Okay, first the LA Times ran an article last Friday titled, “L.A. County will no longer strive to reunite families.”

Like many who at least nominally follow foster care issues, I read the startling headline and the article that followed with a sinking heart.

Reporter Garrett Therolf wrote:

The decision is the most significant of several reforms made by the department after a series of high-profile child deaths last year, some of which involved the department putting too much faith in its ability to rehabilitate families. In 2009, The Times reported that reunifications led to some children’s further injuries and even deaths. Isabel Garcia, for instance, starved to death two months after child-welfare officials deemed that she, her five siblings and their parents were all doing well.

And then Therolf went on to name the other recent cases in which inadequate oversight and poor decisions on the part of social workers, meant that no one intervened when red flags indicated a child was in danger at the hands of his or her family—with hideously tragic results.

But, although the LA Times and others had reported the deaths as a series that suggested a trend, experts in the field noted that, despite ghastly nature of the high profile tragedies, there was no sudden rash of such incidents. According to what DCFS Director Trish Ploehn told the Daily News last week, the number of deaths fluctuates within a fairly close range from year to year. In 2009 there were 17 deaths, higher than the 14 of 2008, but lower than the 20 that occurred in 1998 and 1999 when DCFS was snatching many more children into its care.

[UPDATE: In a chat today, Garrett Therolf rightly reminded me that, due to a difference in the way the deaths are now reported, the 2009 figures and the 1999 figures are not really comparing apples to apples, making the already complex topic still harder to assess.]

However, press-fueled public hysteria and political pressure being what it is, many worried that LA County, rather than analyze the details of its actual systemic failures, would instead go for the politically expedient broad strokes. The agency would be quicker to take kids away unnecessarily from their parents and would make it harder for imperfect, but essentially decent parents to get their kids back when they have made some needed corrections.

The results would be another kind of slow motion tragedy in which kids may not die, but nor do they thrive.

Nevermind that, as the National Coalition for child Protection Reform points out, study after study has indicated that in most cases, kids do much better with their families, even if those families are far from ideal.

Back in September, The Daily News printed a warning that the feverish focus on those awful deaths was creating a panic among Foster Care officials and that bad policy could result.

And now that bad policy seemed to have come to pass.

BUT WAIT—MAYBE NOT

After the LA Times article ran, DCFS Director Trish Ploehn contacted foster care watchdog, Richard Wexler, to state that she and the agency were not abandoning family reunification at all, and that she never said any such thing to the Times.

(DCFS also sent out a press release to that effect.)

AT WHICH POINT…The Times appeared removed its initial headline and replaced it thusly….

AT WHICH POINT watchdog Wexler reported that the Times had evidently backed off of its claim that DCFS was going to push less for family reunification.

AT WHICH POINT….the LA Times Garrett Therolf (who is generally a very good reporter) contacted Wexler and told him that the Times may have changed its headline (because the headline person was bad, bad, bad and got things wrong) but that Ploehn had said what she said, and the Times wasn’t backing off its story once teensy bit.

AT WHICH POINT ….I lost track of the argument.

Unfortunately one point has become obscured by these several days of the Times and DCFS parsing who meant what: Abuse can take place at both ends of the spectrum. Every week parents come before the LA County Supervisors and plead for help in getting their children back from the foster care system. Most of the time nothing comes of it.

I hear from some of those parents on a regular basis. Right now, I don’t have the staff to investigate their cases. (I intend to begin to change all that later on this year.)

But the LA Times, despite its staff cuts, does have the capacity to at least look into some of these troubling stories of kids yanked into the trauma that is foster care for reasons that are filmsy at best. Mr. Therolf has demonstrated in the past, that he is more than talented enough to do it. {Check out his story on the county’s unnerving computerized system for evaluating whether a child should be removed from a home.)

Let us hope he can persuade his editors to allow him to investigate some of the individual cases that show the other sad end of the DCFS continuum.

Such coverage would provide a much needed balance to the horror stories that are still threatening to drive the County into a child-snatching panic.

In response to my post about Sunday’s LA Times stories telling of the two adolescents who died in the care (if you can call it that) of LA County’s Department of Children and Family Services, Richard Wexler, the
Executive Director National Coalition for Child Protection Reform wrote me an email that was both informative and disturbing.

Wexler commented in particular on the case of Miguel Padilla, the boy who was bounced around from place to place after his mother abandoned him and his father neglected him. He was raised for a while by his elderly great grand mother, who until finally he hung himself in a stand of trees outside the group home where he was placed at the end. His body was not discovered for nine days—and only then, by accident. No one had bothered to search for the kid.

Here are the questions Wexler asked:

A little boy [Miguel] is placed with his great grandmother. There is no indication that she does not love the child, but every indication that she is too old to keep up with him, supervise him properly or get him help with mental health problems.

But why does the Los Angeles Times assume, in its story Sunday about such a boy, that the only alternative is to take him away and place him with strangers?

Why didn’t anyone think to ask if DCFS should have poured help IN to that home, instead of asking only why they didn’t take the boy out?

Apparently because the Times never asked anyone who would raise that option.

When Miguel Padilla first was placed, keeping him safely with his great-grandmother would have been relatively simple: An Intensive Family Preservation Services intervention to start with, followed by linking the great grandmother to less intensive help. Even without hindsight, the odds of Miguel succeeding, not to mention surviving, would have been far greater – and, it would have cost county taxpayers far less.

Now I don’t blame the LA Times reporters for asking those questions. Looking at the surface facts of the case, I too thought Miguel Padilla’s grandmother was too old and ill equipped to care for him. Ditto Lazhanae Harris, the 13-year-old girl whose terrible story the Times also told.

But Wexler insists that this is far from true, that if the parents are not abusive, intelligent family preservation is much, much cheaper and much more likely to have a good outcome, than dumping a kid into “the system,” as those whom I know who have had personal dealings with DCFS call foster care.

To illustrate, Wexler directed me to a video of a speech by one of his colleagues, Karl Dennis, a family preservation specialist who is also the visionary founder and longtime director of Kaleidoscope, a non-profit community-based childcare agency in Chicago.

Just a bit before the video’s halfway mark, Dennis tells a compelling about a kid who, like Miguel, had no place to go because his family couldn’t or wouldn’t take him. But Dennis and his group provided the wrap-around services necessary to return the kid to his very reluctant mother (again, for less money than a slot in the foster care system—and certainly less than incarcerating him, which was clearly where the kid was headed). It worked. According to Dennis, the difficult kid finished school and got a good paying job and now has a life.

According to Wexler, with any luck at all the same might have been true for Miguel and
Lazhanae —if the emphasis at DCFS was on family preservation.

It seems, unfortunately, that it is not. So, all too often it appears that the LA County agency that is supposed to rescue children from abuse and neglect, instead has systematized it.

Surely we can do better.

A large thank you to LA Times writers Kim Christensen and Garrett Therolf for their well-reported, important and heartbreaking package of articles titled “Flawed county system lets children die invisibly.”

The first of the articles tells about a disabled and desperately neglected 17-year-old boy who hung himself from a tree outside the group home where he was placed. Then, as if to make clear the reasons behind his despair, no one at all in the group home noticed or cared enough about his absence to try to search for him.

The second article tells of a 13-year-old girl who fell down a similar chasm of neglect and dispair and ended up stabbed to death after she took to the street in search of someone who might give enough of a damn to even marginally take care of her.

Here’s how the first of the articles begins:

Miguel Padilla ran away from a licensed group home in April 2008, but he didn’t go far.

Unknown to anyone at the time, the 17-year-old amputee made his way to a stand of trees near the main driveway. Using his one arm, he climbed into the branches, tied a makeshift noose to a limb and hanged himself.

Nine days passed before a staffer found his body at the sprawling LeRoy Haynes Center in LaVerne, coroner’s records show — and then only by chance.

“To our knowledge there was no search by LeRoy’s or any other authority,” said Dave Rentz, the boy’s minister.

Miguel Padilla died much as he had lived: alone and out of sight, his suicide the final step in a failed journey through Los Angeles County’s child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

At least 268 children who had passed through the child welfare system died from January 2008 through early August 2009, according to internal county records obtained by The Times. They show that 213 were by unnatural or undetermined causes, including 76 homicides, 35 accidents and 16 suicides.

In addition to the narrative stories, Christensen and Therolf have provided us with a list the 98 kids who have died in foster care from January to August 2009, and the reasons for their deaths.

This is necessary journalism. It is a pity that these days we don’t see more of it.

Lawmakers have a habit of racing too quickly to solve one highly publicized problem, only to inadvertently create a whole new set of problems. If we are not very careful, Los Angeles County is heading straight toward a bunch of unintended consequences in reaction to a pair of tragic events relating to LA’s foster care system.

Let me explain:

Because of the nature of much of my past reporting, I’ve monitored at close range a number of cases where the Department of Children and Family Services swooped in and took kids away from their parents and into foster care. In the cases that I happened to observe, the kids were put in the system, not because of some kind of hideous neglect or because they were being physically or sexually abused, but because an otherwise decent parent made a lousy choice. Most often it was that somebody in the family’s house had been busted for drug possession and/or dealing.

As a consequence, the kids were yanked away from everything familiar, from the people who loved them, from their friends, their school, their siblings, and put in a house with strangers.

And, guess what? They did poorly in the county’s care. It was awful. Damage was done. No, of course, it is not good for children to grow up in a household where drugs are used or in evidence, or where somebody’s boyfriend or husband or cousin gets arrested for dealing….any of those things. But there are ways to intervene in the lives of children, while also keeping the families together.

Yet, I found that the system is designed—and incentivized really—to do other than that.

In the past I had always been of the impression that the problem with LA’a foster system is that social workers didn’t take kids away from bad parents soon enough, so terrible things happened, as in the heart shattering cases of Dae’von Bailey and Lars Sanchez. Or that DCFS occasionally placed children with foster parents who turned out to be monsters.

But reporting in and around the DCFS system, I learned that while the horror stories do happen, they are the rarities, the lightening strikes. And certainly there are plenty of non-monsterous, non murderous but abusive and neglectful parents who need to have their kids removed until they can get their respective acts together (if they can get their acts together).

However in the cases I followed, I encountered a much different kind of abuse:For instance, with the family I followed the mostly closely, I saw six kids removed for mind-numbingly stupid reasons from the care of parents who were, on balance, very loving and caring—imperfect, but good enough. I watched as those same children were separated from each other and shoved into the maw of a system that behaved toward them with haphazard indifference on its best days. When finally the parents got their family back a half year later, the effect on the kids had been utterly traumatizing. There was no other word for it. The parents too were deeply traumatized.

And it didn’t have to happen. No good was served.

Now because of the panic over those two high profile deaths, the County Supervisors are stumbling over each other in their haste to make it still easier to take kids away from parents, and harder for the parents to get them back.

This is a potentially disastrous fix.

Wednesday’s LA Times has a crucial Op Ed by Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection, who talks about this issue in knowledgeable detail.

I hope very much for the safety of LA County’s children that those in position to make decisions on such matters take to heart what Wexler has to say. If they do not, there will be hell to pay. And it will be a hell visited mostly on certain unlucky children.

Here are a few clips:

Gerardo R., as he is known in court documents, never beat his children. He did not torture them or stab them or brutalize them. He was a loving father who’d always been a part of his children’s lives — and when their mother lost custody, he immediately stepped forward. But he had to fight for his children’s right to live with him.

Why? Because he was unable to afford housing deemed satisfactory to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. For that, his children were denied the chance to live with their father and even had their right to have him in their lives terminated forever, until a California appellate court intervened.
Read the rest of this entry »

The LA Times reports today that records acquired by reporters Garrett Therolf and Kim Christensen, through a California Public Records Act request, showed that fourteen children died of abuse and neglect in Los Angeles County last year despite the fact that each of those kids came from that had supposedly “been under the scrutiny of child welfare officials”

The family of a boy who died of multiple skull fractures had been reported 25 times to the Department of Children and Family Services and the mother had a known history of methamphetamine use. In other families, children died within months or even one day after a social worker’s last visit.

[SNIP]

All told, the records show, 32 children in the county died in 2008 from abuse and neglect, including physical assault, drowning and malnourishment. Eighteen of the children were in families that had never been in contact with the family services agency.

But the other 14 families should have been well-known to child welfare officials, based on previous referrals and investigations. For whatever reasons, many of the earlier allegations were not substantiated

In case after case the reports acquired by the Times details horrific suffering on the part of children who should have been protected.

Agency officials told the reporters that they “lack adequate resources to handle daunting caseloads.”

(By the way, this is an excuse I’d buy that a little more if I hadn’t spent the last two weeks in a state of fury while I reviewed documents and notes from a 2004 case where DCFS took the time to snatch six kids from decent parents who happened to be former gang members whom the local cops disliked.)

Good for the LA Times for bringing these cases to light.

Now it remains to be seen what the County of Los Angeles going to do with the horrific findings.

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PS: AND SPEAKING OF DANGEROUS….More on the dangers of Men’s Central Jail either later today or first thing tomorrow.

Thank you to the LA Times and the SF Chron for their editorials supporting the bill, AB12, which came before the state legislature this week. The bill is a measure aimed at fixing one of the largest problems in California’s foster care system—namely the fact that foster care kids are cut off from nearly all help or support the minute they turn 18. This occurs with very little preparation or help in getting an apartment, a car, a job, health care….and all the other elements of adult life. They are given a few referrals and a bag holding their possessions. That’s it.

As a consequence, sixty-five percent of those who “age out” do so with nowhere to live, and 51 percent are unemployed

When combined with whatever abuse and/or neglect brought a kid into the system, the effects of this sudden abandonment are stark. One in four former foster kids who matured in the system will be incarcerated within two years of leaving foster care. One in five will become homeless before they turn 20-years old.

Only around three percent of those who age out in foster care will ever go to college.

AB12 proposes to use Federal funds allocated by a bill signed into law by George Bush to extend the care and benefits for most foster kids until they’re 21 years old. The three year extension, it turns out, makes a big difference.

Here’s what the Chronicle said.

Myriad studies have shown that the period immediately after “emancipation” at age 18 is the most precarious for a foster youth. These young people – our children, our collective responsibility – are many times more likely than teenagers with family-support structures to become homeless, incarcerated or pregnant. Their chances of getting a college degree are somewhere in the single digits, according to various studies.

A new study of three states (Illinois, which extends foster care benefits to age 21; and Iowa and Wisconsin, which do not) underscores the cost-benefit ratio of helping young adults get on the right track. The study found that each dollar spent on extended-years support to foster youths returns $2.40 as a result of their increased education alone. If anything, that cost-benefit analysis is extremely conservative, considering the state costs of incarceration, teen pregnancy, homelessness and mental-health programs.

Just to put all this in perspective, a 2007 report indicated that, nationwide, kids who grow up with their own parents typically don’t become self-sufficient until age 26 — and their parents on average contribute $44,000 after they turn 18 in rent, utilities, food, medical care, college tuition, transportation and other necessities to help them get there.

Why then, are we surprised when kids who are “emancipated” from the foster care system generally do so poorly? And why haven’t we done anything to remedy the situation? (Yes, our budget situation is desperate but it is, after all, less expensive to help a kid for a few extra years, than it is to incarcerated him.)

And here’s what the Times said:

For years, thousands of California youths were abused or neglected twice over — first by parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t provide basic care, then by governmental agencies that sent them to live with strangers instead of extended family, only to cut them off from all support on their 18th birthdays.

[SNIP]

[AB12] would represent a huge step forward in fulfilling the state’s duty to see abused and neglected kids through childhood, in the care of loving family members when possible, and into college or paying jobs. But some caution is in order. As final language is hammered out, there may be pressure to divert savings to help with the state’s budget woes instead of reinvesting in foster care. That would be a costly mistake;

The human and the dollar cost of not investing in grown-up foster children has already been shown to be very, very high.

It is time for us, as a state, to act as if these kids who have been put in our care genuinely matter to us.

Actually, it’s way past time.

It gets worse.

Yesterday Texas Child Protective Services, was told by the 3rd circuit Court of Appeals that they had no business taking over 450 children away from their families, that there simply wasn’t credible evidence to suggest that the majority of children were in enough danger to justify their removal.

Then today, CPS essentially said to the 3rd Circuit Court that it didn’t care about the court’s pesky opinion, that it was keeping the kids, and was going to the Supreme Court to overturn Thursday’s ruling.

Timothy Lynch, writing for the National Review, has a very thoughtful and informative run down on some of the underlying issues contained in this situation. Plus, he has reports from neutral observers that suggest CPS has repeatedly dealt with the children in ways that cannot help but traumatize them. Here are some clips:

Culture shock is not a crime. Today marriage and child bearing are commonly delayed into one’s 30s, so there was some culture shock when the news broke about a raid on a religious sect where teen pregnancy was reportedly the norm. Texas law-enforcement officials may recoil from such behavior but it cannot send agents out on a whim to enforce a new set of rules. The Mormon splinter group, known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), moved to Texas precisely because the state’s marriage laws were amenable to their religious beliefs. In 2004, the year FLDS members moved to Eldorado, Texas law allowed girls as young as 14 to marry with the permission of their parents. In 2005, Texas lawmakers heeded the advice of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff to raise the minimum age that minors with parents’ permission can marry from 14 to 16. Shurtleff had experience dealing with FLDS communities in Utah. Texas also upgraded the penalties for bigamy from a misdemeanor to felony. There is nothing untoward about that — so long as those new laws are applied prospectively.

A Presumption of Guilt. Six weeks have now passed since the April 3 raid on the FLDS ranch and there have been no arrests for child abuse or child rape. The raid was prompted by an anonymous phone call by a lady named “Sarah.” “Sarah” claimed that she was 16, that she lived at the FLDS ranch in Eldorado, that she was forced into a marriage with a much older man by the name of Dale Barlow, that she had one eight-month-old child and that she was pregnant again. Texas CPS executed a search warrant at the ranch but could not find “Sarah” or Dale Barlow. Police now believe that the phone call was a hoax by a woman in Colorado who has a history of submitting false reports. Dale Barlow was found in Arizona. He has been interviewed by investigators, but Texas has chosen not to have Barlow arrested even though they had an arrest warrant for him when the initial raid took place. Texas CPS officials now stress that the seizure of the children is a “civil” matter unrelated to the raid and that the constitutional safeguards that pertain to criminal investigations do not apply. FLDS parents and their appointed lawyers were initially bewildered by the Kafkaesque manner of Texas’s “child removal” proceedings. The presumption of innocence was turned on its head, which means the parents were expected to prove a negative — that they committed no crime. Until yesterday’s ruling, CPS had been able to whimsically thwart any challenge to its authority. Some parents, for example, have tried to present government documentation, such as birth certificates and drivers licenses, to show they have violated no marriage law so that they could retrieve their children. Unacceptable, said CPS. When some mothers sought to meet with their attorneys before police interviews, CPS informed the mothers that if they left the shelter for such an appointment, they would not be able to rejoin their children, which are in CPS custody.

[SNIP]

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay the women are very Stepford-y, the hairdos are aggressively retro, and five girls were positively identified as having had sex when they were under age. The latter constitutes abuse.

But all of the above did not justify the removal of 468 children from their homes and families by Texas Child Protective Services.

This is why Thursday’s 3rd Court of Appeals opinion was a welcome one. The court wrote that the previous court, which had allowed the mass kid snatching, had “abused its discretion” by relying on “legally and factually insufficient” evidence to maintain custody of children whose parents are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Scott Henson of the terrific Texas blog, Grits for Breakfast, points out that the heart of the matter is embodied in Footnote 11 of the opinion, which reads as follows:

The simple fact, conceded by the Department, that not all FLDS families are polygamous or allow their female children to marry as minors demonstrates the danger of removing children from their homes based on the broad-brush ascription of every aspect of a belief system to every person living among followers of the belief system or professing to follow the belief system.”

Everybody’s got articles and Op Eds on the case today. But the LA Times hits it dead on with its editorial Here’s the opening (but read the whole thing):

Texas’ top prosecutors and child services directors should have read their Arthur Miller before tearinghundreds of children from their mothers who belonged to a polygamist sect. In “The Crucible,” the playwright’s allegorical take on McCarthyism, a hysterical teen in Salem, Mass., sparks the infamous witch hunt as the adults around her give deadly vent to their own fears. With the sanctimonious certitude of Miller’s Judge Danforth, Texas officials assumed mass evil among the residents of the Yearning for Zion ranch and acted accordingly. Fortunately, the parents got a more impartial appellate court panel, which ruled Thursday that the state had overstepped its authority.

By the way, a big bouquet of virtual roses to Texas Rio Grand Legal Aid for taking the case…and getting a win.

There have been no big reviews in the New York Times, the LA Times or the Washington Post or, heaven forbid, the New York Review of Books.

Yet, I noticed Sunday morning that a new book was residing at a comfy number eight on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, just a couple of notches below Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You).

The unsung book selling quietly like hotcakes is called Hope’s Boy, written by a man named Andrew Bridge. As a child, Bridge spent 11 years in Los Angeles County foster care after he was taken away from his mentally ill mother. For part of that time, he lived in the now-closed, Dickensian hell hole that was McClaren Hall, LA’s once-notorious group residence for foster kids.

Bridge’s was a childhood that statistically-speaking nearly always predicts failure: A mind-boggling 50 percent of the kids who come to adulthood within the foster care system will be homeless within two years. Only 2 percent of the nation’s 500,000-plus children in foster care ever get a college degree. Bridge blew the odds out of the water by getting a scholarship to Wesleyan, then becoming a Fulbright Scholar, and graduating from Harvard Law School.

Since graduation, he has spent most of his adult life advocating for America’s children who, for one reason or another, are stuck in the awful social service mechanism known as “the system.”

I first met Bridge in early 2000 when I was working on an article for the LA Weekly about the foster care system.

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