LA’s Foster Kids v. DCFS v. LA Times Reporting

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.