Posted on 05/03/2005 8:23:05 PM PDT by Mo1
From the LATimes:
L.A. County officials' use of a waiting room for overnight stays is called illegal by the state.
For more than two years, Los Angeles County officials have housed some foster children overnight in the waiting room of an office building near downtown, with toddlers and teens spending days and nights on couches and roll-out cots as social workers try to find them homes.
County logs show more than 100 cases this year alone in which youths have spent the night in the roughly 300-square-foot waiting room, including a few occasions when toddlers and babies slept next to teenagers.
This week, state licensing officials determined that the waiting room amounts to an illegal foster home and ordered the county to stop using it to place children for hours at a time.
In 2003, child-welfare officials promised the Board of Supervisors that they had stopped using office space to house children. On Friday, however, a spokeswoman for the Department of Children and Family Services acknowledged that the practice continued.
"We understand that it's not the best situation for children," said Laura Grasmehr, the agency's spokeswoman. "The department is looking for more shelter beds."
In the early morning hours of Jan. 25, a 2-month-old, a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old were removed from their mother, who was suspected of neglect. Records show they spent the night in the department waiting room with eight other children ages 11 through 16.
One 19-year-old male stayed at the Wilshire Boulevard office seven consecutive nights in March, shuttling back and forth to another office during the day. Those same nights, other teens also slept there, including one 15-year-old girl and one 14-year-old girl, according to county records.
Those who have spent the night at the office are usually difficult-to-place teenagers. They include gang members and youths with emotional problems and physical disabilities. They are supervised by county employees who periodically check on them in the waiting room, a social worker said.
Social workers frequently take abused and neglected children to their offices while they call around to find them a place to stay, Grasmehr said. When the children are picked up after hours, they wind up at the emergency command post, a 1960s office building on Wilshire near Vermont Avenue.
The waiting room has been transformed into a de facto shelter. The room is furnished with toys, books, a television, a microwave, a refrigerator, couches, tables, chairs and a crib, records show. Adjacent is a bathroom with a shower. Rollout beds are kept in a nearby conference room. Snacks and fast-food vouchers are used to feed the kids while they wait.
"What's your office like? Would you want your kids spending 72 hours there?" asked Larry Bolton, chief legal counsel for the California Department of Social Services, which enforces laws requiring the licensing of foster homes and day-care centers. His agency ordered the DCFS to find an alternative by May 20.
Some employees said the conditions in the waiting room go against the county's mission to protect children.
"We remove them from their home because we're telling their parents that they're not taking care of them," said Edward Santana, shop steward for Service Employees International Union Local 535, which represents social workers. "It's pretty unacceptable to have little kids all the way up to 19-, 20-year-olds."
Children began sleeping at the office after the county closed its emergency shelter for abused and neglected youngsters, MacLaren Children's Center in El Monte, in March 2003.
The closure settled a lawsuit by children's advocates, who alleged that the county was dumping children with mental health issues in MacLaren and leaving them there.
To take its place, officials paid foster and group homes to hold open dozens of emergency beds and set up crisis teams to intercede when foster children were at risk of being removed from a home, according to records.
But those beds were "intended for children without significant behavioral, psychological or medical needs," county documents show.
In May 2003, more than a dozen children, including runaways, one child with severe medical problems and others with behavioral and emotional problems, spent the night in the Wilshire waiting room, some sleeping on couches. The Times wrote a story the following month. County supervisors ordered the agency to fix the problem.
"The Command Post Center is not an appropriate location to house children for more than a few hours while a more permanent placement is found," Supervisor Gloria Molina said in a June 2003 motion.
Within days, David Sanders, head of the DCFS, told supervisors that he had found four one-day-only emergency beds at group homes that he would always keep open for children with serious emotional or behavioral problems. He told them the problem had been resolved.
A more long-term fix was tied to a "Family Reception and Conferencing Center." The project would "provide a 24-hours-a day, seven-days-a-week operational location where children can wait in a comfortable setting while DCFS social work staff perform the necessary administrative activities to identify and legally clear an appropriate placement," Sanders told county supervisors.
On June 10, 2003, they approved his $680,000 plan to remodel a closed health clinic in Paramount.
But it is now used as staff offices.
Sanders said he scrapped his original plan because he was worried that any county shelter would wind up housing difficult-to-place children for longer than he intended.
"It is clear that we need something immediately to resolve this," he said Friday. "What I don't want to do is something that becomes another layover spot for children."
The issue came to light most recently in February, when a social worker wrote a memo complaining to Sanders.
"There currently exists a problem where children spend excessive hours" awaiting placement, "without adequate provisions made for their supervision, rest and nutrition," the memo by social worker Lincoln L. Saul began. "It is only a matter of time before some tragic event takes place."
The day before he wrote it, Saul had found seven children sleeping in the office at 6:15 in the morning.
Five were sleeping on couches and rollaway beds. Two more were sitting in chairs in a conference room, their heads slumped over tables.
His memo also reached child advocate Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, who in turn called licensing officials.
"It's beyond shocking that this is going on and nobody cares," she said. "I talked to them two years ago and told them this kind of thing is an unlicensed facility."
Part of the problem is that the number of shelter beds, where children can stay for up to 30 days, has dropped from 83 to 56 in the last year, Sanders said, and most refuse to take difficult children.
Sanders said he has been working for three weeks on obtaining more beds and tightening contracts, the result of an internal study he ordered after noticing last year that the number of children spending long hours at the command post had begun rising.
Roxane Marquez, Molina's press deputy, said the supervisor was not aware that children were still sleeping in the waiting room until a reporter called her Friday. She said she thought the problem had been resolved long ago.
"The supervisor is pretty concerned," Marquez said. "She's not happy at all."
I'm glad we don't have web cams...
As a result, we end up in situations like I had a couple of weeks ago where I had to take 4 kids because their mom was arrested. Or the one where there were 4 kids who had been physically and sexually abused and the 6 and 7 year olds were already acting out sexually on other children, not to mention several other serious behavior issues. We are told that we cannot stay with these children in the office, but we don't have any choice. We are not allowed to take them home or stay in a motel with them, and there simply isn't any place to put them. From the time a child is removed, particularly after hours, the oncall worker becomes responsible for the care and supervision of the child(ren), for being in contact with the parents and collecting their medical histories and for being on the phone until a placement is found, and then, if anything is found at all, there is a very high likelihood of having to drive to a location in excess of 3 hours away to deliver the children....and then drive back, Nobody understands how desperate the situation is until they've seen it from the inside. Our social structure is crumbling at the foundation. It's just a matter of time.
You need to open reasonably priced vasectomy clinics up there.
All these breeders with no brains, must be stopped.
"Yes! You can sleep with your first cousin with no bad results."
"Your sister's hot? Do her. No problem."
Let's franchise it.
Maybe it is time for established orphan homes for children instead of foster homes?
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With a red feeder like that one, you best watch yourself: there will be a gazillion hummers zooming around.
Well done.
I have five of them (hummer feeders that is). There are 3 in the front, pretty widely spaced, and two in back pretty close together, and I have hummers all the time.
I found this picture of the light up on Patos Island in the San Juans..Thought you might like seeing what you are getting into.....
.....Westy.....
Lucky you...
"Lucky you..."
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I guess that was an unfortunate choice of words.
The looney nudies are back....http://www.iol.co.za/general/news/newsprint.php?art_id=qw1115460900441B214&sf=
http://us.news3.yimg.com/img.news.yahoo.com/util/anysize/345,http%3A%2F%2Fus.news2.yimg.com%2Fus.yimg.com%2Fp%2Fap%2F20050507%2Fcapt.yl10405071009.belgium_spencer_tunick_yl104.jpg?v=1
http://us.news3.yimg.com/img.news.yahoo.com/util/anysize/380,http%3A%2F%2Fus.news2.yimg.com%2Fus.yimg.com%2Fp%2Fap%2F20050507%2Fcapt.yl10305071007.belgium_spencer_tunick_yl103.jpg?v=1
Ummmm, I meant I only have one feeder and a couple hummers...
LOL!
*Smooch*
back handed salute!:)
Spring Hike in the Cascade foothills, WA.
Once again bedtime for old pharts..LOL...
Goodnight all, be good or careful...
.....Westy.....
Friday afternoon Gabriel and I took a hike with my brother-in-law and his 79 yr old father on a short trail in the Cascades and saw similar scenery. Yeow! I'm out of shape... and those hills and switchbacks are steep!
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