Funding Better Foster Oversight Will Save Lives, Money
#15 FAMILY SERVICES
At any given time, 30,000 children are in the care of L.A. County’s foster care system, run by the Department of Children and Family Services.
Under the best possible circumstances, taking a child away from his or her parents and siblings would be traumatic. In L.A. County, where the system is overwhelmed and poorly run, it’s often a defining event, placing children on a preventable, downward path.
Simply put, the system doesn’t work.
Within two years of exiting foster care when they turn 18, between 25 percent and 50 percent of young adults become homeless, 25 percent have been incarcerated and 60 percent of the girls are pregnant.
Director David Sanders, who is credited with turning around a much smaller system in Minneapolis before arriving in Los Angeles last year, is trying to keep more children with their families by encouraging parents to work out their problems through counseling. But doing so runs counter to funding incentives.
Currently, a large portion of the department’s federal funding is tied to children who are removed from their families. If the child is returned, the money stops. (The county Board of Supervisors is trying to wrangle an exception from these rules.)
In the meantime, the department’s record-keeping is woefully inadequate as it loses track of children moving from home to home.
According to Janis Spire, director of the Alliance for Children’s Rights, the county has better means of tracking stray animals and than children in the foster care system.
The department needs to invest in technology to be apprised of a child’s immunizations, school records, and reasons for leaving one home for another. That would help cut back on foster children receiving the same shots over and over again and also help weed out abusive foster families.
Of course, throwing money at a problem is no guarantee of solving it. While the number of cases assigned to each social worker needs to be lowered in part a funding problem there also needs to be increased accountability of social workers’ performance. This may mean more paperwork, but documentation of each child’s trip through the foster care maze is a non-negotiable baseline.
To do this, consideration should be given to a uniform set of forms to document each medical, psychological, developmental assessment and each home visit by a social worker. Social workers must visit homes weekly.
When Sanders took control of the department in March 2003, less than a third of its staff had direct contact with families and children. So far, he has reallocated 200 or so to casework and reduced staff through attrition by another 150. He should continue to pursue his goal of 50-50 balance of caseworkers and administrative staff.
Further, the department must develop measurable criteria for contracted services. The county spends millions on private contracts to provide services to foster children; it should implement performance-based contracting to get value and production for that investment.
Lastly, social agencies around the county must communicate with each other to better serve children in need of attention. When LAPD investigates a domestic abuse, drug or gang call, DCFS should be privy to that situation if it involves a child (some 30 percent of the domestic situations investigated by DCFS caseworkers also are police matters).
How to ensure that this all takes place? Perhaps have a citizens’ commission appointed by the county’s Board of Supervisors to oversee the department. That would allow for more than just the political oversight currently being provided.
FAMILY SERVICES
Proposal: Overhaul Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services
Obstacles: Federal funding tied to removing children from their homes, bureaucratic department structure, misplaced priorities
Cost: Variable
Time Frame: Starting right now
