Foster Care Rules Left Out Family, Tragedy Followed : Children: Boy’s death raises issue of ‘kinship care’ as alternative to placing neglected youngsters with strangers.

Robert Brown’s life began with a tragedy and ended with one.

He was born, sickly and underweight, to a drug-addicted transient mother and a father who was in prison. He died this month, just shy of his 2nd birthday, allegedly at the hands of the foster mother who was being paid $345 a month by Los Angeles County to take care of him.

Betty Moore, Robert’s aunt, believes she could have prevented the death--if only she could have kept the boy. But after seven months of caring for him, Moore says, she was forced to give him up because she could not obtain the kind of financial aid that is routinely available to foster parents.

Children’s advocates say Moore’s battle with the bureaucracy sheds light on a child welfare system that sometimes makes it easier to send abused and neglected children to live with strangers than to keep them with their own families.

“The system puts up one barrier after another for these families that are trying to keep their children out of foster care,” says Syl De Toledo, a Long Beach social worker who runs a grandparents support group. “This was tragic, for the little boy, for the aunt, every way you look at it. This boy should not have ended up in the foster care system.”

Foster care is designed to provide safe homes for children who are abused, neglected or--as in the case of Robert Brown--abandoned by their parents. But with a chronic shortage of foster homes and an explosion in the number of children needing care, child welfare officials across the country are relying increasingly on “kinship care.”

Although it is not always safe to send abused and neglected children to live with family members, child advocates say relatives are more likely than foster parents to care for a child until adulthood. Relatives also provide important family ties and cultural similarities that foster homes can rarely match.

Yet bureaucratic red tape can be daunting for relatives, many of whom are poor and ill-equipped to negotiate their way through the complex child welfare system. Social workers, meanwhile, say they are often too overburdened to guide them.

“The system is not user-friendly to kin,” says Alex Morales, who runs a nonprofit child welfare agency in Los Angeles and who recently served on a national foster care commission hosted by the Child Welfare League of America, an advocacy group.

Morales says that, although the government encourages kinship care, “it is not helping to provide the financial assistance and other support services (that relatives need.)”

For the most part, the federal government foots the bill for foster care, paying monthly amounts ranging from $300 to nearly $1,000 per child, depending on age and medical needs. Relatives seeking the same assistance, however, face an additional obstacle: federal law requires that the child’s natural mother qualify for welfare payments under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program before foster care money is freed up.

The link between the two federal aid programs sometimes makes it hard for relatives to get the financial help they need, experts say. In Moore’s case, the natural mother was homeless and could not be found, making it impossible for government officials to prove her AFDC eligibility.

“This is one of the technical absurdities of the (foster care) program,” said Steve Fox, director of government relations for the county Department of Children’s Services.

For relatives who do not qualify for federal assistance, some states provide their own aid for foster care. But in California, state law bars relatives from receiving such back-up funding because the Legislature has deemed it too costly.

As a fallback, some relatives turn to the welfare system themselves, obtaining payments from the AFDC program--payments that amount to only a fraction of what a stranger would receive under the foster care program.

There are other hurdles for relatives.

Most states require that foster parents place no more than two children in a room. But relatives, who may be living in close quarters or have children of their own, may not have the extra space.

One Los Angeles woman, who is caring for the children of her sister and her cousin, said she was recently forced to send her own daughter to live with a relative in order to meet the two-to-a-bedroom rule. She is adding another room onto her house to comply with the rule.

“The state is threatening to take the children until this room is completed,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified. “I don’t want to see them in a foster home.”

In Betty Moore’s case, several factors prevented her from continuing to care for her nephew, Robert, including federal regulations and her inability to cope with the bureaucracy.

Moore began caring for Robert last January, after his mother left him with her. Raising three children of her own at the time, Moore paid for their care with a combination of AFDC and government disability payments. But with yet another young one in the house, she began to feel the pinch.

In March, Moore tried for the first time to get assistance for Robert. The baby had been suffering from various infections and Moore could not afford to take him to the doctor. The Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services referred her to the Department of Public Social Services, which administers welfare payments. There, Moore was told that if she could provide a birth certificate for Robert, she could receive welfare payments and Medi-Cal coverage for his doctor visits.

Moore sent for a copy of the birth certificate. It never came. Records show that a Department of Children’s Services social worker attempted to contact welfare authorities to help Moore get the certificate. The call was never returned, and there is no indication in the records that the social worker followed up.

In May, Robert’s mother--who was then homeless and abusing cocaine--reappeared and angrily demanded her son back. Moore, fearing for the child’s safety, notified sheriff’s deputies, who called children’s services officials. This time, the agency went to Juvenile Court, where a judge awarded the aunt temporary custody of Robert, whom one social worker described as “a happy, playful toddler.”

But this still did not ease Moore’s financial burdens.

Once again, she asked for a Medi-Cal card for Robert, who was suffering from ear infections, diarrhea and frequent colds. He had yet to be immunized against childhood diseases. Because Robert was now a ward of the court, social workers thought Moore might be eligible for foster care payments and health benefits.

But the effort failed. Social workers could not find Robert’s natural mother for a meeting to determine whether she qualified for the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program--the federal requirement that child advocates say prevents some relatives from getting financial help.

The meeting--intended to prove that she was not self-supporting--was required even though county officials knew the mother was homeless, that she had been abusing drugs, that her other three children were in foster homes and that social workers had earlier described her as mentally unstable.

Considering Robert’s bad health, and Moore’s inability to get financial aid, the Department of Children’s Services recommended that the boy be placed in a foster home. A social worker told Moore the agency had “no choice.”

In fact, children advocates say, the county had another choice. County social workers, they say, should have continued to help Moore get Robert’s birth certificate, clearing the way for welfare payments and Medi-Cal benefits.

County officials argue, however, that Moore was responsible for getting the birth certificate on her own. Said Schuyler Sprowles, spokesman for the Department of Children’s Services: “We were not in a position to do more for her than we have done.”

As for Moore, she says she was willing to follow the social worker’s advice because Robert was too ill to wait any longer to see a doctor. “He was so sick,” she recalled. “This lady (the social worker) told me she was coming to get him. She said he’d be able to get the shots that he needed. She said he was going to get help.”

In late July, Robert moved in with foster mother Valerie Lacy-Walker and her husband, Samuel. State authorities who licensed the Walker home said the couple appeared to be model candidates.

Valerie Walker taught for a year in a Christian preschool and had taken child psychology classes. Her husband is an associate minister at their church. Their answering machine message opens with the words “Praise the Lord.” In their application for a foster home license, the Walkers pledged “to show love, concern and understanding to children while they’re part of our family.”

While Robert was with the Walkers, Moore pressed forward with her efforts to get financial help so that she could care for him. She filed a formal appeal asking state authorities to overturn the county’s decision to deny her aid under the federal foster care program.

“I have been taking care of Robert Brown for seven months without any assistance from the state,” she said in an Aug. 4 letter to the state Department of Social Services. “I feel that if the state is willing to assist foster parents, the state could just as well give the relatives of Robert Brown assistance, since we have provided assistance for seven months.”

A hearing on her request was held Sept. 26. Moore took a bus to downtown Los Angeles and told the administrative law judge she wanted her nephew back. On Oct. 18, the request was rejected. On Nov. 4, Valerie Walker brought Robert into the emergency room of Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. The boy, covered with bruises, was in full cardiac arrest and soon would be dead. Hospital officials contacted the police, who arrested Walker.

She was charged with murder, accused of beating Robert to death with a stick.

To prevent similar occurrences, child welfare advocates are pushing for reform of the system on several fronts.

In California, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and several other groups have sued the state Department of Social Services in an attempt to compel the state to pay more to recipients who take in their relatives’ children.

Another suit, brought by the Youth Law Center of San Francisco, challenges the constitutionality of the state law barring relatives from receiving state foster care assistance. And Assemblyman Rusty Areias (D-Los Banos), has introduced a bill that would change the state’s foster care law.

The Areias legislation, estimated to cost the state anywhere from $26 million to $217 million, has failed several times because opponents say it is too expensive. But Areias believes the bill would save money by reducing the need to place children in expensive group homes and emergency care facilities.

“It’s really a situation where we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Areias said. “There is all this demagoguery (in the Legislature) about family values and yet this policy has not been changed. . . . It is an inconsistent, archaic, ludicrous policy that infuriates me more than anything.”