LAST CHILD LEAVES MACLAREN 'DUMPING GROUND' FOSTER FACILITY CLOSES.

Byline: Michael Gougis Staff Writer

Forty years after it opened, the last child left MacLaren Children's Center in El Monte on Friday, ending a chapter in the county's foster care efforts marked with accusations of abuse and lawsuits.

``It's like closing Alcatraz,'' said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles, which is suing the county over its foster care system, including conditions at the 10-acre, 120-bed shelter in El Monte.

``I think it's an extraordinary accomplishment. Symbolically and practically, MacLaren has always been a hellhole,'' he said. ``I think it's a significant day that demonstrates the county's commitment to real foster care reform.''

The last child remaining at the sprawling campus was relocated Friday morning. Many of the remaining workers there spent the day boxing possessions and preparing to move. While some programs will continue to be housed in the administration offices, the residences will be deserted for the first time in decades.

``We continue to be concerned about what happens to the children now that the center is closing,'' said Mark Tarnawsky of Service Employees International Union Local 660, which represents many of the clerical workers at the center. ``What is going to happen now that the county has no emergency shelter for them?'' When the shelter opened, a mixture of teens, toddlers and infants lived there while social workers looked for foster homes to place them in. But over the years, the population shifted as the easier-to-place children found foster homes and the older, more troubled children with emotional, mental and behavioral disorders - those harder to find foster homes for - became a larger and larger percentage of the population.

At one point, the cottages on the grounds, built to house 120 children, housed more than 200, county officials said. In 2001, a county grand jury found that there was an average of a half-dozen assaults every day at the center. A lawsuit alleged that children were beaten and had their arms broken, and more than two dozen workers lost their jobs there because they had criminal records.

In the end, to try to prevent those emotionally troubled children from walking out of MacLaren and into the streets, the county installed a lock on the front door, but children could leave simply by pressing a button. A social worker was assigned to sit at the door to talk to the fleeing children and try to convince them to stay. And the cost of keeping children at MacLaren - more than $750 a day per child - made it the county's most expensive child care facility, grand jurors found.

But MacLaren's biggest failure, officials and outside experts said, was simply that it became a warehouse for the toughest cases that county child welfare workers handled.

Instead of pushing to find the children the treatment they needed, workers were content to keep the kids there. And leaving troubled children in a complex where they saw nothing but other troubled children was no recipe for helping them.

``MacLaren became kind of a dumping ground for high-need children by many agencies,'' said county Supervisor Gloria Molina, whose district includes MacLaren. ``It's unfortunate that it wasn't able to live up to its mission. Kids who were supposed to be there for 60 days wound up staying there for six months.''

``It became a dumping ground and a breeding ground for acting-out teens who would all too often later wind up in Juvenile Hall,'' said Amy Pellman, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Alliance for Children's Rights. ``It will not be mourned.''

Union officials said they remained concerned that former MacLaren residents were running away from their new placements in large numbers, or were being placed in motels or DCFS offices. County officials said they had no verified reports of children sleeping in motels or offices.

Union officials said late last month that 111 children who had been at MacLaren are now listed as runaways on the county's missing kids Web site. A report from DCFS in late February said that of the 200 children who had left MacLaren since October, 131 were back home or in the same foster or group home they were assigned to after leaving the center, and about 15 had gone AWOL. The remainder had either been hospitalized or moved through multiple placements; one died in a car accident.

Department of Children and Family Services officials said they plan to eliminate the need for a large, institutional emergency shelter with a series of emergency foster homes and shelters. More critically, they plan to more rapidly assess foster children's needs, find them permanent placements and provide more help to the foster parents caring for the county's most troubled youths.

``Everything we do should be centered around permanence,'' Interim DCFS Director Marjorie Kelly said in a statement.

``MacLaren taught us that warehousing these children is not a solution,'' Pellman said. ``We should do everything to make sure that their first placement is their last placement.''