Another Los Angeles CPS FAIL

The social worker’s accusation is that DCFS managers were housing “children in a Wilshire Boulevard office building without sufficient meals and bedding and then trying to keep the information from their bosses.”

An investigation will be conducted by the county’s auditor-controller.

“Department leaders acknowledged that children sometimes stayed in the room while waiting for foster placements but said they were well cared for and rarely spent more than a few hours there.”

The accuser, Lincoln Saul, ” has worked for the department for over 20 years and is highly respected and was just doing his job. It is a great concern to know that if a social worker speaks out on an issue that there will be personal attacks against them to discredit what they are saying.”

L.A. County supervisors order foster care inquiry
[Los Angeles Times Blog 7/12/11]

“In December, top Department of Children and Family Services officials ordered workers to notify them every time a child had to stay more than eight hours at the agency’s night operations office near MacArthur Park. The reports were then forwarded to the Board of Supervisors, which has been keeping a close eye on the agency since learning that more than 70 children had died of maltreatment in recent years despite having come to the attention of social workers.

But agency employees feared sending that news up the chain of command. Saul alleges the agency started shifting children under government care to field offices shortly before the eight-hour mark. Sometimes they would move them to a McDonald’s to restart the clock, Saul said.

As a result, Saul alleged, the most difficult-to-place children — newly removed infants and older teenagers who had been kicked out of previous foster homes — churned through a unkempt office space night after night, often sleeping in car seats or on the floor without sheets, almost never staying more than eight hours before leaving to spend the day in a field office while social workers tried to find them a foster home.”
Foster children routinely housed in office waiting room, social worker alleges
[Los Angeles Times 7/12/11 by Garrett Therolf]

View the complaint letter here.

REFORM Puzzle Piece