On Wednesday, LA County’s Chief Executive Office (CEO), Bill Fujioka released a report reviewing the deaths of children in LA county whose families were under the supervision of or had been investigated by the Department of Children and Family Services—DCFS. Fujioka compliled the report in response to a motion authored by Supervisors Mark Ridley Thomas and Mike Antonovich, who asked for 10 years of figures on kid deaths, so that the causes might be better assessed and future deaths might be prevented.
The motion was, in part, a response to some articles in the LA Times (like this one) that suggested more kids were dying while left with their families after being investigated by DCFS. The Times implied that the increase in deaths could be due to a change in foster care policy called the Title IV-E waiver, that meant an effort to keep more kids with their families and provide support for those families, rather than removing them to the foster care system.
Many foster care watchers, myself included, questioned the Times’ conclusions and worried that a bad diagnosis might have the unintended consequence of more kids being damaged by being unnecessarily yanked from their families.
The CEO’s report helps to clarify matters by teasing out more details on those awful yearly deaths.
This is from Ridley-Thomas’s office’s statement regarding the new report:
It is particularly important to resist the temptation to exploit child deaths to push ideological agendas, the Supervisor said: “The CEO’s report shows we cannot honestly link child deaths to specific policies or the performance of particular government departments or individuals.”
In 2010, the total number of child deaths for children with DCFS histories was 175, in line with the annual average since 2000 of 166. “It would be negligent to be satisfied with any total more than zero; but it is also reckless to suggest there are quick fixes,” he said.
“We must shun policy gimmicks that produce sound bites for news conferences but yield no true solutions. We must not trivialize the enormity of the challenge, and we expect that all in society understand this is a problem for all of us to solve.”
It is particularly important to resist the temptation to exploit child deaths to push ideological agendas, the Supervisor said: “The CEO’s report shows we cannot honestly link child deaths to specific policies or the performance of particular government departments or individuals.”
In 2010, the total number of child deaths for children with DCFS histories was 175, in line with the annual average since 2000 of 166. “It would be negligent to be satisfied with any total more than zero; but it is also reckless to suggest there are quick fixes,” he said.
“We must shun policy gimmicks that produce sound bites for news conferences but yield no true solutions. We must not trivialize the enormity of the challenge, and we expect that all in society understand this is a problem for all of us to solve.”
Yep.
And to demonstrate the complexity of the problem there was this saddest of facts in the report: Nearly one-in-five (17%) of the children who died in LA County in 2010 had a parent who had themselves been referred to DCFS as a child.