Foster Kids' Last Resort: Finding the Lost Relatives.....

Foster Kids' Last Resort:
Finding the Lost Relatives
Ms. Librizzi Hunts....
For Tony Ruiz's Family;
Expecting Anger, Pain
By CHRISTINA BINKLEY
August 23, 2007; Page A1

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1187...googlenews_wsj

LOS ANGELES -- After nine years in foster care, and nine different
homes, 12-year-old Tony Ruiz was in serious trouble. He was on multiple
psychiatric drugs, had long been suicidal, was often defiant and
disruptive and displayed hopelessness.

"I just want to have a family," Tony told Judy Smith, a volunteer court
advocate and the only person who had known him for any length of time.
Fearing Tony wouldn't live to see adulthood, Ms. Smith turned to Linda
Librizzi, a sleuth of sorts who locates the lost relatives of foster
children.
[Tony Ruiz]

A longtime licensed clinical social worker, 53-year-old Ms. Librizzi is
on the vanguard of a growing revolution in child welfa She is a
"family finder." Thanks to computer search technology, social workers
have for the first time a powerful tool to locate the family members of
"cold cases," children who spend years moving from foster home to foster
home until their biological families' whereabouts are unknown.

There are roughly 525,000 children in foster care at any given moment in
the U.S., many of them moving to a new foster home every few months.
Roughly 25,000 foster children each year reach adulthood without ever
having found a permanent home. They are discharged to the streets at 18
years of age, often ending up homeless, incarcerated, or otherwise
overseen by the judicial or social welfare systems.

In the 40 or so communities around the U.S. that are using the new
data-plumbing techniques, government social workers are placing about
25% of cold-case children in homes, estimates Kevin Campbell, a former
social-work administrator in Washington state who pioneered the method.
But dedicated family finders like Ms. Librizzi, who works for a private
nonprofit agency and isn't distracted by typical social-worker duties,
boast success rates as high as 75%. Social workers say the likelihood of
these children finding homes is otherwise nil.

Even advocates concede the main problem with family finding is that it
isn't being implemented soon enough. They say it would be most effective
if it were used to prevent children from spending years in the
foster-care system in the first place.

There are other challenges, too. Family finding doesn't solve the
psychological problems that can affect foster children, especially when
they have bounced from home to home. Few families are fully prepared for
the difficulties of taking in a long-lost relative who has spent years
in foster care. As a result, some reunions end unhappily.

Here in Los Angeles County, home to the nation's largest child-welfare
system, family finding has helped shrink the number of children in
foster care to 11,000 from 14,000. That promises significant cost
savings. The cost of caring for a foster child in Los Angeles can top
$75,000 a year, not including the burden on the judicial system and
homeless shelters as troubled children pass into adulthood.
[Linda Librizzi]

Los Angeles started testing family finding about three years ago and is
now training social workers and expanding it countywide. For the
children, the process begins with the permission of a social worker --
or in a few cases, with a court order -- requested by someone involved
in the child's care.

One corporate partner of this effort is U.S. Search, a unit of First
Advantage Corp. which sells such data to social workers for $25 a
report, less than it charges other clients. Tapped by Mr. Campbell, U.S.
Search, which typically sells its services to private detectives and
individuals in search of old girlfriends and others, has a small staff
dedicated to working with social workers.

U.S. Search subscribes to databases of records on voter registration,
marriage, divorce, criminal filings, credit records and other
information. Its software broadens search terms to look for alternative
spellings. In one study by Mr. Campbell, U.S. Search was able to find
more than 85% of parents who were listed as "whereabouts unknown" in
California court records.

Armed with this data, teams of local social workers -- and in one
California county, retired police detectives -- make dozens of phone
calls, knock on doors and wheedle information to re-forge family
connections. They aren't just looking for adoptive homes. They're also
hoping to put foster children in touch with their roots and create an
additional source of support.

The work is arduous, emotional and slow. The searches, culled from so
many databases, can be messy. Data are almost always missing; workers
can spend weeks chasing false leads.

Even when social workers find whom they are looking for, the process can
open festering family wounds, rekindling the problems surrounding the
children's births or their removal from parents' care. Mr. Campbell, the
inventor of family finding, tells social workers to expect a third of
the family members they reach to refuse further contact. He also tells
them to expect anger. "There's a lot of pain in these families," he says.

Mr. Campbell calls Ms. Librizzi one of the most tenacious family finders
he has trained. She has spent more than a year trying to connect some
children with their family members.

Ms. Librizzi, a dark-haired woman whose accent reveals her New York
origins, spent 30 years working in child welfare before her employer, a
group home for youths called Hollygrove, cut back to outpatient services
for financial reasons. In 2005, she began doing family finding to find
homes for Hollygrove's young residents, later expanding her clientele to
children identified by the county as most in need of family finding. She
declines to divulge her salary, saying only that she works part-time and
is paid on an hourly basis.
[Kevin Campbell]

Two days before Christmas in 2005, Ms. Librizzi was assigned to find the
family of Tony, the 12-year-old boy. He weighed nearly 240 pounds and
was often picked on at school. Separated from his brother and sister as
well as his extended family over the years, Tony was living in a
sparsely furnished three-bedroom group home for boys, overseen by a
small rotating staff.

Ms. Librizzi began with a few bits of information about Tony's origins
from his caseworker: Tony's name and birth date, the name of his mother,
her Social Security number and birth date, and her former address.
Nothing was known about Tony's father, not even his name. Working from
her small shared office, Ms. Librizzi emailed the information to Clif
Venable, a data researcher at U.S. Search.

Mr. Venable then went to work in his Culver City, Calif., cubicle,
typing the information into his company's computer system. Minutes
later, Mr. Venable emailed back a 10-page list of possible relatives,
people who had lived at the same address, possible previous addresses,
and even neighbors culled from the many databases to which U.S. Search`
subscribes. Ms. Librizzi began at the top of the first page that Friday.
She quickly thought she'd hit gold with a man who spent an hour
discussing Tony. "Turned out, he wasn't even related," Ms. Librizzi says.

Because many of Tony's relatives had moved repeatedly, the names on the
list often lacked working phone numbers. On page five, Ms. Librizzi
dialed a number in Stafford, Texas -- someone with an entirely different
family name.

The woman who answered demanded to know how Ms. Librizzi had gotten her
number. "From an Internet search. I just want to reassure you, this is
not a crank call," Ms. Librizzi says she responded. The woman finally
conceded she was a distant relation -- the sister-in-law of Tony's
mother's sister-in-law. She agreed to pass along a message that someone
was searching for Tony's family.

An hour later, Ms. Librizzi received a call from a woman in California
-- another distant relative -- who said she knew where Tony's mother
was. When Ms. Librizzi returned to her office on Monday morning, three
voicemail messages from Tony's mother awaited her.

Ms. Librizzi, along with Tony's social worker, pursued the possibility
of developing some sort of relationship between Tony and his mother. She
phoned various family members on behalf of Tony so many times that the
family began to call her "Linda-for-Tony."

Ms. Librizzi also continued following other leads. Building on
information from records and family members, she obtained a number for a
San Fernando, Calif., Indian tribe, and called its administrator, Rudy
Ortega, to find out if the tribe had records of Tony's birth. Mr. Ortega
was noncommittal. The tribe receives many calls from people hoping to
gain access to a tribe's benefits (even though the San Fernando tribe
isn't federally recognized and doesn't receive such benefits). But the
call roused Mr. Ortega into action.

As it turns out, the 32-year-old Mr. Ortega and his wife, Samantha, a
medical technician, are Tony's great-uncle and great-aunt. They had
three children: girls named Citlaly and Itati, and a son named Tomiear
-- and they had at one time looked into adopting. They say they would
have adopted Tony all those years ago had they been contacted.

Six weeks after the search began, Tony was told his mother had been
found. He also learned he came from a line of Indian chiefs from the San
Fernando Band of Mission Indians. His great-grandfather was Chief Little
Bear Rudy Ortega Sr. The senior Mr. Ortega was interested in bringing a
tribal member back into the fold.

At first, L.A. County social workers explored reuniting Tony with his
mother. But his mother failed to show consistent interest or ability to
care for Tony, say social workers. Social workers say Tony's mother, who
has had several other children removed into foster care, moves
frequently among the homes of friends or relatives. She could not be
reached for this article.

Meanwhile, the tribe pulled together. Three other families quickly
volunteered to start proceedings to potentially adopt him, including
Rudy and Samantha Ortega. During a meeting that fall, tribal elders
determined that the Ortegas were the best match. Tony soon began to
visit them, first briefly, then spending weekends at their home.

When he returned to the Lynwood group home each Sunday night, Tony wept
and pleaded to stay with the Ortegas. He hung a small dreamcatcher -- an
Indian totem said to ensnare bad spirits -- over his bed.

Last fall, Tony announced he wanted to become a veterinarian -- a sign
social workers say that he was looking forward to the future. In March,
the county court gave him permission to move in with the Ortegas, who
took classes in how to deal with troubled children. The family also
arranged to have another male relative tutor Tony in the afternoons to
help with schoolwork and socialization.

By April, Tony was off medication entirely. Mrs. Ortega discovered he
needed glasses -- he had once had them, but lost them in the course of
his many moves. Chatty and smiling, he lost 50 pounds. Now 13, he began
to earn A's at his new school.

Tony struggled to describe what was special about the Ortegas. "They hug
me," he finally said.

Things didn't continue as smoothly. After the initial honeymoon period,
many of Tony's former patterns of misbehavior reappeared. He walked out
of class at school and at home, his discipline problems escalated and
frightened the family. He once waved a kitchen knife at Mrs. Ortega, she
says, and she caught him urging the family's pet dog to fight with a
neighbor's Chihuahua. He bullied Tomiear, Mrs. Ortega's youngest child,
by pushing and teasing the preschooler.

When she discovered she was pregnant with her fourth child, Mrs. Ortega
says she feared Tony might become jealous and hurt the baby. Two weeks
ago, the family abruptly discontinued the adoption, saying they'd
reached the end of their rope. The county didn't fully prepare her for
the magnitude of Tony's troubles, said the angry Mrs. Ortega, who drove
Tony to his social worker's office and left him there that Friday
afternoon. "If I were to do this again, it would be with a child who is
much, much younger," she said.

Ms. Librizzi says Tony's experience with his family has revealed
behavioral problems that had been ignored when he was being shuffled
among foster homes. Tony will begin intensive therapy for these issues,
she says.

Mr. Campbell says such outcomes are all too common. "You ask yourself
how would Tony's story be different if his family had been found in the
first six months after being taken from his mother," he says.

Tony is now once again living with just a few personal belongings in a
group home for boys.

Just after he left the Ortegas, new hope for Tony emerged: his tutor.
The tutor, a police officer who is engaged to a tribe member, told
Tony's social-work team that he remains interested in serving as a
mentor -- or possibly more -- to Tony.

"We're going to keep on keeping on," says Ms. Librizzi. "We don't end
until we have some sort of personal connection for a kid."

Write to Christina Binkley at





CURRENTLY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES VIOLATES MORE CIVIL RIGHTS ON A
DAILY BASIS THEN ALL OTHER AGENCIES COMBINED INCLUDING THE NSA / CIA
WIRETAPPING PROGRAM....

CPS Does not protect children...
It is sickening how many children are subject to abuse, neglect and even
killed at the hands of Child Protective Services.

every parent should read this .pdf from
connecticut dcf watch...

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com/8x11.pdf

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com

Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the US
These numbers come from The National Center on
Child Abuse and Neglect in Washington. (NCCAN)
Recent numbers have increased significantly for CPS

*Perpetrators of Maltreatment*

Physical Abuse CPS 160, Parents 59
Sexual Abuse CPS 112, Parents 13
Neglect CPS 410, Parents 241
Medical Neglect CPS 14 Parents 12
Fatalities CPS 6.4, Parents 1.5

CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, HAPPILY DESTROYING THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT
FAMILIES YEARLY NATIONWIDE AND COMING TO YOU'RE HOME SOON...


BE SURE TO FIND OUT WHERE YOUR CANDIDATES STANDS ON THE ISSUE OF
REFORMING OR ABOLISHING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ("MAKE YOUR CANDIDATES
TAKE A STAND ON THIS ISSUE.") THEN REMEMBER TO VOTE ACCORDINGLY IF THEY
ARE "FAMILY UNFRIENDLY" IN THE NEXT ELECTION...