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Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against LA County

 

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Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against LA County over Foster Care Conditions

September 2002

Children’s services agencies are in a state of disaster. Across the nation, children’s advocacy groups have begun using lawsuits as a way to force reform. In July, a class action lawsuit was filed against the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, the County of Los Angeles, and the State of California. The suit was filed by a broad coalition of public interest organizations, including the Center for Law in the Public Interest, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the Western Center on Law and Poverty, the Youth Law Center, Protection and Advocacy, Inc., the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and the national law firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe.

According to an ACLU press release, “The suit seeks to ensure the delivery of medically necessary mental health services for children currently in, or at risk of being placed in, DCFS custody, and to put an end to the county’s abysmal record of multiple failed foster placements and its excessive reliance on restrictive, institutional placements for children with emotional and behavioral problems. Currently, close to 50,000 children are under DCFS supervision, making Los Angeles County’s child welfare system the largest in the nation.

“Numerous studies, as well as the experiences of other jurisdictions, have conclusively shown that intensive, community-based mental health services can be successfully and cost-effectively provided in the home or in a home-like setting, even to children with the most severe emotional and behavioral problems. Indeed, intensive, community-based mental health services are not only legally required, but they are far less expensive than the congregate and institutional placements upon which Los Angeles County has relied for too long.”

The Dragon spoke with one of the ACLU lawyers who filed the lawsuit, Ben Wizner. According to Wizner, the goal of the suit is to force Los Angeles County to sit down with community groups and to come up with an action plan for improving the services to the children of Los Angeles. The lawsuit specifically targets mental health services because those services are paid for by state and federal medicare funds, so making better use of those services would not over-burden the county. He understands that the lawsuit is not a magic bullet, but believes that it will start a process. “I think we are clear on what’s wrong,” Wizner says. “And we know that if the county better utilized mental health services, fewer kids would be placed in the system. But how exactly to make the transformation is not clear.”

The coalition that filed the lawsuit reviewed the outcome of court actions around the country. Wizner states that although the legal actions may not have accomplished all that they could have, they have resulted in improvements in children’s services agencies. The group decided that in this suit, rather than asking for a federal takeover of the department, it would seek to force the department into dialogue with community groups, with the agreed-upon actions to be reviewed by a judge.