Supes Push Foster Care System Talks, Leaving Families In Limbo

SANTA CLARA COUNTY, CA — The future of Santa Clara County's foster care system remains uncertain as legislators again moved discussions about overhauling the program into the next month.

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday again continued its conversation regarding what to do with foster children in the county as social workers and foster parents wait in limbo for social services officials to decide how to process and place kids in need of housing and services within 24 hours of receiving them.

Supervisor Dave Cortese in November called for a moratorium on child intake at the county's Receiving, Assessment and Intake Center, which stopped taking in children earlier this month.

The board on Tuesday was again briefed by county staff on their progress in revamping the placement process. While the board has continued administrative discussions on the RAIC, a new system has not been finalized.

"What we were doing was essentially warehousing kids when we had problems," Robert Menicocci, director of the county's Social Services Agency, said Tuesday of the county's recent intake and sheltering process. "We would warehouse them and try to shuffle them around, warehouse them until they would age out. And we would just move on to the next case."

Scott Largent, a Santa Clara County resident and frequent public speaker at county board meetings, detailed memories in front of the board of his time entering the county's foster care system via a group home in 1988 when he was 11 years old, memories he says "really bothers me."

"This process messed me up big time in my life and it took a long time to recover from this and to be able to get back into my home and back into Santa Clara County. We really need to pay attention to this and I think this should have been taken care of internally," Largent said.

"I don't think I should have been outsourced, I don't think I should have been kicked to the curb and the same goes for a lot of these children. I just hope people pay attention. And a lot of these children are ones that are homeless that I'm running into on the streets," he said.

Cortese asked staff to ensure monitoring and reporting on the county's foster system progress, as well as to ensure children are receiving individualized care.

During the supervisors' discussions Tuesday, Supervisor Susan Ellenberg dug into staff for not bringing what she asked for the last time the board met to discuss the RAIC in December, specifically regarding foster children's transportation and childcare.

"During the last meeting I asked for a number of things to be included in this report back. They weren't included," Ellenberg said.

She said an off-agenda report provided to the board "had the correct headings for what we asked for, but I didn't feel answered sufficiently or substantively enough for me to feel comfortable with where we are."

While the county has explored a ride-hailing service called "HopSkipDrive," Ellenberg said she has heard from foster parents expressing how "that is not an acceptable alternative" to a government-operated and supervised transportation service to handle transporting the hundreds of foster children in the county's care.

"I want to make sure that we are not focused on putting out information or options that aren't necessarily available or accessible to the families that are going to use them," Ellenberg continued. "Stakeholder engagement [means] the foster families, the resource families, the people who are living this day in and day out need to be involved in every step of this process."

The county has been trying to reorganize and restructure the RAIC for months, following the county's reorganizing of its Department of Family and Children's Services, which oversees the care and placement of foster children in the county's system.

Lourdes Gomez, a chief steward for social workers represented by Service Employees International Union Local 521, said the county's children services department "has failed miserably in addressing the issues at the RAIC," largely because of how it has failed to restructure the entire department.

When the county reorganized the department early last year, SEIU Local 521 accused the county of labor malpractice for making the decision without consulting the union. It has been a point of contention that local SEIU representatives and social workers have used to leverage strikes since October.

"The way that we're looking at it is they're trying to address headaches by outsourcing," Gomez said.

She said following the department's reorganizing, the county has placed more administrators to assuage social workers' caseloads without hiring enough additional social workers to address understaffing.

"Right now we have way too many managers making little to no decisions, and I feel the department was negligent when they came to the RAIC," Gomez said. "We need more staff. The department has almost an allergy when requesting more staff."

She added the county tries "to make things work with what we have even though it's not working."

Supervisor Cindy Chavez mentioned Tuesday that the county's massive contract with Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority includes workers trained to handle children and seniors, which could be something to explore when discussing transportation collaboration for foster families.

"In the meantime, our caseload is not reduced and our workload is not reduced," Gomez said. "And we're lacking resources and staff."Maggie Cockayne, a 36-year-old Morgan Hill foster mother who over the last six years has fostered 10 children from the county, said she struggles navigating the county's broken foster system because of understaffing, which she says is made worse by outsourcing county foster care services.

"We don't understand why they're not hiring more," Cockayne said.

She added that she has run into problems with children who need rides to court-ordered appointments who have not been able to make it in time because of logistics with HopSkipDrive, which is also not staffed with trained childcare professionals.

And when children don't get to meet with their parents for court-ordered visits, it's the family and the children who suffer.

"There's no accountability when it's not a county agency that's in charge of taking care of the children," Cockayne said. "They're so short-staffed that they don't even have time to assess the kids."

The board will again discuss the RAIC in February.

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