How Could You? Hall of Shame- Adina case-Child death

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions

From Calexico, California, 23-month-old foster child, Adina, died on December 11, 2014.

“Adina, a 23-month-old girl, lay on the floor in the darkened bedroom of a Calexico home, alone. It was Dec. 9, and she was slipping away as blood pooled inside her skull, the result of a powerful blow to her forehead.

Two days later, Adina was declared dead at a hospital in San Diego. A coroner’s report said she may have bashed her head on the floor while jumping between two beds in the bedroom, but officials couldn’t be certain. There were no witnesses and no proof.

One fact was clear, however. Adina’s death was a dramatic failure of the foster system that has grown to depend heavily on privatized care.

A rambunctious toddler, who had a habit of jumping on furniture, was left unsupervised in a room with two beds. After Adina was injured, her foster parents called 911, then hung up, then didn’t call back for nine minutes. And finally, although foster parents are required to know CPR, law enforcement documents say these parents didn’t know the basics.

“They were supposed to keep my granddaughter safe, and they failed,” said Scott Faris, 46, Adina’s grandfather. “The county is ultimately responsible for the child, who is in their care, whether they hand it off or do it themselves.”

Adina died in the hands of Alba Care Services, a nonprofit corporation that runs about two dozen foster homes spread throughout Riverside and Imperial counties. Over the last 30 years, corporations like Alba — called Foster Family Agencies, or FFAs — have grown to eclipse California’s public-run foster care, creating a $300 million industry. For some, that unbridled growth has sparked concerns about foster home standards and the perils of profiteering in foster care.

California lawmakers responded this month with unanimous support for increased standards in the private foster system. A new bill, which is likely to become a new law, will require all foster family agencies to seek accreditation by 2017.

This mandate will bring a wave of change to Riverside County, where only 6 of 30 existing FFAs are accredited. Over the next 15 months, these agencies will need to either open their doors to accreditors — who will scrutinize their recruiting, training and oversight procedures — or close their doors for good. Ideally, the process will weed out any substandard or unscrupulous agencies, according to proponents of the bill.

“I suspect there will be some agencies that just roll over and say – ‘I’m not going to do this anymore,’” said Carroll Schroeder, executive director of the California Alliance of Child and Family Services, a statewide trade association that accepts FFAs as members, but only if they are accredited.

“Accreditation is a little bit like getting an audit. You can try to cheat on it, but you can’t cheat on it for very long,” Schroeder added.

The new legislation is AB 403, a far-reaching bill that seeks to reform California foster care on several fronts. Gov. Jerry Brown hasn’t taken a public stance on the bill, but even if he were to veto it, lawmakers already have more than enough votes to override the veto.

Under the proposed law, FFAs must receive accreditation from one of several accrediting companies, chosen by the state. FFAs that can’t meet the 2017 deadline can seek a two-year extension.

But, even with that leeway, accreditation will be a difficult hurdle for FFAs, said Sandra Austin, the founder of a local foster agency.

Austin is the CEO of Family Health and Support Network in Palm Desert that began in 2004 and runs 39 foster homes in Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties.

Austin believes wholeheartedly that reform is needed to improve overall quality of foster care, but worries the accreditation process will be too pricey and too cumbersome for some smaller agencies. The law designed to squeeze out substandard caregivers might inadvertently shut down some first-rate ones too, Austin said.

“I believe in setting standards,” Austin said. “But it would be really cool if the state or the county would offer some assistance with the accreditation process and the cost.”

Accreditation costs vary based on the size of each individual FFA. However, even for smaller agencies, the fees amount to thousands of dollars per year.

Although AB 403 has been widely supported, not everyone is convinced the accreditation mandate will make a huge difference.

Audrey Karen Brandon, 19, a former Riverside County foster kid, worried that accreditation would become just another bureaucratic box to check.

Eleven years ago, Brandon spent a year in private foster care in Colorado, a state that uses FFAs just like California. Sometimes her foster mother would punish her by making her pull cacti with her bare hands. Sometimes she was made to sleep outdoors.

Would accreditors have caught that? Maybe, but Brandon has her doubts.

“I feel like there is pretty much a way out of anything,” she said. “If somebody goes to get a smog check, they can get it written off if they know the right person. I really don’t think this would be any different.”

“It’s worth a shot, but I don’t think it’s a guarantee it’s going to improve anything.”

‘Money-makers’

California’s foster family agencies first boomed during the crack epidemic of the late ‘80s, which overwhelmed the existing public foster system. Privatized foster care has continued to grow since then, and today the state has about 250 of these agencies — plus another 170 “sub-agencies” — licensed by the state.

Together, these agencies house a majority of California foster children who are not placed with a relative or guardian.

In Riverside County, there are more than 1,500 children in FFA homes, and they outnumber the kids in traditional foster homes five to one. In return for housing all those children, the FFAs receive more than $30 million per year from the county.

Those numbers are no surprise to Silvia Signoret, a longtime Palm Springs foster parent who leads For the Children, a local foster parent support group.

Signoret said the public and private foster systems are both capable of producing good and bad homes, but the FFAs are much better at recruiting than their public counterparts. The Coachella Valley faces a constant shortage of foster parents, so it is no wonder that many kids — and so much money — go to FFAs.

“The FFAs are money-makers,” Signoret said. “But they have to exist because the county does such a poor job of recruiting and keeping foster parents.”

The Riverside County Department of Public Social Services said in a written statement that it has an ongoing need for foster parents, and recently tapped state funding to prepare a countywide recruiting plan.

The plan involves new public service announcements, social media and prominent local officials, the agency said.

“We are constantly recruiting foster and adoptive homes, because we can never have too many and we sometimes lose foster families who end up adopting a child in their care,” the statement said. “In those instances, it is still a positive outcome, because a child has a permanent family.”

In a traditional foster care system, a parent who wants to help foster kids is first trained, vetted and licensed by either the California Department of Social Services, or in some cases, a county subsidiary agency. Once a foster parent is licensed, a county social worker will place children in the home as necessary. Parents receive a monthly stipend of $688 to $859, depending on the age of the child.

In the privatized system, parents are not licensed by the state but are instead recruited and “certified” by their individual FFAs. The agencies also employ their own social workers, who place children and oversee care.

In return, the county gives the FFA a larger stipend, between $1,789 and $2,060 per child, each month. Half of that money is passed on to foster parents, but the rest stays with the FFA, paying for social workers and administrators. Of the FFAs that operate in Riverside County, at least one third pay their CEOs a salary of $150,000 or more, according to tax filings reviewed by The Desert Sun.

In the eyes of critics, this system is ripe for abuse. Because FFA revenue is based entirely on foster stipends, these organizations have a business incentive to take as many children as possible. Potentially, an unprincipled FFA could lower its recruiting standards so it could hire more foster parents, take more foster children and collect more revenue.

“To me, it just seems like asking for trouble, because they have, by definition, a need to stay in business,” said Gerald Singleton, a civil rights attorney who specializes in cases of maltreatment in foster care.

Singleton is representing Adina’s family in a lawsuit against Alba Care Services and Imperial County.

Alba CEO Antonio Romero declined to comment on the death or the lawsuit. In court, Alba has denied all wrongdoing and cited a dozen legal defenses. Singleton argues that Adina’s death is just one example of the dangers of injecting profitability into foster care.

But others say the issue isn’t that simple, and that lawsuits like the one against Alba show exactly why.

Jill Duerr Berrick, a foster care expert at UC Berkeley, said that FFAs are liable for the parents they recruit, so they have a business incentive to raise standards, not lower them.

Any agency that cuts corners to recruit more parents risks losing far more in the courts than it stands to gain in county stipends, Berrick said.

“Applying the standard economic model to this field doesn’t always work,” Berrick said. “Because every time you expand the number of service providers, even if it expanded your revenue, it also expanded your liability.””

For private foster agencies, a new layer of scrutiny [Desert Sun 9/28/15 by Brett Kelman and Barrett Newkirk]

REFORM Puzzle Piece