Foster Care

Nadya Suleman told TV host "Dr. Phil" McGraw on Tuesday that she fears Kaiser Permanente Medical Center may not release her octuplets to her until she proves she can care for them. In an interview with The Times, McGraw said Suleman called him Tuesday afternoon, distressed after talking to Kaiser officials. Suleman has taped two episodes of McGraw's show, the first of which is scheduled to run today.

"Please, don't hurt her. Don't argue with them. You told me this would happen. Leave her alone." This is what 7-year-old Andrew Bridge thought as the police took him from his mentally ill mother on a Saturday afternoon on the streets of Los Angeles. Torn between the desire to protect his beloved mother and the need to be safe, he was pulled away from her and into a life that proved only marginally more bearable than his harrowing existence with her.

The state social services agency Wednesday was moving to shut down nine homes used for child day care and foster care after an audit found registered sex offenders in them in violation of state law. The revelation came after state auditors compared the addresses of 75,000 licensed facilities, including foster family homes and in-home day-care centers, with the state's database of registered sex offenders.

California's 80,000 foster children -- nearly 27,000 in Los Angeles County -- are underserved by deeply stressed courts and government agencies, and the hearings that decide their living situations often last no more than 15 minutes, according to a report released Friday.

Los Angeles County's Board of Supervisors passed a 5-year, $62-million plan Tuesday to improve mental health services, taking a step toward fulfilling a 5-year-old settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of children in foster care. Advocates for foster children hope the plan will improve access to mental health care, a chief objective of a 2003 settlement reached after allegations of serious shortfalls in the screening and treatment of children in the county's foster care system.

California's payments to foster parents are so low that the state is in violation of the federal Child Welfare Act, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday. Ruling in favor of three groups of foster caregivers who brought suit against the state, U.S. District Judge William Alsup noted the state's compensation rate has fallen to as little as 60% of the costs the state is obliged to cover to be eligible for federal matching funds.

Articulate and engaging, 20-year-old Shakhina Bellamy appears -- at first meeting -- an unlikely fit in the ranks of New York City's homeless. But after hearing her story, told through tears and flashes of anger, her state of limbo seems an almost inevitable result of an adolescence spent bouncing through a dozen group homes and foster families as a ward of New York's child-welfare agency. She entered the system at 9 and walked away from it at 17.

Los Angeles County child welfare workers frequently fail to comply with federal rules on monitoring the homes of foster children living with relatives -- a problem that has cost the county an estimated $6 million over the last year, officials said Tuesday.

A mother said she hugged her 8-year-old daughter for the first time after a seven-year fight to get the child back from what was supposed to be temporary foster care. "I hug her very close and hard," Qin Luo He said after a court-ordered meeting in Memphis with daughter Anna Mae, now a second-grader. Qin Luo and husband Shaoqiang He were reunited with Anna Mae under orders from the Tennessee Supreme Court.