Child welfare, by the numbers

In October 2010, county supervisors found themselves unable to measure the performance of DCFS because they believed they lacked consistent data from year to year on the number of children who had died as a result of abuse or neglect. They directed county staff to compile statistics on child deaths over the last decade, but soon realized that many agencies track child deaths, often recording different aspects of the tragedies while needlessly duplicating their efforts. With numbers gathered by different authorities with different goals, the supervisors couldn't agree on whether things were getting better or worse. So the board called for a "single entity" to compile, maintain and interpret child death data. The matter was deemed urgent.

In a report dated March 31 of this year, county Chief Executive Officer William T Fujioka recommended that representatives of various agencies meet to draw up a charter for what became known simply as the "single entity." The work group was to make staffing recommendations and propose an oversight board.

A year after the supervisors demanded action, and several months after they ordered the head of DCFS to report directly to them instead of to Fujioka, no work group has met. There is no uniformity of child death statistics. There is no "single entity."

That's par for the course in Los Angeles County government, where attention spans often last only as long as the news cycle. Frustrating, to be sure. Embarrassing, even.

Outrageous?

Let's stick with frustrating and embarrassing. There are enough outrages in county government. Too often and too easily, the latest outrage reorders priorities and derails important work as the board reacts to public or media scrutiny and managers react to the board. Supervisors fume, fingers point, heads roll, remedies are debated, selected and quickly forgotten.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich has requested an update on the "single entity," and that's a good thing; the county needs some follow-up or some closure on the issue, and it needs it soon, before the next board blow-up over child death numbers. But first, everyone involved — the supervisors, Fujioka, DCFS and all the other agencies and offices that track child death statistics — could profit from taking a deep breath.

And then they can ask, calmly: What happened? Why is it that, a year later, there is no "single entity" with consistent and unassailable data? Was the goal really to create yet another county agency? Isn't the problem that the county has too many siloed and sometimes squabbling agencies?

It's important to focus on the underlying mission of the county's child welfare program, which is, or ought to be, to keep children safe and living securely in permanent homes. The numbers that count are the ones that measure safety and permanency. They include incidents of re-abuse — how often children who were abused before the county intervened are abused again afterward — and how long it takes to move a child from a temporary situation, such as foster care or a group home, back to a reunified family or, if necessary, into adoption.