Welfare Agencies

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday ordered a comprehensive audit of the Department of Children and Family Services in an attempt to improve an often unresponsive child abuse hotline, bolster the number of adoptions and cut the swelling ranks of youngsters in foster care.

A 4-year-old boy found unconscious in a squalid Bronx apartment visited previously by police and social workers died Monday while the city's child welfare agency was still trying to explain another youngster's death three weeks ago. Investigators were questioning 4-year-old Quachon Brown's mother and her boyfriend. Late last year, caseworkers had visited the apartment where Quachon and his siblings lived and deemed it "to be in order," said John B.

As patriotic tunes blared over a loudspeaker, veterans filed onto the Ventura College football field Friday, wearing tattered tennis shoes and layers of shabby clothes. They arrived by bus and by foot, their faces were unshaven and their gait weary. Within an hour, however, they had taken showers, donned clean clothes and new shoes and received haircuts. And the vets were assigned to their homes for the next three days--military cots under olive-colored tents.

It could be better, but it could certainly be a lot worse. That is the consensus of Los Angeles County officials, immigrant advocates and others monitoring how noncitizen residents fared in Gov. Pete Wilson's sweeping welfare blueprint. "The governor doesn't do anything to make it worse for legal immigrants, but he also doesn't do anything to mitigate the impact of the [federal] welfare bill on legal immigrants," said Phil Ansell, welfare reform strategist for Los Angeles County.

Agencies that help children, families or the poor may be filled with good intentions, but shrinking sources of funding--both nationally and locally--has reinforced the imperative that they now prove their programs yield results. So how does a program that feeds people prove that the people it fed are better off? How does a teen pregnancy prevention program determine how much credit it gets if girls do not become pregnant or boys become fathers?

The Orange County Grand Jury is investigating the practice of social workers helping some pregnant teenage girls under the county's protection marry the adult men who impregnated them, county officials and sources close to the panel confirmed Thursday. The panel's probe centers on whether the underage girls' interests are being protected and whether law enforcement officials are appropriately dealing with the adult men, who might otherwise be prosecuted on statutory rape or child abuse charges.

A commission that oversees Juvenile Court matters should be notified if Orange County social workers accommodate any more marriages of adolescent girls under their protection to the adult men who have impregnated them, the committee's chairwoman said Tuesday.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has awarded a $4,100 grant to the Organization for the Needs of the Elderly, a Van Nuys social service agency, the supervisor's office announced Thursday. The funds will come from a discretionary account--each supervisor controls such an account used to help fund organizations of their choosing. Yaroslavsky said the grant will be used to install acoustic panels on the ceiling and carpet in one of the center's three preschool rooms.

The director of the state Department of Social Services called on Orange County social workers and Juvenile Court judges Tuesday to halt the practice of helping some pregnant teenagers under the county's protection marry the adult men who had sex with them. "I don't know how we accept these relationships under any condition," Director Eloise Anderson said in an interview. "We need to stop that."

The federal government proposed new rules Tuesday to help low-income Americans register to vote in welfare offices. The Health and Human Services Department, moving to implement last year's Motor Voter Act, said its proposal reverses current regulations that bar the distribution of voter registration materials to welfare recipients and applicants at welfare offices.