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LA DCFS Director Ousted:
Run Social Services like a Corporation? Not!

September 2002

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called for the resignation of Department of Children and Family Services Director Anita Bock after only two years of service. This is the third director to head the department in less than 10 years. LA has the largest child welfare agency in the nation, and critics describe it as one of the worst. The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of community groups just filed a class action lawsuit against the department for its failure to provide adequate services to foster children. ACLU spokesperson Mark Rosenbaum described the LA department as “shameful” and one that “leaves every child behind.”

What is at issue is not the director's personality, but management philosophy. Pundits have called for running social services like a business. The result is a department that is more concerned with the bottom line than with providing services to benefit the community.

According to the LA Times, Anita Bock was hired because of her business background. She has a law degree and a masters in business administration. Her previous experience had been as a welfare director in Miami, where she was pressured to resign because of a backlog of child abuse investigations.

Bock represents a trend in hiring social service directors and upper management who are professional managers but have never had any experience in the field. A manager in the LA department was quoted in the LA Times: “There are four management levels above me. I'm the last person [in my hierarchy] who ever carried a case, ever made a home call, ever wrote a court report.” The comment is typical of remarks workers have made to the Dragon about administrators' lack of understanding of on-the-ground child welfare procedures. “If someone tells me again that management is management, there is no difference between managing social workers or managing assembly line workers, I'm going to scream,” a worker commented.

It is easy to understand the dilemma of county administrators. Children's services departments are in a state of crisis because they do not have enough staff to do the job. A child protective services worker can't be in two places at once. They can't give children and families the individual attention they deserve if they have more clients than they have time to see. Every study conducted by the state and county in the last decade has documented the staffing crisis. Past articles in the Dragon have described the effect of understaffing in human terms: clients are suffering because social workers don't have the time to help them.

Why has LA, like many other counties, consistently failed to hire enough staff? They have followed the current business philosophy: restructure, downsize, contract out, and lay off workers. The quality of the product is secondary to controlling the market and ensuring profits to stockholders. (In the case of county administrators, this translates to making the provisions of services secondary to living within the budget). And if one thing seems politically incorrect to an MBA, it is hiring more county workers.

LA County responded to the child welfare crisis by conducting both internal audits and audits by outside agencies These studies consistently pointed to the overloaded social workers and a hostile management culture with a siege mentality. In response, like their counterparts in corporate America, the department utilized its own form of creative accounting. “Whenever we would come to an agreement over staffing levels, instead of hiring, the department would play games with numbers,” states field staff Danny Ramos. “You have departments where significant numbers of employees are out on long-term stress leave, and the department counts those workers as if they were still working, and refuses to back-fill the position.”

According to union field staff Harold Walker, there are over 600 vacancies in the department, and at the same time the county has refused to bring down millions of dollars in federal and state matching money designated to improve staffing levels. The union won numerous arbitration awards ordering the department to improve staffing levels, but instead of honestly trying to meet agreed-upon caseload levels, the department exploited technicalities. For example, the department would raise the number of cases a worker was required to carry to well over the safe limit for one month, and then lower the load for that worker the next month to avoid having to report the problem. These practices were used by other departments, such as adult protective services, as well. The union took the issue to arbitration and won, but the department still fails to hire in good faith.

The union has consistently gone before the board of supervisors and explained to them what unsafe staffing means. “We told them that kids that are in dangerous situations are not being seen because we don't have the workers to see them, and more and more workers are leaving the department or are out on stress leave,” Ramos says. “More and more families are being torn apart because we can't give them the help they need, and instead their kids are overloading the foster care system, where they are not getting services.”

The union is calling on the board of supervisors to hire a new director with first-hand knowledge of child welfare procedures and to direct that person to staff the department fully. We understand that in a time of budget crisis, it is easy for the “tyranny of the bottom line” to take over, but we are willing to work with the county to secure more funding. The union has been in the forefront on this issue, going to the state legislature to seek more funding for social services. County supervisors need to make providing better services their goal. They must stop turning social services directors into bean counters and free them to do the job that most of them want to do. If we work together to create healthy communities, the money will come.