GROUPS SUE TO SAVE KIDS CONSENT DECREE SOUGHT FOR COUNTY FOSTER CARE AGENCY.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

Calling Los Angeles County foster children's system the worst in the nation, public interest groups and the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday seeking a federal consent decree to reform a program that has lurched from crisis to crisis.

If the county program with nearly 55,000 foster youths is placed under federal court oversight, it would become one of a handful of foster care systems in the nation under such supervision.

``For decades now, the Los Angeles County foster care system, our nation's largest, has been widely regarded as this country's worst: a tragic model of child neglect on the part of the government,'' said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the county's foster youths.

``Los Angeles' is a system that leaves nearly every child behind,'' he said. ``It is the system's failure to identify and address the mental health problems of these children that is perhaps the principal obstacle to family reunification or adoption, that results in the county's shameful record of costly and needless foster placements and hospital institutionalizations, that leads to tens of thousands of children never having a single place to call home, a single family to call their own.''

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich said the action is justified.

``I support their efforts to resolve a very critical problem that exists in the Department of Children and Family Services,'' Antonovich said. ``The foster youths have been failed by a lack of leadership in the department.''

County Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Sharon Harper said the county has been working to improve the foster care system and that a consent decree could pose a burden.

``It would probably make it more cumbersome for us to operate, but without specifics I don't want to speculate,'' Harper said.

Consent decrees - court-approved agreements to settle lawsuits in exchange for promises to reform - have been agreed to in recent years by the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and other public entities.

Critics say such agreements hamstring local leaders by turning over control to unelected officials. But supporters of such deals note that local officials agree to them usually only after government has repeatedly failed to carry out reforms and appears on the verge of being hit with a costly court judgment.

The lawsuit was filed against the county and state specifically on behalf of five foster children, ages 9-16, by the ACLU, Western Center on Law and Poverty, Youth Law Center, Protection and Advocacy, Inc., the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law and the national law firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe.

``The judge would ensure that changes were implemented,'' said Lew Hollman, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Law in the Public Interest. ``The reason we think that is necessary is that the county has failed to reform itself for so long that we feel it needs the coercive force of a court order to bring about real change. The children can't wait.''

The lawsuit comes after an announcement earlier this month by Department of Children and Family Services Director Anita Bock that she would leave her post Aug. 16. Following widespread complaints that she failed to act aggressively to turn around the nation's largest foster care system, the Board of Supervisors had voted in closed session to ask her to resign.

In the past year, the Daily News has outlined long-standing systemic problems in the foster care system, starting with allegations in July 2001 that staffers at MacLaren Children's Center in El Monte - the county shelter for abused and troubled youths - had slammed children into the ground and broken their arms. Earlier this year came revelations that the number of children killed by foster parents and relative caregivers hit a decade high in 2001.

The lawsuit concentrates on the lack of community-based mental health services the county provides to foster youths.

According to some estimates, between 60 percent and 85 percent of children in foster care have significant mental health problems. In the county, thousands of children have emotional, behavioral and psychiatric impairments but are not being provided with the community-based mental health services they are entitled to by law, critics say.

Those services are known as ``wraparound,'' a program in which children's services, mental health, welfare and other officials work together to meet the individual needs of foster youths.

States that have begun using the program have been successful in reducing the number of foster youths abused in the system and the total number in foster homes.

Ira Burnim, legal director for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C., said child-welfare experts know that therapeutic foster care works, but the policy-makers who oversee child welfare and mental health systems in California seem unwilling to support those programs.

``Counties, including Los Angeles, continue to rely heavily on restrictive congregate shelters, despite widespread agreement among children's mental health experts that such shelters are harmful to the children with the most severe emotional and behavioral problems,'' he said.

Rosenbaum said child advocates are optimistic that the county's new interim child welfare director, Marjorie Kelly, a well-known advocate of wraparound services, will be able to successfully implement the program here.

The supervisors voted Tuesday to hire Kelly, former head of the state child welfare system under former Gov. Pete Wilson, at a salary of $182,004 a year while a national search is conducted for a permanent director.