When Loving Care Crumbles

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San Diego County’s foster-care system is hobbled by too few families willing to take in a child, not enough funding and a steady flood of new cases. But there are bright spots and caring, committed advocates dedicated to helping as best they can.

THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM of childhood is a refuge cradled in the warmth of a mother’s embrace, secured by a father’s steadying hand. It is a place where grownups never fail you. There is always someone there to stroke your forehead and ease you back to sleep when you wake in the middle of the night, clutching your pillow. It is not a place where home is never really home, where fathers take their own lives, where mothers drift off into the dark, ensnared in the bleak grip of alcohol and drugs.

Try telling that to Patricia McKee. But first, consider the shattering bench marks of her childhood. When she was 5 years old, her father committed suicide.

“I really don’t remember my father, or what happened to make him do that,” she says. “I guess I was too young.”

In the turbulent wake of her father’s sudden death, McKee’s mother gradually lost her long-fought battle with twin addictions to alcohol and street drugs. At 10, McKee was “rescued” from her troubled home and placed in the county’s foster care system. Thus began her long, tumultuous trek through adolescence. Portions of that journey are, understandably, somewhat sketchy. She estimates she lived in no fewer than 23 “homes”—foster homes, group homes and institutions—before she “aged out” of foster care at 18.

“I was bounced around quite a bit,” she says. “It got to the point where I figured it was just a matter of time before I got kicked out and sent to another home.”

So much for the kingdom of childhood.

McKee’s story is tragically common. Most children who end up in foster care are victims of neglect, physical, emotional or sexual abuse, even abandonment. Through no fault of their own, they are torn from everything familiar and thrust into a system that is chronically overwhelmed by the sheer number of those in its care.

McKee celebrated her 18th birthday—and her emancipation from the foster care bureaucracy—in August. She is living on her own now, working part-time and studying culinary arts at Grossmont College. One day, she says, she will be a master chef. Today she is a remarkably upbeat young woman.

“I’m happy with who I am,” she says. “And I am that person because of the experiences I’ve had.”

NEARLY EVERYONE involved in foster care acknowledges there are pervasive problems plaguing the system. One of the most intractable issues is a chronic imbalance in the number of foster children and the ranks of families who are willing and able to care for them.

“There are never enough foster homes,” says Twila Perucci, president of the San Diego County Foster Parent Association. “These kids are shuttled from family to family. After a while, they become hardened. They learn to show indifference. It’s their defense mechanism.”

Those sentiments are echoed in interviews with foster parents, foster children, judges, attorneys, political figures and volunteers who work with foster youth.

Dawn Davis, managing attorney for the Foster Youth Advocacy Project, points to what she calls “a web of issues” stemming from a shortage of foster homes. Foster youths are more likely to drop out of school, more susceptible to depression, less likely to maintain stable relationships, more likely to become homeless.

“Lack of continuity is a chronic condition for these kids,” Davis says.

Under the Foster Youth Advocacy Project, attorneys with the San Diego Volunteer Lawyer Program provide free legal services to children in foster care, including representation on a variety of civil issues, citizenship, special-education assistance and health services.

Davis says she has seen some improvement in health and education issues confronting foster youth. But there is much more, she says, that should be done on their behalf.

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foster: To supply with food or nourishment . . . to bring up a child with parental care. To nurse . . . to cherish, to keep warm. To encourage or help to grow.

The Oxford English Dictionary

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“Everyone has the best of intentions in trying to find homes for these kids, but there simply aren’t enough,” Davis says. “That’s no one individual’s fault, really. It’s our fault as a society.”

Hard numbers provide a stark outline of the problem. In fiscal year 2005-2006, there were 6,500 children in San Diego’s foster care system, according to Cathi Palatella, executive assistant with County Child Welfare Services. Estimates for the current fiscal year are slightly lower: about 6,400 children. As of July 31, there were just 1,645 foster families to care for them.

The county has mounted an aggressive recruitment campaign, using the media and the Internet. Still, the shortage of foster families persists. Critics point to a variety of possible reasons for the shortfall: more dual-income families (foster parents cover expenses such as childcare), more troubled or special-needs children coming into the system and what many consider insufficient reimbursements. Officials here are quick to point out that monthly stipends for foster parents in San Diego County have increased since 2000, when they ranged from $393 to $553, depending on the child’s age. The current range is $425 to $597, with an additional $276 per month for children with severe medical or behavior problems.

The majority of those who enter foster care in San Diego County are initially placed at the Polinsky Children’s Center in Kearny Mesa, although some are placed directly into kinship care with relatives. Each month more than 400 children, from infants to teens, are brought to the center because law enforcement or an emergency-response social worker has determined they need to be protected.

The average stay at Polinsky is 10 to 12 days, but some children stay there for months, waiting to be placed in a foster home. In an effort to shorten those stays and blunt the trauma experienced by children who are suddenly removed from their homes, the county launched a 23-hour assessment center at Polinsky in September 2006. As of early September of this year, more than 700 children had undergone the assessment, Palatella says. Amazingly, more than half of those children (58 percent) were successfully placed in foster care settings in less than 24 hours.

Those who work with foster youth stress that their goals are to reunite children with their families and to protect those children from harm. Unfortunately, they can’t always do both.

In the past, the reunification of a foster child with his or her biological family was viewed as the ultimate desired outcome, even if it took years to bring the family together. Adoption was often viewed as a failure of the system. By the mid-1990s, there was growing concern that children were remaining in foster care far too long and that efforts to reunite many of those children safely with their parents were doomed from the start. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), enacted in 1997, made one fundamental change: It mandated that children in foster care either be returned to their families or freed for adoption within a finite time—six months if the child is under 3; one year if the child is 3 or older.

“Before ASFA, children were lingering in foster care for unnecessarily long periods of time,” says Superior Court Judge Susan Huguenor, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court of San Diego County. “The bottom line—you have to do what’s best for the child.”

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