system.'

Last month, the 75,000-member American Family Rights Association called on Schwarzenegger to order a statewide investigation and audit of the child protection and juvenile court systems. The group claims the system has needlessly placed thousands of children in foster care to draw state and federal revenues.

Former Glendale resident and group home owner Fred Baker said he would like to see an audit determine whether any funds are missing from the Department of Children and Family Services budget and whether the county needlessly placed children in foster care to boost its budget.

Baker won a $459,940 judgment against the county in 2002 after a jury found the county closed five of his group homes in Lancaster and South Los Angeles in 1996 without offering him a chance to appeal.

Baker said the county closed his facilities in retaliation after he went to county officials in 1995 and told them that children were placed needlessly in foster care to obtain state and federal funds.

Schwarzenegger's proposals, which his administration estimates would save $20 million in fiscal year 2004-05 and more in subsequent years, calls for performance-based contracts, which would require private agencies to meet federal and state outcome measures as a condition of payment.

Since Illinois switched to those types of contracts in the late 1990s, the number of children in foster care in that state dropped by 50 percent. Half of the private agencies were unable to meet the goals and were forced to close.

Schwarzenegger also proposes to pursue a flexible funding waiver with the federal government so that much of the money now used to pay for foster care could be spent on programs to keep children with their birth parents.

The county supervisors' vote today would authorize child welfare officials to negotiate with the federal government for the first waiver in the state that would allow the county Department of Children and Family Services to use $250 million of its $1.4 billion budget on services to help prevent the placement of children in foster care.

The national nonprofit Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care expects to release a report in late spring on how Congress could reform federal child welfare financing and strengthen court oversight of child welfare cases.

Jim Mayer, executive director of the state's Little Hoover Commission, which has released three largely unheeded reports in the last decade calling for major reforms in the system, said Schwarzenegger's plan could save the state substantial money.

But Mayer stressed that the governor needs to heed the commission's recommendation to place one person in charge of fixing the system and establish civilian oversight panels in the counties.

"Nobody is in charge here,' Mayer said. "That's been the consistent theme of our analysis.