A Lifeline to Foster Kids

Shortly after Adam was born in 1980, his mother left him to his father, who soon abandoned him to California’s hidebound, understaffed foster care system. Adam cycled in and out of seven foster homes, suffering neglect and physical and sexual abuse, before being placed, at 5, with a couple who tried hard to give him some semblance of home. By then, Adam was showing signs of emotional trauma--angry outbursts, running away--that ultimately led the couple to give him up to a group home. Adam’s problems escalated, and since age 14 he has been in and out of state mental hospitals, where he has committed several assaults.

Adam’s story, recounted last year in a report by the state’s Little Hoover Commission, is all too typical of how California’s foster care system has let children down for so long in so many wrenching ways.

As a state grand jury report released last month shows, nowhere are these failures more shocking than in Los Angeles County. A key problem, the grand jurors concluded, is that county social workers do not pass along essential background information, like HIV status or history of violent behavior, to the foster parents who take a child in. Then, feeling unprepared to meet the child’s needs, they often reject him or her, starting the sort of painful cycle that left Adam indelibly scarred.

County foster care director Anita Bock says that much of the problem can be fixed by correcting social workers’ misunderstanding of state confidentiality rules. Bock, who took office last December, has ordered social workers to share any and all information they think would better prepare foster parents for their responsibilities.

Her directive will not reassure some social workers, who fear violating the department’s encyclopedic book of rules. Bock vows to whittle the tome down to several dozen pages by next year and says she could finish the job this year if law firms would volunteer a few hours each to her agency.

The county Board of Supervisors should help Bock keep her pledge; foster children have heard years and years of lofty but finally empty promises.

In the 1990s, as head of the Miami office of Florida’s Department of Children and Families, Bock helped pioneer computer models to depict social problems geographically--creating maps, for example, that show the neighborhoods where teen birthrates are highest. Here, Bock faces a far more basic challenge: creating the kind of online system for tracking children and foster homes that many other urban regions have had since the 1980s. She wrote Microsoft founder Bill Gates, asking help to develop such a system, but expectably got a form-letter rejection. She needs to think a lot more realistically.

Ultimately, the key to properly caring for L.A.’s foster children is not software but leadership that creates a culture of open dialogue and trust in a department that has feared and rejected change for too long.