Altadena's Five Acres the Site of State Foster Care Pilot Program

State and county officials, mental health professionals and others gathered Thursday morning at the Five Acres foster care facility in Altadena to celebrate the introduction of a new demonstration project designed to transition foster youth  into stable home situations better and faster.

The program is called Residential Based Services (RBS), meaning services applied at the child's permanent home rather than while still in the custody of the state.  

It is designed to get foster children out of facility care and into homes within nine months of their entering the foster care system.  This will be accomplished by increased intervention from social workers, mental health professionals and others who will help to prepare not only the child, but also their parents or relatives who will be taking them into their homes.

Currently, a typical stay in foster care in Los Angeles County is about 22 months, according to Dr. Angela Shields of the county Department of Children and Family Services.

In many cases, there is not a lot of effort going in to finding children a permanent home or making sure that psychological problems or other challenges that the children are facing are dealt with when they are transitioning out of care, according to Pam Dubin, the county DCFS official who oversees the program in the county.

The demonstration program is an attempt to change that.  It is being implemented in facilities in four counties throughout the state, and if it is successful, could be reproduced throughout California.

The extra intervention does not come cheap, but part of the program's charge will be demonstrating that by reducing a child's stay in foster care it can be cost effective, Dubin said.

"It's more expensive for that care, but the question is whether you make up for it by cutting stays, or if you see a big decrease in recidivism," Dubin said.

The demonstration program will serve 160 foster youth in L.A. county at three foster care facilities: Five Acres,  Hillsides and Hathaway Sycamores.  The latter two are in Pasadena.

The program came out of 2007 state legislation that was the result of a working group of foster care, mental health and other professionals who were coming up with a plan to address problems with California's foster care system.

The program has been in place for the last four months and is serving 52 children at Five Acres, Dubin said.  Three children have been moved to their permanent homes at this point.

A big component of the program will be increased intervention in managing mental health problems, as well as the parenting skills of the relatives or guardians of the foster youth. 

Though this might seem like an obvious step for managing a foster care transition, traditionally the roles of parenting and mental health have fallen into different governmental departments in L.A. County.   The RBS program merges functions from the DCFS, the county Department of Social Services and the county Department of Mental Health.

Simply finding a way to combine the resources of departments with different goals and mandates is an accomplishment that county officials said they believe will be the key to the program's success.

"All the people here need to be commended for looking outside their own narrow interests to work together to improve children's lives," said Dr. Marvin Southard, the direct of the Department of Mental Health, and a speaker at the event. "The one thing we've learned is we have to work together."

John A. Wagner, the head of the California Department of Social Services, flew down from Sacramento for Thursday morning's ceremony and said the program could fundamentally transform the way foster care is managed in California.

"We want to change our facilities from being a last resort for foster youth to a brief stop along the way to a permanent home," Wagner said at the event.

The event was co-hosted by Altadena's representative to the County Board of Supervisors, Michael Antonovich, whom several speakers credited with program support over the years.

In addition to changing how social workers handle the children's home-based services, Five Acres workers are also looking at how to change their facilities to better suit their needs.

In two of their residential cottages Five Acres is housing the children who are in the RBS program.  The dormitories are designed to feel more like a home and have less of an "institutionalized" feel, according to Joe Ford, the program director at the facility.

Staff working at the cottages said children who live their frequently go on outings outside of campus and participate in a lot of  community activities.

Five Acres also reserves rooms for RBS kids who may need to abruptly return to the facility if there is a problem at home.