KEEPING FAMILIES TOGETHER, BUT AT WHOSE EXPENSE?

Dawn Galvan remembers Megan Mendez as a smiling, healthy and happy baby.

So it broke her heart when Megan's battered body was unearthed from a
backyard grave at a south Modesto home.

Galvan and her husband, Frank, were Megan's first foster parents. They had
hoped to adopt her.

"We had her for almost a year, through her first birthday," Galvan said.
"She was a good baby. We really loved her."

Galvan, who once specialized in caring for children of drug-addicted
parents -- children like Megan -- said she became so frustrated with
Stanislaus County Child Protective Services that she gave up her foster
care license.

The Galvans moved to a small Minnesota town in 1996 -- about two years
before Megan was killed and four years before her body was discovered in
December 2000.

"Child Protective Services was a total nightmare to work with," Galvan
said. "They never, ever thought about the kids first. Megan wasn't the only
one; we had other kids like her (but) CPS kept giving them back to their
parents. It was so frustrating."

Child welfare officials say that under federal law they must do everything
possible to keep families together, even when the parents are addicts.

An outside expert, however, questioned that contention.

Child welfare officials will not discuss Megan's case, saying they are
bound by strict confidentiality laws designed to protect the privacy of
welfare recipients.

Jeff Jue, who met with The Bee before he retired last month as director of
the county's Community Services Agency, said a number of changes were made
as a result of Megan's death.

Those changes include more oversight, new procedures for children whose
parents choose to place them with other people, and more training for
social workers.

Jue and Teri Kook, the county's chief of child welfare services, said the
agency has a twofold reason for trying to reduce the number of children in
foster care: Because they believe it is better for children to be with
their parents, and that strategy complies with a federal mandate.

"We're required by law to do everything possible to keep families
together," Jue said last month. "We remove kids (from their homes) only
when all reasonable efforts fail."

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child
Protection Reform, challenged Jue's remarks.

"It is simply not true that states are required to do 'everything possible
to keep families together,'" Wexler said. "There is no such mandate, and
there never was.

"States are required only to make 'reasonable efforts,' and the federal
Department of Health and Human Services has said repeatedly that such
efforts need not include placing a child in any kind of danger."

Wexler said Jue may have been trying to shift the public's attention away
from his agency by making that statement.

"It's a great way to divert attention from their own failings," he said.
"Unfortunately, such self-serving comments wind up smearing safe, proven
programs that have kept together thousands of families and made thousands
of children safer."

Stanislaus County program a model

Kook, while not commenting directly on Wexler's observation, pointed to her
agency's standing as an innovator in child welfare services.

Late last month, Kook was part of a statewide conference on child abuse
prevention strategies in the face of funding cutbacks.

Stanislaus County was cited as a model for "blending and braiding" a
variety of funding sources as a way to provide services aimed at keeping
families intact.

Kook said Megan's case was not discussed at the conference.

Megan's mother, Laura Gunter, had a long history of drug abuse and drug
related crimes. But after she successfully completed a court-monitored
treatment program, Gunter was reunited with Megan, another daughter and a son.

Once the court approved the reunification, Gunter and the children were on
their own. Soon, without social workers or anyone else checking up on her,
Gunter was back on heroin.

By June 1997, Gunter was arrested. Rather than risk her children's return
to foster care, she placed them in the care of neighbors before going to
jail. In April 1998, two weeks after her release, Gunter died of a heroin
overdose.

Megan's caregivers, Josephine and Margarito Origel, are accused of beating
her to death sometime between April and December 1998. Both are jailed on
murder charges and await separate trials.

Wexler said his group advocates keeping families together if possible, and
a number of studies have shown that the premise is a sound one.

"All over the country," Wexler said, "mothers go into (drug) treatment,
complete it, are reunited with their children -- and nothing goes wrong."

Not only are such programs more humane and less expensive than foster care,
Wexler said, "they're safer than foster care, where the rate of abuse is
far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general
population."

So what might have gone wrong in Megan's case?

Wexler said he suspects that there was far less monitoring of Gunter than
there should have been, though he admitted that was just a guess without
having more information.

Multiple cases, more mistakes

Other factors, he said, include inexperienced and-or undertrained social
workers, who often must deal with an overwhelming number of cases.

As a result, Wexler said, more mistakes are made.

"They made bad decisions in both directions," he said. "The more that
workers are overwhelmed with children who don't really need to be in foster
care, the less time they have to find children in real danger."

Galvan said she did not believe Megan's mother ever was able to kick her
heroin habit. She said she tried to convince Child Protective Services to
conduct random drug tests of some parents before allowing them to take
their children.

"You could tell some of the moms were still strung out when they came to
get the kids," Galvan said. "We would tell the social workers that, and
they would just blow it off."

Galvan said she wishes she could have done something more to convince
social workers and the court to allow her and her husband to adopt Megan.

"Just let people know we loved Megan a lot," Galvan said, "that she was
happy and that she was fought for. We tried our best. It was the system
that took her away."