Shields for Families

Philip Browning’s five-year tenure as director of Los Angeles County’s Department of Children’s Services (DCFS) concludes tomorrow, and the search for his replacement is underway. Brandon Nichols, who served as chief deputy under Browning, was recently named acting director.

California, home to the largest foster care population in the country, has publicly declared its intention to pursue the use of so-called “predictive analytics” to foresee and presumably prevent child abuse.

Newly available data from Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) shows that the county’s foster-parent recruitment crisis extends to most parts of the county. The number of foster homes (including both county foster homes and private foster family agency homes) has dropped by 52 percent in the decade between 2005 and 2015.

During a champagne lunch Wednesday, in a sumptuous dining hall at the University of Southern California, Marilyn Flynn, the dean of the School of Social Work, took the stage. It had already been a heady day for Flynn, who has served as the school’s dean for two decades, leading it to become the single largest school of social work in the nation.

Facing a rising number of children in care in the county and looming statewide reforms, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a proposal yesterday that would seek ways to invest in finding immediate placements with family members for children entering the county’s child-welfare system.

By Holden Slattery The idea of predictive analytics, where big data is crunched to better assess the likelihood of something happening, is gaining traction in the field of child protection with hot spots in Los Angeles, across the country in Pennsylvania and as far afield as New Zealand.

The number of children in foster care in Los Angeles has decreased dramatically from 52,000 to 19,000 in the last decade. That number is back on the rise, due in part to policy changes at the county’s Department of Children and Families.