CONFERENCE WILL TACKLE CHILD SUPPORT STRATEGY; COLLEGE OF THE CANYONS EVENT TO OFFER ADVICE FOR PARENTS.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Daily News Staff Writer

At a conference to be held Saturday at College of the Canyons, parents can get advice about dealing with Los Angeles County's troubled system for helping them get court orders and collect child support money.

Similar to a conference held last weekend in Carson for parents in southern Los Angeles County, the Santa Clarita conference will give North County parents on child custody and visitation issues and on how to get a court order for child support, how to get an order enforced and how to get an order changed.

Speaking will be court commissioners and attorneys specializing in family law, officials of the district attorney's Bureau of Family Support and representatives of Single Parents United in Kids, My Child Says Daddy and other advocacy groups.

``We're not telling people: Bring your case file and we'll work on it here. This is to give people some tips and pointers and resources and phone numbers,'' said Shauna Jackson, an aide to county Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who is sponsoring the program.

The program will run from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the college, 26455 Rockwell Canyon Road, Valencia.

Antonovich's office averages 10 telephone calls or letters a week from parents complaining about how their child-support cases are being handled, Jackson said.

Common complaints are that fathers make payments but the money never gets to the mothers, that some parents find it impossible even to reach anyone in the Bureau of Family Support who can help them with their cases and that the bureau often fails to find noncustodial parents and collect the money they owe for child support.

County officials are considering calling special public hearings before the Board of Supervisors about the child support system, which was criticized by an independent 1997 audit, Jackson said.

The Price Waterhouse audit called for major changes in the way the district attorney's Bureau of Family Support does business. The audit was especially critical of the bureau's voice-mail system, saying it frustrated callers and caused many repeat calls.

The audit also found that the bureau lagged behind those in other counties in collections, that the large bureaucracy created long delays in processing cases and that rank-and-file workers were each assigned too many cases.

Jackson said the audit described a child support system that was overly bureaucratic, lacked anyone who knew how to make its computerized record system work correctly and was organized so that a parent might need to talk with three different officials, each hard to reach, to get a case straightened out.