Report Raises Questions About Alternative To Foster Care Program In San Diego County

Speaker 1: 00:00 No child should be left in the care of an abusive parent. But that's the concern around San Diego counties voluntary services program, which is an alternative to foster care. The program is meant to offer support to families and keep them together rather than split them apart by placing children into the foster care system. But it may be causing more harm than good. Morgan Cook, a reporter with the San Diego Union Tribune is watchdog investigations team has been covering this story and joins us with more and Morgan. Welcome. Hi. So tell us more about these voluntary services agreements. How do they work and what's the main idea behind them? Terry services agreements are a tool that the county uses in lieu of foster care when it is possible for the child to be kept safe in the home. So if they can keep the child in the home safely, they want to try to do that. Speaker 1: 00:52 And they do that by coming up with an agreement typically between the social worker and the family. And they agreed together that the family will receive certain kinds of services, um, that will hopefully mitigate the risk. Or, you know, prevent the possibility that children will be maltreated in the future. And you wrote about the case of a three month old baby girl who was hospitalized with serious brain injuries. Uh, what were you able to find out about that case? Well, to find out, you know, several things about it, but it was, it was heavily redacted. So we were kind of trying to gather the information, you know, around the redactions and kind of stitch it into a coherent narrative about what happened to the child. So, you know, we learned about when she was injured, what these social workers found when they talk to family members and you know, doctors and other people involved and what they decided to do and essentially how they decided to do it. Speaker 1: 01:55 So how do volunteer service agreement cases compare to the cases that go through the foster care system? The cases that go through the foster care system, um, happen in a court, you know, formal setting. Um, and those children are removed from their homes and taken under their protection of the juvenile court. And then the juvenile court places them, you know, in another home where they will be safe. Uh, and then hopefully they can either be reunified with their families or adopted by another family. Voluntary services cases are different in the sense that they don't, they often don't involve the courts at all and the children are typically allowed to stay in their homes. Wild. These services are being provided to parents and you know, the services I'm talking about would be, you know, counseling help with unemployment, education about child development, things like that. You know, people have substance abuse problems that can hook them up with treatment for that. Speaker 1: 02:55 And all of that can go on without those people losing their kids. And do you have a sense of how many voluntary services cases are handled by the county? Yes. Um, the county handled about, well, about 1500 kids spend at least one day and voluntary services in the fiscal year ending June 30th, 2017 and the working group that looked at how the county handles these cases came about after a ut investigation into abuse in the counties foster care system. What other concerns did the group raise? The group raised all kinds of concerns. They raise concerns about the culture at the health and Human Services Agency and how, you know, what it, what it needed was some reorganization and some, you know, to make the uh, the practices and procedures more coherent across the whole region. And they then said, you know, there's social workers who have secondary post traumatic stress because of this work that they do. Speaker 1: 03:53 It's really hard. They see a lot of things that nobody wants to see. And so they need support too. They need, you know, mental health support. They need coping skills. All of those things. They wanted them to, you know, they had some concerns about policy for voluntary services and how those families are selected. And they suggested, you know, a large committee of people who might be able to, you know, decide together if a family is appropriate for voluntary services. They've talked about all kinds of stuff, funding and how things should be organized within the agency and how oversight should happen, what information the public should have, whether children should be attending their own court hearings. I mean there were a lot of things that they brought up. And after reporting the story, what is the most surprising thing you found? I think one of the most surprising things I found about it is, is that it's just, it's, um, we use it a lot. Speaker 1: 04:48 I mean more than I would think because I wasn't really aware of its existence and it's something that happens really I guess largely outside of the public's view. And so it was kind of surprising to me that we are trying to protect all the, these children, uh, using this tool that isn't well understood by the public. Did the working group provide any recommendations and how has the county responding? The county is responding by saying, you know, yes, these are changes that we think are great ideas and we're going to go for it. You know, like setting up a dedicated staff of social workers to just handle voluntary services cases, you know, setting up dedicated staff of social workers to just handle, you know, emergency investigations of children who have allegations of abuse while they're in care, you know, foster care or something. And they took a lot of the recommendations to heart and then others they're planning to study to see what's feasible. Speaker 1: 05:49 You know, they have to study workloads and they have to study staffing and see if it's possible to, to do some of the things that the working groups, and I'm wondering if you have a sense of what the status is of the, of the foster care system. Is it overtaxed? Is this voluntary services program, um, put in place to sort of mitigate that or ease some of that or what's the situation there? That was unclear to me. Uh, but I get the sense that the county is really, you know, they're, they are working towards their values, which is to try to keep families together while keeping kids safe. And this is a way that they're trying to do that. As far as the health of the overall system, I mean, I think that these reports make it clear that there's room for improvement, but there's room for improvement in every system. Speaker 1: 06:38 And so I don't think that that means that San Diego's is functioning particularly poorly or has any huge problems compared to others. That's not really something that we can see well, but speaking to people, you know, reporting the story. I think a lot of people have a lot of confidence in the system and they think it works really well overall, but it just has some areas where it really needs to take a hard look at what's going on and see if it can make it better. I've been speaking with Morgan Cook, a reporter with the San Diego Union Tribune is watchdog investigations team. Morgan, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you.