RETRIEVING LOST FAMILIES : SUCCESS OF L.A. PROGRAM DRAWING NATIONAL ATTENTION.

Byline: Kenneth B. Noble The New York Times

By her own reckoning, Gloria Jones could hardly have been a worse mother.

The Los Angeles woman was unwed, unemployed and a chronic drug abuser. Discipline often meant a scream and a slap. And she had lost her children to foster care twice because of neglect, and was on the verge of losing them permanently.

That is when Charles Thomas came into her life. Instead of removing Jones' three daughters again, a judge assigned Thomas, a social worker and family therapist, to smother her with constant guidance and attention.

Since that appointment in late 1995, Thomas has worked intensively with the family, and has been on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day. He arranged drug counseling and classes in child care and spirituality at a local church. He helped bring order to the family's once chaotic and squalid apartment. And he has become Jones' advocate on an array of concrete problems related to poverty, like getting her rent - which was more than a year in arrears - paid on time.

This new approach, based on intensive supervision and using networks of neighborhood institutions, is bringing national attention to the Los Angeles County child welfare office and is about to be embraced in New York City.

In September, Nicholas Scoppetta, the commissioner of New York's administration for children's services, praised the approach used in Los Angeles, saying that he wanted to replace much of the vast bureaucracy responsible for protecting New York's most vulnerable children with dozens of neighborhood-based networks based on the Los Angeles model.

Under the old model, social workers faced a stark choice: either leave vulnerable children with their parents, with little monitoring, or move them to foster and group homes. Child welfare authorities often let cases slide for years rather than make such a bleak choice.

Now, Los Angeles County, using two dozen neighborhood-based networks of churches, medical centers and social service groups to help children before they suffer serious neglect or abuse, is seen by child welfare experts as having one of the most successful programs in the nation.

Scoppetta and his aides have traveled to Los Angeles and observed firsthand the program. But, they say it is too early to tell when a similar program might be implemented in New York.

The idea behind the program is simple: Community-based organizations are likely to know more about a child's neighborhood and family environment than a fragmented, complex central bureaucracy. In theory, intervention by social workers familiar with the family itself is also likely to be less threatening than meddling by workers from a remote bureaucracy.

So far, the Los Angeles model is also proving to be cost-effective. Peter Digre, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services, said the cost of placing a child in foster care or a shelter and of providing care by psychologists and specialists could total $30,000 a year; the neighborhood network costs about half that, he said.

The underlying premise in these intensive family preservation programs is that a community-based caseworker can quickly identify problems and correct them after observing a family at home for several hours a day, several times a week. Free of rigid office schedules and paperwork, caseworkers like Thomas can be available anytime family members need them.

``I like their family preservation program a lot because it takes into account the fact that families cannot function on their own, they can only function in the context of the wider community,'' said Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, a public interest legal firm.

She added, ``They also have very high, very specific procedural safety standards that require lots of contact between the family preservation worker and the child to ensure that they are safe in homes where there still are some questions about their safety.''

Most family preservation programs inject a brief but intensive dose of counseling and social services, typically for six weeks. By contrast, the Los Angeles program is designed to connect a family to a community system for the long term.

``Our approach organizes the churches, schools, mental health centers and numerous other community-based organizations to work with the entire family,'' said Bruce Rubenstein, the Los Angeles agency's deputy director for community development.

``When public assistance pulls out, the family is still connected to neighborhood organizations, and children are protected by these ongoing connections,'' he said. ``The singular caseworker approach often fails to deal with issues of social isolation. And social isolation is one of the key factors in the most egregious cases of child abuse and homicide.''

Before the new program, Jones said, she had only minimal contact with county child welfare officials. In those rare instances, she said, she resented what she perceived as their heavy-handed efforts to run her life.

``They didn't look beyond what they could see, they didn't try to understand what kind of person I really was,'' she said.

A year later, the Jones family is still together, and Jones said she was confident about her new skills as a parent. Chaos at home has been replaced with regular mealtimes, bedtimes and limits, she said, backed by positive discipline.

``Before I got in this program, I'd get mad and go off and cuss and holler if somebody tried to tell me what to do,'' she said at her modest apartment in South Central Los Angeles. ``But I've learned how to control my temper, my attitude and my mouth. I'm not as quick to go off, and I accept criticism a lot more easier,'' she said.