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L.A. to Focus More On Protecting Kids, Less On Reuniting Families

by Tom Henderson (Subscribe to Tom Henderson's posts)
Feb 5th 2010 4:00PM

11Comments

Filed under: In The News


Angel Montiel was reunited with his parents after they enrolled in parenting classes and agreed to drug testing and other services.

Now his mother is spending 15 years in prison. She pleaded no contest to beating the toddler to death.

Angel is one reason the Department of Children and Family Services in Los Angles County is readjusting its thinking.

The overarching goal of many state and county agencies designed to protect children is to reunite and preserve troubled families.

Not in Los Angeles County. Not anymore.

In a major policy shift, the Los Angeles Times reports, county officials say their number one priority will now be protecting children from unsafe parents. Reuniting families and reducing the number of children in foster care are distant seconds.

This is a big change, the Times reports.

Department administrators once boasted about how they got children out of foster care. There were of 52,000 kids in foster care in Los Angeles County in 1997. Last year, there were 19,900.

"I do want these numbers to start going down again, but only when I can assure everyone that the work we are doing results in safety for that child who is going home," Trish Ploehn, the department's director, tells the Times.

"I don't know how much more we can go down in the numbers, though," she adds. "We are a very large county, and it's possible that we are already at the level where we are supposed to be."

The change in attitude comes on the heels of a Los Angeles Times report that detailed how at least 17 children died last year from abuse and neglect, even though the department was aware of their dangerous family situations. In 2008, the paper reports, 14 children died under similar circumstances. (Montiel was among the children who died in 2007.)

One of the children who died last year was Isabel Garcia. The child starved to death, the Times reports, two months after child-welfare officials decided she and her parents and five siblings were doing well.

"These cases had a very deep effect on the department," Ploehn tells the Times.

Not everyone likes the effect. Critics charge that department officials already break up too many families. Sabreen Shabazz, 56, of Los Angeles tells the Times that she cares for her 11-year-old granddaughter on $845 per month. She worries her granddaughter will be taken into foster care, she tells the paper.

Shabazz is a member of a group called DCFS Give Us Back Our Children. Members often demonstrate outside Edelman Children's Court in Monterey Park, Calif.

"DCFS has a family preservation unit and they need to focus on that work more, not less," Shabazz's friend Janet Mitchell tells the Times. "Look at Sabreen. She's a loving grandmother who just needs help. They live in poverty, but the child is happy because she is loved."

Related: Adoption / Foster Care Helpline

Tags: child abuse, foster care, Foster Care Abuse Neglect Los Angeles County Children and Family, neglect

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