Fixing Failed Families: Job for Heroes or Fools?

The ball sailed over the fence, setting off a dog’s territorial barking. Noe scrambled after it. But two competing voices froze the 13-year-old at the top of the chain link, and there he teetered, precariously balanced between two families and two lives.

It was a Saturday afternoon and 3-year-old Leticia, 16-year-old Jorge and their six brothers and sisters whose ages fall in between -- Nan, Noe, Marisol, David, Oscar and Armando -- were with their birth mother, Maria, for the weekly visit social workers had arranged. Months earlier, according to interviews and documents, Maria had stopped taking her medicine for epilepsy and depression. When she landed in the hospital, Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services put the children in foster homes.

Now Maria saw her offspring only on weekends, when three sets of foster parents ferried them to this Hacienda Heights park. That afternoon, when one of the kids booted the ball into a neighboring home’s backyard, Maria urged Noe to get it. One of the foster fathers ordered Noe down. With the dog yapping, Noe glanced in confusion from his mother to this new authority and back before finally abandoning the ball.

By evening, Maria had returned to Whittier, where the family had lived. The children were back to their foster homes in Riverside County’s Moreno Valley and the San Bernardino County towns of Colton and Fontana. And that’s where they remain while their social workers, sagging under the weight of rules, regulations and caseloads of 40 children or more, crisscross three counties attempting to knit the unraveling clan back together -- all the while debating, no doubt, whether they are on a taxpayer-funded fool’s errand.

What’s Best for the Kids

The law and common sense prescribe that when a parent makes an effort to do his or her job, the county must also make a serious effort to knit the failing family back together before forever removing a child. Social workers call this “family reunification.”

In the small yard of the Fontana foster home in which they now live, four of Maria’s children show off the tomatoes and flowers they put in the soil with their own hands. But the transplanted siblings -- Nan, 15, Marisol, 12, David, 10, and Oscar, 6 -- can’t entirely shake the frightening sense of being uprooted that came when social workers pulled them from their mother’s home.

No reasonable adult would doubt that the children are better off now. The question social workers still struggle to answer, however, is: What can be done to give them the best shot at a happy, healthy life? The default answer -- the one that costs taxpayers the least, as it happens -- should be: Restore the original family, if at all possible.

Simple geography ranks high among the catalog of problems that keep the Department of Children and Family Services from doing that as often as it should for the 50,000 children in its charge.

Noe and his brother Jorge are happy in their bustling home in Colton, with its cheery Christmas lights and other foster and adopted children who create a familiar cacophony. But they miss their friends. “The streets here,” Noe says softly, “seem lonely for some reason.” And they fret constantly about their siblings, peppering a social worker with questions that lingered after their last meeting in the park: Why was Leticia’s hair messed up? Is Oscar doing his reading?

In trying to meet the needs of Maria’s children while the county wrestles with reuniting the clan, their social worker must drive a loop of almost 150 miles, heading from Santa Fe Springs to Fontana, to Colton and then out the Riverside Freeway to Moreno Valley. Maria, still in Whittier, is too far away to attend her children’s weekly group therapy sessions. If the agency had been able to find homes for the children near Whittier, the kids could see more of each other and their mom. And their social workers might have more time for the kids -- time to go beyond the basics by visiting their teachers, perhaps. Group therapy, family meetings and doctor and dentist visits would be vastly simplified and more productive. The children would have the stabilizing continuity of friends and schools.

Using mainly state and federal funds, the county gives a set amount of money to foster parents for each child’s food, clothing and other expenses. Good foster parents lose money on the deal. So finding volunteers is hard, and the county has largely relegated the job to private recruiting companies.

Now the county needs to change these companies’ habit of mining families where they increasingly are settling: far from the urban core. Because a familiar, supportive community is the next best thing to crackerjack birth parents, when contracts expire in April, the agency needs to renegotiate with the companies that provide most foster homes and demand that they recruit more local foster families.

Foster Parents as Pros

The department should also follow Illinois’ example and professionalize a corps of highly trained foster parents. Subsidizing their housing costs or paying them a modest salary -- particularly those who take in kids with severe emotional difficulties -- is a better bargain than the $40,000 the county pays to keep a child in a group home, and better for the kids, too.

Another way to prevent the time drain that comes from social workers pinballing from, say, Lancaster to San Pedro in one day, is for the county to find and fully staff regional offices in the neighborhoods with the most need and recruit more local therapists and tutors to serve neighborhood children accordingly. As things stand, astonishingly, children in South-Central Los Angeles, where there’s plenty of need, are visited by workers stationed in Torrance and other suburban offices. Ultimately, though, trying to put a family back together isn’t as smart as making an effort to keep whole any family not blatantly beyond redemption.

With that in mind, child welfare agencies in Oregon and New York and in other countries do a much better job than Los Angeles County of using such tactics as “family conferencing” -- a process that gathers relatives, friends and others to create a plan to help parents conquer the alcoholism, domestic violence and other miseries they have visited upon their children before thrusting a child into the vast bureaucratic “family” of foster care.

For too long, however, L.A. County’s Department of Children and Family Services has been too eager to drag parents to dependency court, where due process, including presumed innocence, is subjugated to the interests of protecting a child.

Everyone has cause for outrage when the county uses its extraordinary power to break family bonds and then fails to give the children something better. But no one could suggest that Maria didn’t have, and miss, opportunities to keep her family intact -- a sad social work reality.

Christmas Season Chaos

Two years ago, days before Christmas, Maria signed a “Voluntary Family Maintenance Service Plan.” The department sent therapists and social workers to teach Maria how to keep a cleaner house and make sure she got her medicine. They drove her kids to school when needed and made sure they were clean and got their eyes checked.

But none of this, according to records and interviews, motivated Maria to take care of her children or herself. Instead, she foundered and fought with Javier, the youngest children’s father. Jorge, now a bright, articulate 16-year-old, remembers fleeing outside to avoid the battles. “Shut up!” he shouted. “The little kids are getting scared!”

Just after Thanksgiving last year, an agency “teaching and demonstrating instructor” arrived for a regular visit and found Maria in a stupor. Social workers drove her to the hospital. They’d deemed Javier, who was living elsewhere, unreliable. So they took the kids to the Santa Fe Springs county child welfare office, where the youngest played with dolls and toy cars while the others watched the social workers pore through files and pound their phones’ keypads. By night, the team had parceled the children out to foster homes.

Noe remembers waking up the next morning in Colton, longing for his siblings, overwhelmed with sadness, thinking it must all have been a dream. “How could this happen to us?” he repeatedly asked himself. “Our family was perfect.”

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Tomorrow: Forging Strong Adults From Hard-Knock Kids