LOS ANGELES COUNTY: FIXING THE SYSTEM

IN THE SORDID UNDERWORLD OF SUNny Los Angeles County, where 40,000 children have been removed from their violent, neglectful or drug-addicted families, the pink-stucco True Way Baptist Church may well be a station on the road to salvation. Just ask Delores Mayes, 28, whose children were seized and placed in foster homes when her crack habit got out of hand. Faced with losing them for good, Mayes entered a detox program for six months but had nowhere to take them when she emerged. That is when the church, under contract to the county, stepped in: its outreach workers found her housing and furniture. She reconciled with the children’s father, a former crack addict himself, who secured two steady jobs, as a fish-market clerk and a custodian.

But the church’s efforts did not stop there. For months afterward, its social workers visited the family at least twice a week, eyeballing the kids for signs of neglect, offering counsel on parenting and managing the home and keeping the faith. “They helped me believe in myself,” Mayes says, “to realize that anything was possible.” John Jones, the children’s father, had learned to smoke crack at the age of 16 from his own father and had spent years in jail after stealing to support his habit. Painfully withdrawn, he says, “I’ve been doing a little talking now.” And planning: “I always wanted to own my own fish market, and now I want to live up to that dream.” The couple is set to wed. Once off crack, Jones explains with a sidelong glance at Mayes, “I finally saw what a beautiful woman she is.” “Don’t mind if I blush,” says Mayes, breaking out in a broad grin and bouncing her pig-tailed one-year-old on her lap.

The Mayes-Jones success story is no manna from heaven. It is the fruit of a long, gritty battle to reform the Los Angeles department of child services. Only five years ago, the county was fighting a lawsuit by public-interest groups over a bureaucracy so lax that many abused children were not even visited once a month, the state’s legal minimum. “Kids were dying because they were not adequately supervised,” says Carole Shauffer, director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center. “Foster parents had to make do with ‘drive-by visits’: they would bring the kids to the curb, because caseworkers didn’t have time to get out of the car.”

As of 1989, the county had paid $18 million in settlements to children who were abused while in its custody. In the case of Jesus, a nine-year-old who weighed only 28 lbs. and could hardly speak after his angel dust-addicted parents committed suicide, county workers failed to visit him in his foster home for four months. During that time, he was beaten, sodomized, burned on his genitals and nearly drowned by his foster parents. He became a spastic paraplegic. By 1990 the state was threatening to take over Los Angeles County’s child-welfare-services system.

In 1991, however, the system’s new director, Peter Digre, overhauled management. Since then the budget has grown from $453 million to $772 million, taking advantage of state and federal funds for a skyrocketing caseload. The number of caseworkers rose from 1,500 to 2,000, and an innovative program for community-based “family preservation” was initiated after a yearlong study by a watchdog commission. No longer would social workers be limited to two stark choices in cases of abuse or neglect: leave the kids with their families with minimal supervision or send them to foster and group homes, where loving nurture is all too rare. There was a new way: unite children with their parents while offering intensive services to the whole family, in their own homes and neighborhoods, and assure the children’s safety by frequent visits. “We call it ‘in your face,'” says administrator Barbara Lane.

Los Angeles’ family-preservation program, hailed as a national model, has grown to serve 10,000 children in three years. Unlike some short-term programs, it offers families a year or more of supervision. Rather than require parents to travel to impersonal county offices, it is community based, with churches, Boys and Girls Clubs and day-care centers under contract to provide services. And it is comprehensive: each of Los Angeles’ 23 “networks,” such as the one at True Way Baptist Church, offers up to 22 services tailored to each family’s needs, from emergency rent money to parenting classes.

“What drives child abuse is poverty and destitution,” Digre says. When funds for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) were cut 6% in 1992, he says, “child abuse and neglect immediately rose. Families get caught in a downward spiral: first their utilities are shut off so they can’t keep the baby bottles cold. Then they get behind in their rent and move in with friends or relatives who may have a criminal history. Forty percent of our families cannot find housing. Half can’t find day care, so they can’t work. Two-thirds have drug problems.”

While family preservation has sometimes been criticized as an excuse to leave children in dangerous situations, Los Angeles requires that both a law-enforcement officer and a social worker visit the family after any report of violent abuse. And both must agree that the child is safe; otherwise foster care is mandated. The result is that Los Angeles’ program is focused less on parents who abuse their children outright than on those who neglect their children, allowing them to go without meals, school, clean clothes or emotional support. It seeks to prevent violence before the stress mounts. Each network is paid $1,460 a month for a family requiring the most intense level of assistance, and such a family must be visited at least 16 times a month by a licensed social worker. Since maintaining a single child in foster care costs $3,000 a month, the network system is a bargain. In areas of the county where the program is in effect, the use of foster care has held steady, despite a ballooning number of children in poverty. In areas where family preservation has yet to be implemented, foster-care referrals have risen 37% in three years, paralleling a nationwide increase. One measure of success: child-abuse deaths in the county are down about one-half, from 61 in 1991 to 37 last year.

In True Way’s basement last week, eight women and two men listened raptly as Novel Stokes, a father of five with a Ph.D in psychology, expounded on parenting. “Who do these kids learn from?” he asked. “Their parents!” they answered in unison. “Yes,” Stokes insisted. “If we as parents are screaming and hollering and disorganized, what can we expect our children to be?” The message hit home for Ozzie Williams, 56, a former crack addict who is rearing two teenage sons. Williams, now a born-again Christian, said his kids were “used to being yelled at. I learned to tone myself down.” Churchworkers helped him find housing, furniture, psychiatric counseling and tutoring.

While the Los Angeles program–37% federally funded–wins praise from children’s advocates, its sponsors fear its benefits will be canceled out by legislation now moving through Congress. With 4 million to 10 million children scheduled to be cut from the nation’s welfare rolls in the next seven years through caps on afdc and Supplemental Security Income, two major assistance programs, Digre predicts that Los Angeles will see more than 17,000 new cases of child abuse due to poverty and family stress. “Funding cuts will mean more abuse and more deaths,” says Nancy Daly, who heads the county’s 50-member family-preservation committee. Congressional Republicans, however, say the revisions merely target bureaucratic waste and allow states more flexibility.

At the True Way Baptist Church, Mayes knows little about the controversy. But she offers up a personal motto: “There’s a way out, no matter how bad the circumstances in our lives.” She, at least, has found the way.