Article Published: Sunday, December 07, 2003 -
8:33:44 PM PST
Ways to care for an
ailing foster system
Federal funds could help keep
more kids at home
Following years of scandals and heartbreak in the nation's largest child-protective system, Los Angeles County officials and child advocates hope a new director and innovative ideas will dramatically improve the lives of local foster children.
"We spend $1.4 billion annually on foster care in Los Angeles County," said Andrew Bridge, managing director of child welfare reform programs at the private Broad Foundation in Los Angeles.
"We are not getting what we should for that $1.4 billion. And for the first time, Los Angeles County is beginning a constructive conversation to change that."
The proposed reforms by the county and state are set to begin next year. Congress plans to take up legislation in the summer that could radically change the way the child welfare system is funded.
President George W. Bush has proposed a $5 billion-a-year flexible block grant that could be used to help keep families together -- rather than placing their children in foster care. Most of the funds are now used to pay for the care of children in foster care.
"It's not going to cure everything," said Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary of the U.S. Administration for Children and Families. "States could still choose to spend the money on things that don't matter.
"But for a state with innovative leadership that wants to invest in services that have proven effective in preventing child abuse and neglect, this would give them the flexibility to do that and reduce the need for costly (foster care) intervention later on."
Critics are skeptical about whether officials will follow through with their plans, citing innumerable failed attempts to reform the system in the past.
Critics also expect heavy opposition from what they call the private "child-abuse industry," which has grown wealthy and powerful over the years off the $20 billion-a-year child welfare system, a two-year investigation by the Daily News found.
A recent state Department of Social Services report found the indirect costs of child mistreatment and foster care, such as juvenile delinquency, adult criminality and lost productivity to society, total $95 billion annually.
At the heart of the system's failures, state officials admit in documents, are "perverse financial incentives" in federal and state laws that encourage local governments to earn money by placing and keeping too many children unnecessarily in foster care.
"Financial incentives, inherent in the state and federal government structure, are encouraging the retention of children in foster care until they reach adulthood," researcher Julia K. Sells wrote in a report on child welfare privatization for the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute think tank. "States are actually profiting from keeping children in the system because they continue to receive federal funds."
David Sanders, director of the county Department of Children and Family Services, said experts estimate that as many as half of the county's foster children could have been left in their parents' care if the appropriate services had been provided to the families.
This year, the county settled a class-action lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California that called for improvements in the mental-health treatment foster children receive. It also led to the closure of the long-distressed MacLaren's Children Center in El Monte -- the site of numerous horror stories of abuse, neglect and even death over the years.
"Throughout this case, there is a stream of tales of sadness, desperation and despair," U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz said when he approved the settlement. "There is no doubt, there are almost no instances where someone said the system has worked well.
"But this settlement is a start. It's a very admirable change and innovative. The foster care system has proven to be totally inadequate and disgraceful so far."
The investigation also found widespread misuse of taxpayer funds and some of the highest salaries in the nation among the nonprofit foster family agencies and group homes responsible for most of the 30,000 children in foster homes.
The $1.4 billion DCFS budget, which has swelled from $103 million in 1985 when the department was created, pays to support a total of 75,000 children in the system and adoptive homes.
In the private foster care agencies that oversee most of the children, some executives receive up to $310,000 a year in salaries and benefits and spend millions of taxpayer dollars for posh offices, expensive furniture and luxury cars, according to tax returns and county audits.
County officials and child advocates acknowledge that reforms are needed to overhaul the way the county contracts with group homes and the foster family agencies that recruit foster parents and oversee children's care.
Another key reform, according to child advocates and county officials, began in November when the Board of Supervisors voted to negotiate with the federal government for a waiver that would allow DCFS to use $250 million of its $1.4 billion budget on services to help keep children with their families, instead of placing them in foster care.
Using a similar federal waiver and a program known as "performance-based contracting," Illinois was able in the late 1990s to reduce its foster care population by half and prevent many needless foster care placements.
DCFS recently renegotiated contracts with foster-family agencies and is in the process of negotiating a new contract with its group homes. The new contracts are expected to hold the agencies accountable for providing safe homes and good education for foster children.
Under the current "buck-a-head" payment structure, the private agencies lose revenue when children are reunified with their families or put up for adoption, child advocates say.
"There are a lot of twisted incentives," said Benjamin Wolf, associate legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union in Chicago, which sued Illinois in the late 1990s and forced the state to use performance-based contracting. The innovative form of contracting improved children's lives and forced about half of the agencies to close because they couldn't meet the new standards.
Los Angeles County Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen said the county should have only 12,000 to 15,000 children in foster homes.
"We have way too many kids in our system," said Janssen, who was one of the first county officials to support reforms now under way.
DCFS officials expect a tough lobbying campaign to get the federal waiver and don't expect a decision until March.
"We really think this offers an opportunity to start to fix the system," said Sanders, who took over as head of DCFS last March after the Board of Supervisors called for the resignation of the previous director. "It's not the silver bullet, but at least it's an opportunity to start the kind of major reforms we need to have in place."
Like many of the reforms the state and county have agreed to, critics are skeptical about whether the proposed reforms will help much, noting that the child welfare system has long abused its power to break up families for its own financial gain.
"It's a money-changing game," said Beverly Hills attorney Debra Opri, who won a $75,000 settlement earlier this year from the county on behalf of a Pasadena man whose distraught wife pushed their two children off a courthouse roof, killing them, and then jumped to her death. She had just learned her children would be returned to foster care.
DCFS had made a series of errors in the case that the father claimed led to his children's deaths.
"Instead of selling sprockets and gidgets, the children are getting sold," the lawyer said.
Manhattan Beach attorney Sanford Jossen, who filed a class-action lawsuit in 2000 alleging staff at MacLaren Children's Center manhandled children and broke their bones, wrote in a court objection to the ACLU settlement that it seduces the public into believing reforms are on the way, but in reality does little more than create a six-member advisory panel to make recommendations with no timeline for implementation.
"In this respect, history continues to repeat itself," Jossen wrote. "Studies are done. Recommendations are made. Implementation does not occur. More delays result. The proposed settlement agreement creates the illusion of promise, but on closer inspections provides for nothing."
State Department of Social Services spokeswoman Blanca Castro said the state is redesigning the foster care system and focusing on what can be done to keep families together.
The result is several recent reports by the Child Welfare Services Stakeholders Group, a group of 60 child welfare experts, that call for an "ambitious and far-reaching overhaul" of the state's foster care system.
The reforms, starting in January, call for Los Angeles and 10 other counties to use a series of innovative programs that have been successful elsewhere in the nation.
"We don't expect to turn this around overnight," Castro said. "It's taken us 20 years to get to this point. It's going to take five to 10 years to turn this boat around."
Troy Anderson, (213) 974-8985 troy.anderson@dailynews.com