Child Welfare

It starts with the death of a child. There is no event more tragic than the death of an innocent due to an adult's abuse or neglect. Now add government — too blind to the needs of its most vulnerable charges, perhaps, or too prone to snatch children from their homes and too unwilling or too clueless to help troubled families. The final ingredient: Public outrage and demands for change. For decades, those were the factors that determined child welfare policy. High-profile cases of abuse at the hands of violent or addicted parents resulted in panic and waves of removals, supposedly in the interests of child safety.

There is nothing more outrageous than the death of a child at the hands of an abusive parent who was under the watch of child welfare workers who, in the end, didn't step in and stop the abuse. Such appears to be the case with the death of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez. All the elements are there for a high-pitched emotional public response: Politicians. Government bureaucrats. Bad parents. And an innocent child, now dead. But if the public and the county supervisors leave their setting on outrage, experience shows that the result is too often a cycle of invective, firings, discipline and policy changes that may satisfy a hunger for action, but only of the wheel-spinning sort.

There is nothing more outrageous than the death of a child at the hands of an abusive parent who was under the watch of child welfare workers who, in the end, didn't step in and stop the abuse. Such appears to be the case with the death of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez. All the elements are there for a high-pitched emotional public response: Politicians. Government bureaucrats. Bad parents. And an innocent child, now dead. But if the public and the county supervisors leave their setting on outrage, experience shows that the result is too often a cycle of invective, firings, discipline and policy changes that may satisfy a hunger for action, but only of the wheel-spinning sort.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court was asked Tuesday to decide who should raise a 3 1/2-year-old girl who was given up by her single mother: the South Carolina couple who adopted her at birth or her biological father, who invoked his rights as a Cherokee Indian to claim his child. The justices spent part of the morning as family court judges, and they did not envy those who must decide such emotionally trying disputes every day. "Domestic relations pose the hardest problems for judges," said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

The Bureau of State Audits reported in late March on troubling but familiar problems in Los Angeles County's child welfare system: Abuse investigations continue to take longer than the state's standard 30 days to complete. Although the county had a temporary waiver allowing social workers here to take twice as long, there was confusion over the applicable standard, and too many investigations remained untimely even with the extra time. The problem was exacerbated, if not caused, according to the report, by constant churning of leadership in the department and, as a result, by constant changes in marching orders from the top to front-line child welfare workers.

Large government agencies with vital missions, such as the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, can run properly only on the strength of selfless work, courageous leadership, responsible oversight — and data. Managers and policymakers need accurate, consistent and complete statistics, and they need to demonstrate that they have chosen the right outcomes to measure. Otherwise, there is no way for them, or the public, to know whether they are succeeding. 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.

Puppy beating trial Re "Puppy beating brings 90-day jail sentence," April 3 Jerry Austin, a friend of Glynn Johnson, the man sentenced recently for beating a puppy, was quoted as saying the trial had "dehumanized" Johnson and "humanized" a dog. "That is unfortunate," Austin said. That's a clever way to frame this, but it doesn't change the facts of the case. The trial isn't what brought discredit and shame to Johnson -- his own behavior is. The Times reports that Johnson bludgeoned a 6-month-old puppy at least 12 times in the head with a 12-pound rock.

Los Angeles County supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to launch an investigation into potential flaws in the child welfare system that might have played a role in the deaths of three children over the last month. Child welfare authorities had at one point investigated the care of the three children who died. Statistics show that in the last three years, a dozen children or more have died annually as a result of abuse or neglect despite the fact that their cases had come to the attention of social workers.

The interim chief of Los Angeles County's troubled child welfare agency is quitting, a spokesman confirmed Monday. The resignation of Jackie Contreras, effective Sept. 16, is the third departure by an agency director in nine months. Trish Ploehn, the embattled former chief, was forced out in December. In May, her replacement, Antonia Jimenez, quit after defying the Board of Supervisors' plan to reform the Department of Children and Family Services. The agency has been under scrutiny since reports in The Times that more than 70 children had died since 2008 of abuse or neglect after coming to the attention of county social workers.

More than a year ago, pledges to reform one of the nation's largest child welfare agencies followed a report showing that children in underprivileged areas of Los Angeles County receive alarmingly uneven aid. But the efforts to improve that have largely stalled. Communities with the greatest need for services still have the least experienced child protective staff and those workers have the highest turnover rates. The agency's chief says the disparity has continued because the county and the social workers' union have been unable to agree on how best to slow the movement of employees, who are free under their labor contract to opt out of more challenging assignments, which tend to be in lower socioeconomic areas.

A San Diego judge has struck down state child welfare regulations that significantly limited public access to information about minors who die from abuse and neglect. In a stern rebuke, San Diego County Superior Court Judge Judith F. Hayes said the restrictions were "inconsistent and in conflict" with a law meant to greatly expand disclosures. The Dec. 28 decision came in a lawsuit against the California Department of Social Services and its director, Will Lightbourne. An agency spokesman said Thursday that Lightbourne has not decided if he will appeal the ruling.

Here we go again. After the tragic school killings in Newtown, Conn., the leader of the National Rifle Assn. offers a perfectly sensible proposal to put cops with guns in every school - and people jump all over him. "A paranoid, dystopian vision," said New York's anti-gun mayor, Michael Bloomberg. "The most revolting, tone-deaf statement I've ever seen," said Sen.-elect Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat. But the only problem I can see with the NRA's proposal is that it doesn't go far enough.

The law sounds logical, at least at first: If a parent caused a child's death through abuse or neglect, then the other children in that parent's care can be made court dependents, and child welfare workers can remove them from their home. Imagine a house in which a child was beaten to death, or died of starvation. It stands to reason that other children living there are at risk. The home is dangerous, and if government ever is justified in taking children from their parents, that's when it should be done.

Parents who transport a youngster without a car seat and lose the child in a fatal traffic accident may have their surviving children removed by social welfare authorities, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Thursday. The state high court ruled in favor of Los Angeles County social workers who placed two young boys in foster care after their 18-month-old sister, held on the lap of an aunt, was killed when a driver ran a stop sign and plowed into the car their father was driving.

The mother acknowledged she unleashed a bitter torrent of accusations against the social workers who took her children last year, calling incessantly to claim they were being abused in foster care. But what the workers did in return has drawn a stern rebuke from a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. Amy Pellman, a jurist with deep experience in the county's child welfare system, said they misused their power by retaliating and harassing the family. After she affirmed a referee's decision to return the children to their mother, Pellman declared that the workers acted out of "bad blood" to unravel the family's progress and place the children at risk of being retaken by the county.

Three people were convicted last week for their roles in a high-profile child torture case that revealed breakdowns in Los Angeles County's troubled child protective services agency. A 5-year-old boy, known only as Johnny, was rescued from a dark closet in San Bernardino County in 2009. Much of his body had been burned by a glue gun and hot spoons. He had been starved and sodomized, taunted and punched, forced to eat soap and crouch motionless in corners. Martin Roland Morales, 35, and Juan Carlos Santos-Herrera, 22, were found guilty of torture, child abuse and sodomizing a child under 10 years of age. Crystal Rodriguez, 35, was convicted of child endangerment after failing to protect a 12-year-old victim from the perpetrators, according to the prosecutor, David Foy. Morales could be sentenced to more than 78 years in prison.

More than a year ago, pledges to reform one of the nation's largest child welfare agencies followed a report showing that children in underprivileged areas of Los Angeles County receive alarmingly uneven aid. But the efforts to improve that have largely stalled. Communities with the greatest need for services still have the least experienced child protective staff and those workers have the highest turnover rates. The agency's chief says the disparity has continued because the county and the social workers' union have been unable to agree on how best to slow the movement of employees, who are free under their labor contract to opt out of more challenging assignments, which tend to be in lower socioeconomic areas.

The Bureau of State Audits reported in late March on troubling but familiar problems in Los Angeles County's child welfare system: Abuse investigations continue to take longer than the state's standard 30 days to complete. Although the county had a temporary waiver allowing social workers here to take twice as long, there was confusion over the applicable standard, and too many investigations remained untimely even with the extra time. The problem was exacerbated, if not caused, according to the report, by constant churning of leadership in the department and, as a result, by constant changes in marching orders from the top to front-line child welfare workers.