Article Published: Saturday, December 13, 2003 - 7:25:31 AM PST 
Improve foster care
Pasadena Star-News

A series of scathing audits that revealed horror stories coming out of the Department of Children and Family Services has spurred steps to turn this shameful situation around.

New director, David Sanders, doesn't sugarcoat the problems and recognizes the need for overhaul of the system. Good. Now he has to put meaningful reform in place.

Case tracking has to improve or we will see more deaths as the result of children either placed in abusive foster care or returned to dangerous environments.

The most recent incident involved a 22-month-old returned to parents who beat him to death. The return of the toddler and his five siblings to adults with a history of violence was the tragic result of a bureaucratic oversight. Social workers in charge of the cases failed to read the entire directive from the courts, which advocated the children's return if certain criteria were met. 

Were the workers too lazy to read the entire court order? Likely they are too overburdened to spend much time on this or any of their cases. That has to change. A good start would be up-front common-language instructions.

The agency is set up to handle about 12,000-15,000 children. It has a caseload of 75,000. That overall number must be reduced. We agree with the need to review existing cases. Further, a moratorium on new foster care placement would be appropriate except where the child is clearly in immediate danger.

The county has been criticized for moving too many children into foster care in order to keep state and federal dollars flowing. We believe the reality may be department administrators reacting to public criticism.

The policy has become one of take the kids if any signs of neglect or abuse are present. That can be dirty surroundings and too little food at any given time period.

Sanders supports giving families help to allow them to keep their children. That can be as simple as paying for baby sitting. His is one of the more sensible suggestions we've heard.

It would also go a long way toward avoiding million-dollar lawsuits brought by parents whose children were taken for little more than unfounded complaints.

It is much easier to keep children out of the system than to extricate them once they are in.

Too, the department was long criticized for delaying adoptions, seeking family reunification at all costs. Now the DCFS faces charges of rushing adoption, setting aside the needs of children and tossing parental rights in order to gain lucrative federal adoption bonuses that serve as incentive to move children into foster care.

Until further investigation we can be sure of only one fact: There are too many children in foster care for adequate supervision by the department. Reducing that number through adoption is a viable means but permanent placement must lead to a steady decline in foster care cases, not more.

The new director deserves an opportunity to solve the department's ongoing problems. Until he can get a handle on viable solutions, he must exercise caution in putting more children into a clearly unworkable system.