Foster care in Los Angeles: The real lessons from the waiver evaluation

WITH ITS “CORE LIVELIHOOD” THREATENED, IS LA’s FOSTER CARE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX USING A FRIENDLY REPORTER TO UNDERCUT REFORM?

            On Monday I wrote about how Los Angeles Times reporter Garrett Therolf misrepresented an evaluation of Los Angeles County’s waiver from federal child welfare funding restrictions.

            Therolf falsely implied that the evaluation suggested the waiver had led to an increase in reabuse of children left in their own homes.  In fact, the evaluation makes no such claim  - and more recent data call into question whether there was such an increase.

          (There's more on Therolf's misreading of the evaluation, and some even more serious blunders in Therolf's reporting, in Daniel Heimpel's excellent column in The Huffington Post, and in this summary from the alternative LA Weekly.)

            But that doesn’t mean all is well with child welfare in Los Angeles – obviously, the system is in chaos, though the primary reason for that is the foster-care panic triggered by Therolf’s sloppy reporting.  But the evaluation also makes clear that the waiver isn’t working as well as it should. 

            What I take from the evaluation – and unlike Therolf, I want to make clear that these are my conclusions, not those of the evaluation’s authors – is that while the waiver has not compromised safety, it also hasn’t done nearly enough to curb the misuse and overuse of foster care in Los Angeles County.

THE FOSTER CARE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AT WORK

            One theme runs through all of the waiver’s limits: The harm done by California’s powerful foster care-industrial complex, the network of private agencies that runs most of the group homes and institutions in California.  Since this kind of care is not only the worst for children but also the most expensive, these agencies scarf up an enormous amount of money.  But their power does not extend only to congregate care.  Many counties, including Los Angeles, subcontract a large part of the job of recruiting and overseeing foster parents to private Foster Family Agencies (FFAs).

            All of these private agencies have one thing in common: a profound incentive to encourage governments to take away more children and hold them in foster care for as long as possible.  That’s because they are paid for each day they hold a child in foster care.  If they don’t get enough referrals and don’t hold the children in care long enough, they’re out of business. 

            Their greed, apparently, is insatiable.  Even as virtually every other service in California was forced to endure severe budget cuts (including, of course, the kinds of help needed to keep children out of foster care in the first place) the group homes, institutions and FFAs sued to win themselves a rate increase. 

About a decade ago, when one California institution, now called EMQ Families First in San Jose, had a crisis of conscience, faced up to the fact that their program was failing and totally redesigned it to drastically reduce institutionalization, its biggest problem was not revolutionizing its approach to helping children.  Its biggest problem was what EMQ’s own CEO at the time called “the group home industry” which had the power to stop the state from funding this better approach.

            When Illinois changed these incentives for that sate’s private agencies, their foster care population dropped from over 50,000 in the late 1990s to under 16,000 today.  But California hasn’t made such a change.  So private agencies remain a powerful barrier to any reform effort.

HOSTILE FROM THE START

            In Los Angeles, former Department of Children and Family Services director David Sanders had success in winning over almost every other constituency as he planned for and designed the waiver. But the evaluation reminds us, at one point in surprisingly blunt terms, that earlier initiatives had antagonized the group home industry and it remained hostile.  According to the evaluation:

The LACDCFS adoption of the [Annie E. Casey Foundation’s] Family-to-Family principles and its push to decrease the reliance on group homes by using them less frequently as a placement option and shortening the length of time a child spends in a group home threatens the core livelihood of many service providers. Understandably, the group homes, foster family agencies and their association were concerned.   The [waiver] is intended to further those goals and as a result, the provider community was wary of the plan being developed.  [Emphasis added.]

            The evaluation also reminds us that, from the beginning, the waiver plan was far too modest (again my conclusion, not that of the researchers).  DCFS never expected to free up more than a relatively small amount of money to transfer into additional services to keep families together.  So relatively few additional children would be kept out of foster care.  And that, in fact, is what happened.  In the time since the waiver began, on July 1, 2007, through April 1, 2010, the decline in the number of children in foster care in Los Angeles on any given day hasn’t been much greater than it was during the same number of months before the waiver.  And entries into care – the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year, actually increased – thanks to the foster-care panic started by Therolf’s stories.

            This explains why Los Angeles County still takes away children at one of the highest rates of all large metropolitan areas.

            The evaluation report also reminds us that one of the reasons the amount available for better options was so low was that in 2006, after planning for the waiver was well underway, the private agencies persuaded the legislature to grant them a rate increase (the one they just went to court to get is in addition to this one).  So even as Los Angeles County sought to reduce the number of placements, each placement became more expensive.

            But the evaluation report also reveals there has been more than enough change to alarm the private agencies.

When children are placed in substitute care, placement with a relative – kinship care – almost always is the least detrimental alternative.  Study after study has found that kinship care placements are more stable, better for children’s well-being and, most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.”*

            This is a success story for the waiver, or, as it’s called in the evaluation, the Capped Allocation Plan (CAP).  According to the evaluation:

One year into the CAP, the use of Foster Family Agencies was reduced to 40.6%, down from 54.1% at the start of the CAP. By the second year of the CAP, the use of Foster Family Agencies increased slightly again to make up 42.8% of all first placements. Relative homes made up 24.5% of all placements up from 14.4% at the start of the CAP.

            So at every step in the process, and at every turn, the FFAs, group homes and institutions have worked to undercut the waiver – and even the limited progress so far makes clear why.  As the evaluation itself points out, a reduction in out-of-home care “threatens the core livelihood of many service providers.”  

Given that kind of opposition from a powerful foster care-industrial complex, and given the agency’s poor leadership after Sanders left, it’s remarkable that DCFS made any progress at all.

IT ALL “RAISES QUESTIONS…”

            One of the things that makes private child welfare agencies so powerful is that, in a system more secret than the CIA, they have access to information – they have the case files, they know about the screw-ups and, if they so choose, they can leak them – selectively, of course.

In other cities over the years, it’s been pretty easy to see the fingerprints of private agencies paid for holding children in foster care on news accounts using horror stories to attack family preservation.

The agencies’ vested interest, combined with the free ride they’ve gotten, as a group, from Therolf, raises questions about whether some people at some private agencies might be doing the same thing now in Los Angeles.  I’m certainly not saying this is happening, I’m merely saying these circumstances raise questions about whether it’s happening.

But I’ll tell you what, Garrett: I’ll stop using that kind of phrasing to disguise speculation as reporting – if you will, too.

*-For a discussion of some of this research, and citations, see: Mark Testa, et. al., Family Ties: Supporting Permanence for Children in Safe and Stable Foster Care With Relatives and Other Caregivers, University of Illinois School of Social Work, Children and Family Research Center, October, 2004, and Generations United, Time for Reform: Support Relatives in Providing Foster Care and Permanent Homes for Children, March 2007,  See also, Marc A. Winokur, et. al, “Matched Comparison of Children in Kinship Care and Foster Care on Child Welfare Outcomes,” Familiesin Society, Volume 89, No. 3, 2008, and  David M. Rubin et. al., “Impact of Kinship Care on Behavioral Well-being for Children in Out-of-Home Care,” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 162(6):550-556. 

Foster care in Los Angeles: What Garrett Therolf won’t tell you about the LA child welfare waiver

L.A. TIMES REPORTER OFFERS A HIGHLY-SELECTIVE READING OF THE WAIVER EVALUATION

Read the full evaluation here.

            For much of the time since Los Angeles Times reporter Garrett Therolf launched his crusade to get more children taken from their families he’s been targeting a waiver from the usual restrictions on the largest category of federal child welfare funds, Title IV-E.

            In most of the country, such funds are an open-ended entitlement, covering a large share of the cost of foster care for every eligible child.  No matter how many eligible children a state or county tears from her or his parents, the federal government will keep right on picking up a big part of the tab. 

            This does not mean, as some have charged, that state or local governments “make money on foster care” – since those governments still have to pay some of the costs.  (Private agencies, paid for every day they hold a child in their group homes or in foster homes they oversee do make money on foster care, but that’s a separate set of incentives. Details on all of this are in our publication on child welfare finance.)

           The open-ended entitlement does mean, however, that while safe, proven alternatives to foster care cost less in total dollars, foster care sometimes can be a money-saver for states and counties.  And all that state and local money wasted paying the portion of foster care costs not paid by the feds can’t be used for better options.

          Here’s how an independent evaluation of the Los Angeles waiver puts it:

         Absent a source of funding for community-based services that support families, child welfare departments are left with little choice but to remove children from questionable environments and place them in foster care. When restrictive funding drives what programs and services are offered by the State and counties, it also defines the philosophy and mission of child welfare in California.

         But Garrett Therolf has never told his Times readers about the profound incentive for needless foster care that existed before the waiver – since Garrett Therolf has no problem with that.  Instead, Therolf smears the waiver every chance he gets.

        Under the waiver, Los Angeles County agreed to take its Title IV-E money as a flat grant, based on the amount the county had received in previous years.  The county was free to use the money on better alternatives to foster care.  If it reduced foster care numbers, the county could keep the savings, as long as that money was plowed right back into child welfare services.  But if foster care numbers go up, the county has to pay the full cost of the increase.

        Early on, Therolf’s stories repeatedly described reunifying families as “risky” and the waiver as a “wager” on reunification.  There is, of course, no mention of the profound risks caused by needless foster care before the waiver.  But he sank to a new low in October when he took one tiny piece of the waiver evaluation out of context.  Therolf wrote:

Others who have studied the waiver program say that earlier indicators were already suggesting problems.

         As is discussed in detail below they actually said no such thing.   But for now, back to Therolf:

Child safety indicators under the waiver have become "an area of concern," said Charlie Ferguson, a San Jose State University professor and the state's independent evaluator of the waiver program.

Ferguson said officials had studied data involving children who had not been removed from their homes after an allegation of child abuse had been substantiated. They found that those children experienced an increased rate of substantiated abuse within a year. The rate has increased by 19% since the Title IV-E waiver began in 2007, he said.

          Therolf repeated the claim in a story on November 12:

Since 2007, children found by the department to be victims of abuse who were left in their homes have increasingly experienced abuse again within a year, according to a researcher hired by the state. The increase was 19%.

         He repeated it again, word-for-word, the following day in a story about the likely imminent replacement of DCFS Director Trish Ploehn.

SOME OF WHAT THEROLF LEFT OUT

        What Therolf neglects to mention is that the evaluation also states, on page 2, that there is no evidence that the waiver, which the evaluation refers to as the Capped Allocation Plan (CAP), is responsible for this change.  According to the evaluation:

[C]hanges observed in the participating counties and in outcomes for children and families cannot be directly attributed to the CAP.

        Of course, it’s a pretty long document – maybe Garrett just overlooked it.  Except that the evaluation also made the same point on Page 137:

The design of the evaluation makes it impossible to attribute changes in outcome trend lines to a department’s participation in the CAP.

And, in more detail on page 11:

[T]he overall design [of the evaluation] does not allow the evaluation to determine causality. In other words, it cannot be said that changes observed in the patterns of outcomes of the participating counties post-CAP as compared to their pre-CAP pattern of outcomes were caused by the CAP.

But just because scientifically “it cannot be said” doesn’t mean Garrett Therolf won’t say it anyway.

And Therolf’s claim that “others who have studied the waiver program say that earlier indicators were already suggesting problems” with the waiver simply is untrue.  Those studying the waiver explicitly state that their evaluation can’t determine the reasons for any problems that may exist.

Oh, and one more thing: More recent and more comprehensive data, from the Center for Social Services Research at the University of California at Berkeley, show that recurrence of maltreatment within 12 months actually is down very slightly since the waiver began.  (To see these data, click here and follow the instructions for creating a table.)  Furthermore, as can be seen in the table below, reabuse within 12 months has been cut by more than 20 percent when compared to 1998, the earliest year for which data are available and a time when Los Angeles County was taking away more children and holding vastly more in foster care.

	1998 (Earliest data available)	Year ending June 30, 2008 (first full year of waiver)	Year ending March 31, 2009
Entries into care	11,977	10,650	10,427
Total # of children in foster care	50,125 (1/1/98)	24,654 (7/1/07)	20,344 (4/1/09)
Reabuse of children known to DCFS w/in 12 months. (%)	12.4 (Jan. to June, 1998)	9.8 (July to Dec. 2007)	9.7 (Six months ending March 31, 2009 – most recent available)

Source: University of California and Berkeley Center for Social Services Research, http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/default.aspx

The waiver evaluation uses a more limited time frame – their data go back only to July 2002 and end at the end of 2008, and they use a slightly different methodology.  But even taking their data at face value, the evaluation points out that reabuse within 12 months remains below the level they found in 2002, when DCFS had far more children in foster care.

So if the waiver supposedly caused reabuse to increase, why was the rate of reabuse higher before the waiver, when the county was doing exactly what Therolf wants?

The waiver evaluation does say that the safety data “present a concern” on which DCFS needs to focus – just as Prof. Ferguson told Therolf.  Obviously that’s true.  But the fact that DCFS needs to be concerned about these data and needs to do something about the rate of reabuse, whatever that rate may be, is vastly different from claiming that the waiver is responsible for what those data show.

But Therolf’s smear campaign doesn’t stop there.  In both his recent stories, the boilerplate about the waiver is followed immediately by the claim that child abuse deaths of children “known to the system” have increased since January 2008, implying that, somehow, this too is linked to the waiver.  In fact, the waiver evaluation does not use fatalities as a measure of overall system performance, indeed no scientific evaluation of any system does this, probably for the simple reason that labeling a cause of death as child maltreatment is highly subjective and, though each is the worst possible tragedy, in any one community, even one as huge as Los Angeles County, the numbers are, thank God, low enough to fluctuate due to random chance.

Indeed, the only pattern in deaths of children known to the system, one that emerges by looking at multiple localities over many years, is that they tend to increase in the wake of foster-care panics – like the one triggered in Los Angeles by Garrett Therolf’s shoddy reporting.

MORE OF WHAT THEROLF LEFT OUT

As for the waiver evaluation, here are a few other details Therolf leaves out.

●Another safety indicator used in the evaluation – and the one used by the federal government to evaluate all child welfare systems, remained constant through the end of 2008. 

­●A third indicator, foster-care recidivism; that is, the proportion of children sent home from foster care who enter the system again, also did not change during the first 18 months of the waiver.  If one can reduce foster care without a safety indicator worsening due to that reduction, that is an improvement, since you’re getting the same level of safety while subjecting fewer children to the inherent trauma – and high risk of abuse – in foster care itself.

This does not mean all is well with Los Angeles child welfare, or even with the waiver.  But the problems involve doing too little, not too much.

Los Angeles still takes away children at one of the highest rates among America’s largest metropolitan areas – a problem made worse by the foster-care panic.  That has overloaded workers, creating a crisis in the system.

The evaluation also points to other problems which I’ll discuss in a future post.  But what the evaluation makes clear is that when it comes to Los Angeles County child welfare, the solution to the problems of reform is more reform.

Tomorrow: Why Trish Ploehn must go (and who should replace her)

Coming Monday: What the LA Times won’t report about the county’s child welfare waiver

            In his efforts to scapegoat a waiver from federal funding restrictions for problems in the Los Angeles County child welfare system, L.A. Times reporter Garrett Therolf has been highly selective in quoting from an evaluation of that waiver.

            On Monday, I’ll tell you what Garrett keeps leaving out, and I’ll post a link to the full evaluation so you can judge for yourself.

Foster care in Los Angeles: That’s why it’s called a PANIC

            Garrett (What suit should I wear to the Pulitzer ceremony?) Therolf has a story in the Los Angeles Times today about a report from the office of the county’s Chief Executive concerning the problems at the county Department of Children and Family Services.

            The story serves one useful purpose: It contradicts Therolf’s own earlier stories that attempt to blame all department failings on efforts to keep families together.  On the contrary, this report makes clear that the problems are rooted in the foster-care panic set off by Therolf’s own misreporting of child welfare.

            The report paints a picture of an agency plunged into chaos by a top management so hell-bent on knee-jerk responses to whatever is in the newspaper that it should change its name from DCFS to DCYA.

            Frontline workers are drowning not just in cases, but in policies – so many cascading down on them that workers can’t possibly keep track of them, much less follow them all.  In the story, a spokeswoman for the caseworkers’ union aptly calls it an “out-of-control policy machine.”  The problem is compounded by so many automated e-mail “reminders” involving so many deadlines that the reminders lose their impact – except, in all likelihood, to add an extra element of stress to an already extremely difficult job.  (One can only imagine what it’s like if these constant reminders are accompanied by some kind of special beep on the caseworker’s computer when they arrive).

            The new policies almost always involve more work per case, without any discretion concerning which cases need whatever is called for by the new policies and which do not.  So everyone falls behind and, you may be sure, there is informal corner-cutting going on that no one’s going to know about until it leads to the next tragedy.

            It is to the workers’ great credit that in spite of all this the report found that there has been a “significant reduction” in a backlog of cases open longer than 60 days.  That deserved to be mentioned farther up than the end of the ninth paragraph of the story; but, of course, one wouldn’t expect that kind of basic fairness from Therolf.

            There also is another classic Therolf touch:  

            The only individual case Therolf cites involves DCFS failing to act concerning children living in what is allegedly a squalid home.  But common sense suggests that any agency operating in this kind of chaos is going to make mistakes in all directions at once.  Yes, they will leave more children in danger – they also will take more children needlessly from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help.  This is one reason why, all over the country,  foster-care panics have been followed by increases in deaths of children “known to the system.”

            Indeed, in the story itself, the union spokeswoman notes that different DCFS offices apply the new standards and policies in different ways (the report itself notes that training hasn’t kept up with all the new policies, so regional administrators have to figure them out for themselves).  In other words, a child who might be removed from the home by a caseworker from office A will be left in the home by a caseworker from office B – again, setting the stage for errors in all directions.

           The report itself also suffers from one crucial flaw: The only people to whom the authors spoke are people who work for DCFS.  Imagine what they might find out if they actually spoke to some of the families whose children were needlessly taken by the agency. 

          But then, Garrett Therolf can’t be bothered doing that, either.

Foster care in Los Angeles: LA Times discovers civil liberties issues in child welfare – sort of

"I was never told I could refuse their search, and the tone and level of authority of my attackers made me feel that it would be dangerous to even try."

                The quote comes from Darlene McDade-White, who says she was a victim of an illegal search by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.  Her story was told yesterday in the Los Angeles Times.

                When I saw the headline on Garrett Therolf’s story about the case – “Child welfare official alleges warrantless search” – my first, fleeting, thought was: Wow, someone at DCFS is coming to McDade-White’s aid and demanding civil liberties be respected in child abuse investigations - and the L.A. Times is covering the story!

 

                I was wrong on both counts.

 

                Darlene McDade-White is not a child who was, say, pulled out of her class and interrogated in the principal’s office by a caseworker who suspected she’d been abused.  She was a not a child who was stripsearched by a caseworker looking for bruises.  Nor was she a child forced to undergo a terribly traumatic examination for sexual abuse based on someone’s anonymous call to a child abuse hotline.

                Nor is Darlene McDade-White a parent whose child had to endure any of those things.  Nor did she have to endure a warranteless search of her home by DCFS workers checking to see if there was enough food in the cupboards as they prepared to confuse poverty with “neglect.”

                Indeed, it’s highly unlikely that any of those things ever will happen to Darlene McDade-White, or anyone in her family.  Because Darlene McDade-White actually works for DCFS.  In fact, she’s their lead internal affairs investigator.   She’s the “child welfare official” mentioned in the headline.

                McDade-White  was a victim of a different kind of search.  She says the allegedly illegal search was conducted by other DCFS workers.  They searched her purse, allegedly looking for evidence that McDade-White might be the one who leaked information about child abuse fatalities to the Times.  They found no such evidence.

                And that, of course, is why this search is the one that caught the attention of the Times. 

If the allegations are true, the harm to McDade-White is not trivial. But she is an adult.  And the harm to her does not come close to the harm that unreasonable searches and seizures, based on no more than an anonymous call to a hotline, do, routinely, to children all over the country.

That call is all it takes to send caseworkers to any home where they will demand immediate entry and the right not only to search the home, but sometimes the right to stripsearch the child looking for bruises.  (Policies vary across the country – in some places the caseworker does it herself, in others the child may be taken to a doctor – but the child still will be stripsearched by a total stranger, they’ll just call it a “medical exam.”)

That doesn’t mean DCFS and its counterparts should stop investigating allegations of child abuse.  It does mean that, as I’ve discussed before on this Blog, here and here,  “children’s rights” should include the Constitution’s #4 – the one about being free from unreasonable search and seizure.  In other words: At least meet the minimal standards required to get a judge to issue a warrant.

Although the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California, repeatedly has ruled, most recently last December, that warrants are required if parents don’t give consent, (with the same exceptions as in criminal cases), there is no requirement to give families the equivalent of a Miranda warning.  Indeed, what McDade-White said of her own situation, applies so perfectly to families confronted by DCFS workers that it's worth repeating:

I was never told I could refuse their search, and the tone and level of authority of my attackers made me feel that it would be dangerous to even try.

And unlike the situation with McDade-White and her purse, if a family says no to a warrantless search by a child protective services agency, the caseworker can call law enforcement, claim the case is an emergency and get the child removed on the spot. 

But those kinds of warrantless searches, which occur over and over in LA County, and everyplace else in America, never have attracted the attention of the Times.  Apparently, Garrett Therolf and his colleagues are interested in violations of Amendment #4 only when they might impinge, even indirectly, on the Times’ rights under Amendment #1.

Foster care in Los Angeles: DCFS seeks to silence dissent. I wonder where they got THAT idea?

    I don't know if anyone at the Los Angeles Times actually exclaimed "Thank you, Lord!" when the county Department of Children and Family Services launched an investigation into leaks of information about child abuse deaths – but I'll bet that's what plenty of journalists at the Times were thinking.

    That's because there's no better way to keep a story alive and give reporters an excuse to regurgitate everything they've already told us (while continuing to leave out everything they've left out all along).

    DCFS' whole approach to information is, first and foremost, morally reprehensible. Just as all court hearings should be open in child welfare cases, almost every scrap of paper in every case, not just the horror stories, should be available to press and public. (In those rare cases where disclosure of a given document really would seriously harm a child, the lawyer for the child or the parents should ask the court to withhold the minimum amount necessary to prevent that harm. For details see our Due Process Agenda.) But DCFS' approach also is remarkably stupid.

    First DCFS stopped releasing information about child abuse deaths – arguably in violation of state law. Of course, that only meant that people within the agency would leak the information. So instead of all the information on a given case coming out at once, it drips out, leading to multiple stories instead of one. Now, the leak investigation itself is news, so Times reporters can keep the story going, and push their take-the-child-and-run agenda all over again.

    So first came the news story yesterday. Today, Tim Rutten, a columnist who has emerged as the most overt proponent of that take-the-child-and-run agenda, repeated what was in the story and made outraged comments about it.

    Rutten writes:

The theory here is that if you cut off reporters' information, so that nobody knows exactly how the children died, it's as if they're not dead. No matter how agonizing a child's end, a vast bureaucratic silence will absorb his or her cries, and it will be as if they never lived — or died — at all. If any sound escapes, it will be that faint official splash that first echoed when Pilate washed his hands.

    In other words, Rutten is accusing DCFS of trying to behave like – the Los Angeles Times.

    ●It is the Times that has imposed a news blackout on cases in which DCFS wrongly removes children from their homes.

    ●It is the Times that systematically omitted deaths of children in foster care from a list of high-profile fatalities over the past 12 years.

    ●It is the Times that has refused to report the foster-care panic sweeping through the county – the spike in removals of children from their homes by caseworkers terrified of landing on the front page.

●And it is the Times that has failed to report that, all over the country, such panics have so overwhelmed caseworkers that they've had even less time to find children in real danger – so child abuse deaths increased.

Or, as Tim Rutten might say, but wont: If you cut off the public's information, so that nobody knows how many children have been torn needlessly from everyone they know and love, it's as if it never happened. No matter how agonizing the experience of removal, and how great the risk of abuse in foster care and lifelong emotional scars, a vast journalistic silence will absorb their cries, and it will be as if they'd never suffered at all.

There is one difference of course. When government tries to censor information, it usually leaks to the journalists. When what is still the largest and most influential news organization in a region is the censor, it's far less likely that the public ever will find out.

____________

All that said, however, when it comes to starting foster care panic, stifling dissent, loaded language and otherwise stacking the deck in child welfare coverage, the people at the Los Angeles Times are amateurs. To see a truly professional hatchet job, you've got to check out the Cleveland Plain Dealer. That story tomorrow.

Foster care in Los Angeles: Still deep in denial at the LA Times

The latest big "revelation" from the Los Angeles Times concerning the county Department of Children and Family Services is that DCFS can't keep up with all the reports alleging child maltreatment. Gee, what a surprise.

The Times reports that more than 18,000 investigations remained open beyond the 30 days mandated by the state. Even when the state doubled the time allowed to complete an investigation, 3,700 such investigations could not be completed on time.

At least as alarming: Many investigations that are completed are too superficial, increasing the likelihood of bad decisions in all directions (though, of course, the Times didn't put it that way).

But the story attributes the problem solely to "too few staff burdened with a litany of new tasks intended to reduce the deaths of children whose families already had come under the department's scrutiny."

For starters, those new tasks almost certainly won't reduce child abuse deaths. As this Blog often has noted, a major national study found that none of the traditional investigative and enforcement powers of CPS agencies actually accomplishes that. So DCFS would have been more likely to make children safer by putting those same resources into the few things that really do work, such as more prevention programs, and efforts to curb teen pregnancy and ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.

But, of course, the various new bureaucratic procedures aren't really designed to protect children. They are CYA measures, designed to protect caseworkers and, especially, their bosses, from being blamed for the next tragedy. (And they won't work anyway, since it's clear that the Times will scapegoat DCFS for any death of a child "known to the system" regardless of the circumstances – at least until editors lose interest, declare the "success" of their crusade and move on to something else).

More important, the Times story fails to mention the other likely cause of the backlog - the foster-care panic caused largely by the Times itself.

The kind of out-of-context hype and hysteria-fueled coverage of child abuse fatalities that has characterized the Times approach usually prompts a surge in false allegations and trivial cases - mostly from well-meaning people who are told over and over to report their slightest suspicion, no matter how absurd.

Operators at child abuse "hotlines" become more afraid to screen out such allegations, and workers become more afraid to label them unfounded - indeed, one of the new procedures in Los Angeles County makes it harder for workers to do just that.

So of course there is no way to keep up with the load - and, of course, more children are endangered – even as many other children are subjected to prolonged traumatic investigations and, in some cases, needlessly thrown into foster care.

And, of course, the Times story mentions almost none of this.

More casualties of the Los Angeles foster care panic?

On May 6, Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks wrote a very good column about Candie Sampson, an aunt who stepped forward to care for her sister's children in a time of crisis only to have those children torn away by the county Department of Children and Family Services.

The four children had been taken from their mother because of allegations of drug use and domestic violence. They were placed with a grandmother who died suddenly last month.

It was Sampson who told DCFS about the grandmother's death, and it was Sampson who brought the children to her own small apartment. According to Banks, Sampson "has an MBA, a university job, a construction-worker husband and a 1-year-old son. She spent part of her teen years in foster care. She and her sister didn't meet their father until they were adults and found him on Facebook."

Banks continues:
She bought each child a bed from IKEA. "My husband assembled them that night," she said. Two days later, a social worker came by for an "assessment." Sampson opened her life to prying eyes.

"I informed social services that I want for the kids to remain with my family," she said. And I informed [the social worker] that my husband has a criminal background, due to an addiction in his past. … We completed all the paperwork, provided letters of character references and went to be fingerprinted in less than 24 hours."

Then she waited -- not very patiently, I might add -- through three weeks of "no one talking to me," she said.

She had no standing in the system; the children's stay was considered an "extended visitation" not a "placement," social workers said.

Her apartment wasn't big enough, with just two bedrooms for seven people. And her husband needed a "criminal clearance."

She began looking for a bigger place and pushing the children's social worker to seek a waiver that would clear her husband, who has not used drugs in six years, she said.

"I call her every day all day," Sampson told me. "I leave messages and do not get return calls. I have to keep calling and hope that she answers the phone."

Sampson had spent years as a paid advocate for disabled college students. In that world, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the students get services they need.

In this world of caseworkers and court orders, the squeaky wheel just gets extra scrutiny.
Sampson got a Monday-morning call from a DCFS supervisor, who promised to keep her in the loop, she said. Then she refused to take Sampson's calls.

By Tuesday night, three of the kids were gone. The 5- and 7-year-olds were placed together, and the 4-year-old went to a separate home, she said. He was crying when he left; she had to coax him out of his hiding place under the bed.

"The social workers won't tell me where they are," Sampson said. They did tell her to have the 14-year-old ready on Thursday to go.

FLUNKING THE ATTITUDE TEST

Why would DCFS be so cruel to the children? Banks thinks it may be the very fact that Sampson kept pushing so impatiently to keep them. That may well be part of it. Whether they are birth parents, kinship parents or foster parents workers for child welfare agencies commonly like their parents docile, groveling and, above all, "compliant."

More than 20 years ago, when I was writing my book about child welfare, a Los Angeles lawyer referred to people like Sampson as "flunking the attitude test."

If that's what happened here, it would make her case poignantly similar to that of Jonathan Reid, taken from his mother Debra in part because she was an outspoken community advocate with an in-your-face style, according to a comprehensive account of the case in the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles. (I've been unable to find the superbly reported story, by Michael Gougis, online, but I have a copy.)

One can only hope the parallels end there, however. Because six weeks after he was taken, Jonathan Reid died in foster care.

FEARING THE WRATH OF THE TIMES

But flunking the attitude test almost certainly isn't the only reason for this tragedy. Odds are, these children are casualties of the foster-care panic encouraged by the Los Angeles Times itself.

Imagine how certain of Banks' colleagues on the Times metro staff might have written this story had the children been left with Sampson and something had gone wrong. Every caseworker knows full well that such a story probably would read like this:

A [age and gender of child] is dead only weeks after the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services exploited a legal loophole to allow the child and three siblings to live in the desperately overcrowded home of an uncle who once had been convicted on drug charges.

The death comes at a time when the beleaguered DCFS already is under intense scrutiny in the wake of a series of deaths of children previously known to the agency. The deaths have raised questions about DCFS' emphasis on family preservation.

(In fact, there has been no "series" of deaths, but that hasn't stopped the Times from making the claim.)

That's a key reason why entries into foster care in Los Angeles have soared in the months since the Times started writing real stories very much like the hypothetical story above. And that's almost certainly why, having already endured separation from their mother and the death of their grandmother, the nieces and nephews of Candie Sampson now are separated from a loving aunt and from each other.

No, this does not mean caseworkers are right when they claim to be "damned if they do and damned if they don't." On the contrary, the caseworker who tore apart the Sampson family will face no sanction at all for doing so. The worst she may face is a column that does not even name her or him. In contrast, had this caseworker left the children in that home and tragedy followed, there is an excellent chance the worker would have been scapegoated by her bosses at DCFS. When it comes to taking away children, you're only damned if you don't.

If anyone at the Los Angeles Times really wants to know why these children are enduring such suffering, they could start by looking in their own newsroom.

Covering foster care in Los Angeles: Better boilerplate at the LA Times

Los Angeles Times reporter Kim Christensen proved Saturday that it is possible to cover the story of child abuse fatalities in Los Angeles County without the loaded language. Instead of the usual boilerplate paragraph falsely suggesting that child abuse deaths among children previously known to the county Department of Children and Family Services were increasing, Christensen offered this far more accurate summary:

"The county's child-welfare system -- and those in charge of it -- have come under intense scrutiny in the last two years as deaths among children have come to light."

Exactly.

Covering foster care in LA: The case of the selective sidebar

I'LL BE DISCUSSING CHILD WELFARE IN LOS ANGELES THIS MORNING ON KPFK PACIFICA RADIO'S "SOJOURNER TRUTH" PROGRAM, SOMETIME DURING THE 7 TO 8AM HOUR, LOCAL TIME. IT ALSO SHOULD BE AVAILABLE AT KPFK'S WEBSITE.

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times story, apparently some kind of half-hearted effort to add context to the paper's child welfare coverage was accompanied by a sidebar apparently designed to reinforce the "master narrative" of Times reporting – that the only fatal mistake the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services makes is leaving children with dangerous parents.

Called "A timeline of death" a better title would have been "A highly-selective timeline of death." Because a quick check of NCCPR's own archive of child welfare news coverage turned up these cases, which the Times left out:

● 1999: Four-month-old Garnet Peels is placed with a foster mother who allows her brother – a narcoleptic – to drive the boy in his SUV. The infant was not in a car seat. He died when the foster mother's brother drove the SUV into a pole.

● 1999: Gilbreania Wallace is taken from her grandmother when the pipes in their rented house burst, flooding the basement and making the home a health hazard. Instead of helping them find another place to live, DCFS places Gilbreania in foster care. She dies there, allegedly killed by her foster mother. (DCFS, which would spend nothing to move the family offered $5,000 for the funeral). Just as in the case of Viola Vanclief more than a decade later (making it the one death of a foster child too recent for the sidebar to ignore), Gilbreania's foster mother has previous complaints against her, and the home is overseen by a private agency with a troubled history – the same agency that oversaw the case of Garnet Peels.

● 2001: Two-year-old Jasmine Garcia dies of what police call "catastrophic injury to her head." Jasmine was placed in a foster home overseen by another private agency – and there had been warnings to DCFS about alleged abuse of other children in the home. The foster parents are charged, but one foster parent is acquitted and charges against the other are dropped.

● 2003: Dakota Prince, age 5, and Nehemiah Prince, age 3, are taken from their mother because of what the DCFS deputy director at the time calls "just an inability to provide adequate care." They are placed with a foster mother who was under the supervision of still another private agency. The foster mother can afford the best – including a Cadillac Escalade SUV. But one day she forgets that she'd left Dakota and Nehemiah in the Escalade in 100 degree heat where, a deputy district attorney says, "they cooked inside the car and died." The foster mother is convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

There is nothing in the Times chronology to indicate why it only goes back to 1998 – seemingly an arbitrary choice. But perhaps it's because that avoids including another case, the particularly searing story of Jonathan Reid, taken needlessly from his mother only to die in foster care in 1997. You can read all about that case in this 2002 story - by Garrett Therolf, the Times reporter who now wants us to forget all about such cases, or at least write them off as aberrations, as he crusades to keep more children in the system that killed Jonathan - and Dakota, and Nehemiah, and Garnet, and Gilbreania, and how many others?

And for another example of the kind of story Los Angeles Times systematically avoids, check out today's lead story in the Philadelphia Daily News.

LA Times foster care coverage: The case of the misleading lead

Talk about blowing the lead. The first 12 words in yesterday's feeble attempt by the Los Angeles Times to add some context to its child welfare coverage are grossly misleading, and possibly flat wrong. Those 12 words are: "As deaths among abused and neglected children have mounted in recent months…"

But the story offers no evidence of any such thing.

Rather, once again, the Los Angeles Times is repeating the New York Times fallacy: confusing an increase in media attention to child abuse deaths with an actual increase in deaths. And, amazingly, given the misleading lead, later in the story, the Times essentially admits as much.

According to yesterday's story, there have been about 35 deaths of children "known to the system" since January, 2008. That would be an average of one such tragedy every 23 days. There may have been an increase of three deaths in 2009 compared with 2008 – but the figures for both years are below the figure for 1998, when more children were taken from their homes, and vastly more were in foster care on any given day.

If there is any evidence that this rate has increased "in recent months" – whatever "recent months" means, the story does not provide it. Indeed, if the two such deaths that have been the subject of Times stories in 2010 are the only such cases, then the rate has declined. And either way, it tells us absolutely nothing about whether the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services is doing a better or a worse job of keeping children safe.

When you are talking about an average of roughly 18 deaths a year among children "known to the system" in a city with 3.2 million children and a child welfare agency with thousands of workers, it should be obvious that the fatality number alone can rise and fall due to random chance, and trying to judge whether an agency is getting better or worse based on that number is idiotic. (It also helps explain that major new study which found that investigating more cases and taking more children does nothing to curb fatalities, while focusing on prevention and ameliorating poverty does.)

LEVELING WITH READERS – AT LAST

Indeed, much farther down in the story the Times finally hints at the real story – and contradicts the lead. According to this part of the story:

Under [DCFS Director Trish] Ploehn, a 30-year department veteran, the agency's failings have come to light more readily than in the past, largely because of a state law that opened previously confidential records. Before the law took effect in 2008, virtually all information about children's deaths from abuse or neglect was kept from public view, ostensibly to protect the privacy of victims and their families. Reports about horrific cases leaked out sporadically.

In other words, as far as anyone can tall, the deaths haven't mounted, the Los Angeles Times has simply decided to pay attention.

Still absent from Times coverage are two salient facts: Even people with no love of family preservation, like Deanne Tilton Durfee, probably America's most quoted "expert" on child abuse fatalities, who, according to the competing Los Angeles Daily News "agreed the increase in deaths [in 2009 compared to 2008] is not a 'significant increase in the larger spectrum of things.'" And, for those who absolutely insist on using this measure, as noted above, such deaths actually are down from 1998 decade ago – a time when DCFS was taking away more children.

Garrett Therolf, the lead reporter on the Times stories, claims that the way deaths are measured has changed since 1998. But he actually made that claim not in the Times but in the excellent Blog Witnessla.com, which he apparently contacted to object to something they'd written. He's done the same with this Blog – utterly oblivious to the irony in his constant demands that everyone else tell his side of the story, even as he systematically omits those who favor family preservation from his own reporting. Why hasn't he raised the issue of comparing rates of child abuse deaths in the Times itself? Perhaps because then he'd have to mention the fact that, by at least one measure, deaths have declined. And then he'd have to deal with whole issue of whether you can evaluate DCFS based on fatalities. And then the whole house of cards on which the Times coverage has been built collapses.

FAMILY PRESERVATION ADVOCATES STILL SHUT OUT

That blackout of family preservation advocates continued yesterday, as the story, apparently meant to be some kind of overall assessment of DCFS Director Trish Ploehn's performance, left out anyone from DCFS-Give Us Back Our Children, the grassroots group arguing that DCFS isn't doing enough to keep families together. (That group turned up only when Therolf apparently thought he was writing family preservation's obituary in Los Angeles.)

Yesterday's whole story reads like tokenism – the story to point to when people say the Times coverage lacked any context. Do it once, get it out of the way, and then back to business as usual.

And even as tokenism, it's not very good. Because totally absent is any guidance for readers to allow them to determine if, in fact the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services has made children safer over the past decade and whether it is likely to do so in the future. How are readers supposed to know? The implication is that you know by counting the number of deaths. But what if that number rises this year, just because the EMTs who might have saved lives in a couple of cases went to the wrong house or got stuck in traffic? What if it falls because someone shot at a child – and missed? What if it changes because deaths that one year are considered accidental the next year are considered "neglect" – or vice versa? That gives some idea of how absurd it is to try to use deaths of children known-to-the-system as a measure. Better measures exist – the Times simply hasn't discussed them, much less committed, in advance, to actually using them.

Still, the story did serve one useful purpose: It included a lot about how the county Board of Supervisors loves to preen and posture about these cases, and pronounce itself shocked – shocked! – by things it had every reason to know about all along.

TOMORROW: THE CASE OF THE SELECTIVE SIDEBAR

Foster care in L.A.: The LA Times takes the wrong page from the NY Times playbook

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, what's the last refuge of the child welfare reporter who's gone beyond the facts? Declare the existence of a "series" of child abuse deaths, where no such series exists.

The deaths exist of course, and each is the worst possible tragedy. But the series exists only in the mind of the journalist. Such non-existent "series" are a function of the fact that journalistic interest in child abuse deaths is prone to rise and fall much more sharply, and much more capriciously, than the actual fatalities.

Reasons for inventing a series of deaths vary. In the case of The New York Times it was one of the very rare cases where ideology came into play – the reporter on the child welfare beat at the time strongly sympathized with the city's powerful neoconservatives. They dominated policy during the Giuliani administration – and they hated the city's successful efforts to keep families together. So, as noted previously on this Blog, toward the end of 2005 the reporter turned the tragically-typical run of child abuse deaths in New York City into an alleged "series" and blamed the deaths on efforts to keep families together.

"IT WAS A SERIES – BUT NOT STATISTICALLY"

It was a "series," the reporter would explain later "but not statistically." As a result, everyone was primed to scapegoat family preservation when Nixzmary Brown died in January, 2006. The city is still feeling the effects today, with entries into care up more than 50 percent since Nixzmary died (but even so, New York City still takes proportionately fewer children than Los Angeles.)

And that brings me to Friday's Los Angeles Times follow-up to Thursday's story discussed in several posts to this Blog. The stories claimed that the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, Trish Ploehn, had "suspended a long-standing effort to reduce the number of children in foster homes."

In the follow up, reporter Garrett Therolf declares that while "the county had focused on family preservation" up to now,

a series of child deaths last year among children left in – or returned to – unsafe homes jolted Ploehn's department. "These cases had a very deep effect," Ploehn said last week. [Emphasis added.]

But once again, there is no series – unless of course, the Times means "a series – but not statistically."

Yes, deaths of children known-to-the-system in Los Angeles County went up to 17 in 2009, from 14 the previous year – but, as Ploehn, the competing Los Angeles Daily News, and even the Times' own media critic (and former child welfare reporter) James Rainey all have pointed out, the number was even higher back when the county was taking away even more children and had vastly more children in foster care. And given how subjective the declaration that a death is due to maltreatment can be (for example, was a drowning an accident or neglect?) the 2009 figure may be too high, or the 2008 figure may be too low.

But don't take my word for it, even Deanne Tilton Durfee, the Queen of Child Abuse Fatality Review, the L.A.-based national expert who probably is quoted more than any other national expert, "agreed the increase in deaths is not a 'significant increase in the larger spectrum of things,'" according to the Daily News.

And, let's not forget that new study from the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which found that taking away more children does nothing to reduce child abuse deaths.

Yet there's the LA Times, just like The New York Times, claiming a series where none exists and implying that it was caused by family preservation. This time it's not a matter of ideology. And, as is discussed at the end of this post, Garrett Therolf is a much better reporter than the one who invented the non-statistical series in New York. He's done some outstanding reporting on this issue. And when it comes to the kind of stories that set off "foster-care panics," huge spikes in removals of children, there's a lot worse out there than what the Times has done.

A CHANGE IN LAW CHANGES THE NEWS COVERAGE

The reason child abuse deaths suddenly got so much attention in 2009, is that California changed state law to make case records available in these cases – while all other cases, including all allegations of wrongful removal, remain secret. The simple fact that one could learn more about child abuse fatalities in 2009 created the impression of a "series" of such deaths in 2009. The Times had reason to reinforce that impression after Ploehn made some very fuzzy statements. Then the Times went beyond what Ploehn actually said.

My best guess is that Ploehn did, indeed, say that her agency was going to curb the reunification of families. In its first story on Ploehn's comments, the Times took that to mean that

Los Angeles County has suspended a long-standing effort to reduce the number of children in foster homes because keeping more of the children with their birth families could be unsafe, the county's top child-welfare official said.

Although Therolf insists these two concepts mean the same thing, there is a vast difference between slowing down reunifications and concluding that "keeping more of the children with their birth families could be unsafe." The latter sounds like an indefinite end to all efforts to keep families together, not a slowdown of one such effort. And that is how the copy desk editor who wrote the headlines for both the print story ("County to end emphasis on family over foster care" and the version on the Times website ("L.A. County will no longer strive to reunite families,") took it.

Therolf argues that the editors to whom he reports directly knew what he meant – and were surprised at the headlines. But typically such editors don't just read the final version of a story cold, just before it's time to add the headline. Some of them, at least, have been discussing the story with the reporter throughout the day. At least one would have "pitched" the story at a meeting where editors decide what goes on the front page. So the editors simply know more than what is actually in the story.

Human nature also plays a role here. All of us tend to hear what we want to hear or expect to hear and filter out what contradicts our expectations. (That's why NCCPR supports requiring every interview in a child abuse investigation to be tape recorded.) The Times has been carrying on a crusade about child abuse deaths for months now. When reporters do that, they want results. So even for reasons unrelated to ideology, the reporters at the Times probably were thrilled with Ploehn's announcement. And, indeed, Thursday's story calls it "the most significant of several reforms…"

Suspending efforts to keep families together is worthy of such a claim (except for the use of the word "reform") slowing down reunifications is not. And suspending efforts to keep families together is a front-page story; slowing down reunifications is worth, at best, the front of the Metro section.

LOADED LANGUAGE IN THE FOLLOW-UP

The same problem of going beyond the facts can be seen, unfortunately, in the follow-up story Friday, which was larded with loaded language. Here's how Therolf describes what the county has been doing in recent years:

For years, the county has focused on family reunification and preservation, seeking above all to rehabilitate once-abusive parents through drug treatment, anger management and other services. The number of children in foster care dropped from a high of 52,000 in 1997 to a low of 19,900 last year.

Almost every part of the first sentence is, at a minimum, disputable:

• DCFS has not focused on family preservation. While the number of children in foster care on any given day (the number with which both Ploehn and the Times seem obsessed) has gone steadily down, the number of children taken away from their parents has risen alarmingly in most years since 2004. And a county that has focused on family preservation would not be taking children at a rate above the rate in most big metropolitan areas. (Details are on our website in our material about Los Angeles County child welfare.)
  
• The claim that the county is seeking above all to keep families together is the caricature of family preservation used in attempts to discredit it all over the country. The Times is parroting The Big Lie of American child welfare. What DCFS is seeking to do, above all, is to keep children safe. To the extent that this may involve family preservation, it's because, for most children most of the time, that is safer than foster care.
  
• The characterization of all parents in the system as "once-abusive" also is wrong. In our material on Los Angeles County child welfare, we tell the story of Gerardo R, originally told by the Metropolitan News Enterprise, a daily legal publication. Gerardo was a never-abusive parent whose children were taken from him solely because he did not have housing DCFS deemed adequate. The Times has simply declined to tell this story.
  

  Even as a legal matter, children can be in foster care for months, and then be returned home, before a court ever decides if, in fact, DCFS' allegations were true.
  

PLOEHN ISN'T HELPING

Ploehn hasn't helped things by making one fuzzy, contradictory statement after another. First, in Thursday's story Ploehn tells the Times that efforts to reduce foster care numbers would continue "only when I can assure everyone that the work we do results in safety for the child who is going home" to his or her family. She speculates that the snapshot number, the number of children in foster care on any given day, may well have gone as low as it can.

Then on Friday, she puts out a press release stating that "The department continues to remain steadfast in its commitment to reducing the number of children in foster care and to increasing the number of family reunifications."

But Friday's Times story reports that:

Asked whether she still believed that the foster care numbers might have gone down as far as possible, Ploehn said, "I don't think anyone can answer that question."

So, asked the simple question, can the number of children in Los Angeles County foster care on any given day go down any further? Ploehn has managed to answer "yes" "maybe not" and "I don't know" all in one week.

Actually, of those three answers, the most likely is yes, the number of children in foster care on any given day can be further reduced. Once again, the evidence is from other cities. If you take the number of children in Los Angeles County foster care on January 31 and divide it by the estimated number of impoverished children in the county, there are 37 Los Angeles children in foster care for every 1,000 impoverished children. In New York City it's 31. In Cook County, Illinois (metropolitan Chicago) it's 11. And in Illinois, where the system is state run, independent court-appointed monitors attest to the improvements in child safety.

As for why Ploehn rushed out a statement backing off from whatever it was she said, the Times says the statement came "after a flurry of criticism flooded her e-mail and voice mail."

I'll bet at least one of those e-mails came from her predecessor, David Sanders. Sanders went from DCFS to Casey Family Programs, a multi-billion dollar foundation active both in commendable efforts to promote child welfare reform and some not-so-commendable efforts to thwart child welfare accountability. Sanders is doing the good stuff, including putting Casey money and expertise behind efforts to help keep families safely together in Los Angeles. There have been some promising results.

As I've noted before, people at Casey spend a lot of time on this Blog and on www.nccpr.org; so much, in fact, that I've been tempted to send them an invoice for "technical assistance."

Friday, in two hours after our first post about Ploehn's comments appeared, this Blog received 15 hits from people at Casey Family Programs.

I don't know which they saw first, the Times story or this Blog, but either way, they couldn't have been pleased to read comments from Ploehn pulling the rug out from under them.

Fortunately, it's now harder to pull the rug out from under family preservation in L.A. than in most places, something I'll discuss on this Blog tomorrow.

WAITING FOR "TUESDAY"

I noted earlier that Garrett Therolf is a much better reporter than the one who invented the non-statistical series in New York. Therolf has done some excellent work, and not just on long-form projects. For years, I've cited a story he wrote in 2002, in which he turned what could have been a routine "night meeting" story into a work of art. I even sent it to the author of the superb textbook I used when I taught journalism and suggested he include it in a subsequent edition.

The story was about Debra Reid, whose son Jonathan was wrongfully taken away in 1997 only to die in foster care. The Board of Supervisors approved a settlement and, perhaps almost as important they apologized. And when Reid spoke, they actually paid attention. Here's how Therolf described it:

Virtually every week, a parade of parents come before the supervisors, pleading for help in getting their children out of that system. … The pleas often meet with indifference from county officials, who typically talk among themselves as parents address the supervisors. Tuesday was different.

For months, parents in the same circumstances have tried, desperately, to get the attention of Garrett Therolf and his colleagues at the Los Angeles Times. And, until last Thursday, when it was too late, their pleas were met with indifference from the journalists at the Times. Indeed, when people read in Thursday's story that "A group called DCFS Give Us Back Our Children often demonstrates outside Edelman Children's Court in Monterey Park, saying that too many children are removed from families unnecessarily" did they wonder why, since it's been going on for months, they'd never heard about it in the Times before?

And now, those parents, and their children, are likely to disappear from the news columns of The Los Angeles Times again. They're still waiting for "Tuesday."

TOMORROW: THE SILVER LINING, AND THE REASON L.A.'s FOSTER CARE PANIC MAY NOT BE AS BAD AS THE ONES IN OTHER CITIES