8:41PM: BUT THE TIMES REPORTER SEES IT DIFFERENTLY, SEE BELOW
The Los Angeles Times is now running a clarification of its front page story that had claimed the county was abandoning family preservation, the topic of the previous two posts to this Blog. And, get this: They're pinning the blame on the headline writer.
According to the correction:
The headline on this article incorrectly states that Los Angeles County child welfare officials "will no longer strive to reunite families." As the story reports, Department of Children and Family Services Director Trish Ploehn told a reporter last week that such reunifications would not happen as frequently as in the past until new reforms were in place to ensure safety. The county still plans to reunite or preserve families whenever possible.
But it's not just the headline. The lead for the story says:
Los Angeles County has suspended a long-standing effort to reduce the number of children in foster homes because keeping more of the children with their birth families could be unsafe, the county's top child-welfare official said.
Not only is "suspend" very different from "reduce," the lead suggests that all efforts to reduce foster care, including efforts to curb removal of children in the first place, were being suspended. That's different from slowing down reunifications.
It would still be concerning, however, if DCFS is caving in to pressure to reduce reunifications based on horror stories, when there is no evidence that reunifications have, in fact, compromised safety.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE:
This evening, the author of the Times story, Garrett Therolf, called. He says the Times isn’t backing off at all. Rather he says that I, and, it would seem, the headline writer, misunderstood a perfectly clear story.
His argument is as follows: A certain number of children come into foster care and go out of foster care every month. For the number of children in foster care on any given day to go down, exits must exceed entries. So when he wrote
Los Angeles County has suspended a long-standing effort to reduce the number of children in foster homes because keeping more of the children with their birth families could be unsafe, the county's top child-welfare official said.
What he meant was that reunifications will be slowed so that exits no longer exceed entries. So, you see, according to Therolf, suspending a reduction in the number of children in foster care really does mean “slowing reunifications.” He says the editors to whom he reports at the Times all understood this – it’s just that I, the Times’ own headline writer, and, I’m willing to bet, 99 percent of readers, misunderstood.
The same headline writer wrote the headline on the print edition, which says “County to end emphasis on family over foster care.”
There are two problems with this:
●There are, in fact, other ways to hold the number of children in foster care steady, such as reunifying at the same rate but increasing entries into care, or even slowing down adoptions.
●Nothing in Therolf’s explanation above actually appears in the story.
Try reading the story, but skipping over the clarification, and see what impression it leaves with you.
Meanwhile, DCFS has put out a press release denying both interpretations. According to the press release:
Contrary to a story in today’s Los Angeles Times, DCFS has not “suspended a long-standing effort to reduce the number of children in foster homes.” In fact, the department continues to remain steadfast in its commitment to reducing the number of children in foster care and to increasing the number of family reunifications.
In the Times story, however, Ploehn sounds less than steadfast. According to the Times, she said this:
"I do want these numbers to start going down again but only when I can assure everyone that the work we are doing results in safety for that child who is going home," said Trish Ploehn, the department's director. "I don't know how much more we can go down in the numbers, though," she said. "We are a very large county, and it's possible that we are already at the level where we are supposed to be."
As I said in a previous post, the answers will be found in the actual numbers, not the rhetoric.
I’m hoping that, now that this Blog has included Therolf’s point of view, he will respond in kind and actually include in his stories the points NCCPR has been making for months – like the questions about entries into care in the wake of the Times reporting, the consequences of foster care panic, the overall record on entries into care in recent years, and how the rate of entries in Los Angeles compares to other cities.
