Foster care report: despite progress, county fails to reach 16 of 18 national standards

Sep. 10, 2011 by Ben Baeder

The county this week released a four-year study of  foster care outcomes. The county failed to meet 16 of 18 national goals. It’s not clear in the report how Los Angeles County fared compared to other counties.

Look for a full story next week.

Meanwhile, here are some tips to understand the information:

– Skip all the introductory stuff at the top and get straight to the report, which starts on page 4.

Issues:

– State law says a child’s foster case should be resolved in 18 months, meaning the child should be returned home, adopted, or put in legal guardianship.  The data shows it’s taking almost three years for children to get adopted. The data for this topic are on page 14 in chart C2.2.  There’s information on how long it’s taking for children to be reunited with their families.

– There’s a huge problem with finding homes for older foster children. And many of those older children have their own children, who often end up in the foster care system.  The county found that 60 percent of teenagers who aged out of the system and turned 18 had been in foster care for at least  three years. This is a nationwide problem and not unique to LA County. Check out page 15 and chart C3.3 for this data.

–  There are some catch-22s in the system, especially for the family reunification issue. Specifically, the county is trying to help parents change and get their children back. But the best social workers are careful, so they are reluctant to send children to homes where they feel a child may be in danger. Los Angeles County missed targets for reunification time, and they also missed a national goal because too many children went back into the system again after going home to their families. In other words, the workers must try to reunify as quickly as possible, but then they get dinged when the reunification effort fails. Check out the data on charts C1.1 and C1.4 on page 13 to see this tension play out.

– Black children are twice as likely as other children to be in foster care. Check out the chart on page 28.

Los Angeles County Foster Care Evaluation