Fixing Foster Care: Does DCFS Need Its Own Citizens’ Commission?…and More

When he started 15 months ago, most felt that DCFS Chief Philip Browning was exactly the right person to turn around LA County’s chronically troubled foster care agency, an unwieldy bureaucratic structure that, in the last two decades, has had a habit of devouring any poor soul who has the timerity to try to run it.

Many still believe that Browning may be the right guy. Yet, there is a rising chorus of voices suggesting that maybe he could use some outside help. (We’ll get back to that “help” idea in a minute.)

Worry about whether Browning is making enough of a dent in the department’s dysfunction particularly intensified with the death of Gabriel Fernandez of Palmdale, the 8-year-old who was reportedly fatally beaten by his mother and her boyfriend, after multiple people made repeated reports to DCFS that the child was being badly abused.

Yet it wasn’t just the awful death of this little boy by itself that caused concern about DCFS to spike.

It was Browning’s reaction to questioning on the topic by first LA columnist Steve Lopez, and then by LA Times columnist Sandy Banks that raised alarm, as he talked about the difficulty in changing the “culture,” among other tepid excuses.

Judge Michael Nash, the Presiding Judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, had such a strong reaction to the Browning’s words when he read them Banks column, that he took the unusual step of blasting a long email to the Times along with around 40 judges, commissioners and other officials of the LA Superior Court who deal with foster kid cases—plus the staffs of various elected officials.

You can read the letter Judge Nash’s letter in its entirety. But here’s a clip from it:

….You say you want heads to roll because of what went wrong with respect to the death of young Gabriel Hernandez. Do you think that is going to fix the child welfare systemic problems that contributed to his death? I think not.

For almost 20 years, my colleagues and I have imposed sanctions on DCFS for not following court orders. They pay thousands of dollars every month but don’t fix the problems causing the sanctions.

I will tell you what else won’t work.…utterances from the DCFS Director that social workers feel “hamstrung by a departmental obsession with keeping children with their families”; that the “policy was the product of a previous culture change aimed at reducing foster care rolls and strengthening troubled families with resources”; that social workers “feel pressured to leave kids with families…But safety of the child should be the primary goal.”

I’ve got news for him. Our laws require social workers to make reasonable efforts to prevent or eliminate the need for removal from the home before a child is removed, but not at the risk of the child’s safety. To the extent that there exists this misguided notion of blind allegiance to maintaining the family without consideration of safety, that is clearly a leadership issue within the department that leadership needs to clarify as soon as possible.

What we commonly see in the courts are a significant number of cases where the opposite occurs. That is, cases which are filed and children removed because of fear of retribution in the department, negative publicity or both….

[BIG SNIP]

My point is that it is bad social work to remove children when there are ways to keep them safely at home as the law requires, and it is bad social work to leave children in the home when it is unsafe. The problem is that DCFS can’t seem to strike the appropriate balance. It takes leadership and more to avoid blind adherence to one direction or the other.

In truth, it would be hard to find anyone who understands the complexities of this world better than Judge Nash. He has served on the Juvenile Court bench since 1990, and since 1995, has been either Presiding Judge or Supervising Judge of the Juvenile Dependency Court. In those more than two decades, he’s won a string of honors, pushed through various innovoations in the court, including shoving open the doors of dependency court to allow in journalists, and did so with determination and good humor despite loud oposition.

Thus if he’s angry and discouraged about matters at DCFS, one suspects the rest of us should sit up and take notice.

As I was muttering to myself about these issues late Monday night, I noticed that LA Times editorial board member, Robert Greene, had posted his own expression of frustration on the matter, then suggested we may need an investigatory commission to sort things out—a la the recent Citizens Commission on Jail Violence. Here’s a clip from Rob’s essay:

(Read the rest after the jump.)

….there have been so many other investigations, reports, layers of oversight and reorganizations and they have come to nothing. The department has had 17 permanent or temporary directors over the last 25 years. There is a Commission for Children and Families, a Children’s Special Investigative Unit, an Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, the sheriff, the district attorney, task forces that report directly to the Board of Supervisors, panels that bypass the board altogether, a chief executive officer who was for a while placed over the department and then pushed aside. There have been state audits. There have been lawsuits. There has been withering reporting from this newspaper and others. The department, or its leaders, or its front-line child welfare workers, complain that they can’t get anything done without the full backing of the public, and they complain that they can’t get anything done when they’re subjected to intense public scrutiny.

The department seems paralyzed by too many moving parts, too many individuals and agencies at war with each other, pressing their own agendas or ideologies, jockeying for power rather than working for the well-being of children. Every time there is a news story or a pronouncement, managers and child welfare workers turn their attention away from their work to respond, to cooperate, to stonewall, to defend themselves. One social worker describes the situation as being like a mechanic trying to figure out what’s wrong with a customer’s car – while the customer is standing over her, screaming, “Just fix it! Just fix it!”

In short, the place needs something or someone that produces a game change. DCFS has defeated a pile of well-intentioned directors and it is still dangerously dysfunctional all these years later. Browning has made improvements, but Nash and others are saying it’s not enough when we are talking about the lives of children.

Could a DCFS Citizens’ Commission help? I don’t know.

The Jails Commission didn’t solve all the problems at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, not by a long shot. But it assuredly shook up the status quo, had much to do with the forced retirement of a toxic undersheriff who had actively stood in the way of jail reform, precipitated the hiring of new head of jails who shows early promise with her management, and pointed the way for a widened federal investigation. And there is more change, it is fervently hoped, still to come.

So it is worth putting the notion of a DCFS Commission on the table for discussion?

Yes. It would seem so.

Misters and Madam Supervisors….over to you.

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AND IN OTHER NEWS….LA DISTRICT ATTORNEY JACKIE LACEY HAS ORDERED HER DEPARTMENT TO PLAY FAIR, SEEK JUSTICE AND HAND OVER THE KIND OF EVIDENCE TO DEFENDANTS THAT THE LAW REQUIRES (WHATTA CONCEPT!)

Forgive the snippy tone in the headline above. We don’t meant to make light of this development, which is greatly to Lacey’ credit. But it would have been nice if her predecessors had seen fit to do the right thing without public clamor and the threat of a large ACLU lawsuit. (Just sayin’.)

Linda Deutch from the AP has more on this story. Here’s a clip.

Responding to a civil rights lawsuit, the Los Angeles district attorney issued a special directive to prosecutors Tuesday ordering them to “play fair” and hand over to defendants evidence favorable to their cases including background on peace officers and other government employees.

District Attorney Jackie Lacey said that prosecutors cannot decline to disclose evidence that appears to help the defendant even if the prosecutor believes the information is false.

“It is imperative that everyone on the prosecution team understands and complies with the rule of law and the policy set forth in these directives,” Lacey said in a written statement.
“The integrity of the criminal justice system requires that prosecutors play fair in seeking justice,” she said.

Lacey was responding to a civil rights lawsuit filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union accusing the Los Angeles County Sheriff and the district attorney’s office of concealing evidence regarding deputy assaults at Men’s Central Jail….

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BOARD OF SUPERVISORS VOTES TO TERMINATE CONTRACT WITH BELEAGUERED LA FOSTER CARE PROVIDER “TEENS HAPPY HOMES”

The LA Times Garrett Therolf has an update on the vote to close Teens Happy Homes. (Therolf was the first to report on the agency’s problems.)

Here’s a clip from his story;

….Under the terms of the decision, the county will give Teens a 90-day notice that its contract is being terminated. The contract allows the county to cancel without having to explain why or face a penalty, officials said.

County supervisors Tuesday ordered the Department of Children and Family Services to help Teens’ foster parents try to seek licenses directly from the state or connect with other foster care contractors so children now in their care can remain so, if the homes are deemed safe.

Teens’ Chief Executive Beautina Robinson and the agency’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Many child welfare advocates applauded the county’s decision and said they suspected that the true rate of abuse at many foster care agencies is higher than reported because victims fail to disclose incidents out of fear of retaliation.