SAN JOSE — In the year since the shocking fentanyl overdose death of baby Phoenix Castro, Santa Clara County supervisors demanded reforms to its child welfare agency that sent the infant home with her drug-abusing father, and frustrated social workers publicly called for accountability of a failing system’s leadership.
But are children safer now than they were a year ago?
Despite two damning reports by state regulators concluding the county left vulnerable children in unsafe homes, the same two agency leaders — who embraced a policy that effectively valued keeping families together more than keeping children safe — remain in charge.
There’s been progress in key areas over the past 12 months, but many of the employees tasked with implementing the sweeping reforms say they are understaffed, crushingly demoralized and still lack confidence in their bosses.
In September, another case arose when the grandfather of 6-year-old Jordan Walker of San Jose — who was stabbed to death by an uncle two months after baby Phoenix’s death in 2023 — sued the county, claiming the child welfare agency left the boy in an unsafe home despite warnings.
“I don’t want it to happen again,” said social worker Matthew Kraft, whose dire warnings about baby Phoenix’s safety went unheeded. “I don’t have a lot of faith it won’t.”
In July, the state’s Department of Social Services, in a rare move, demanded “immediate corrections” for a list of the county’s child safety failures, including policies that left children in abusive homes despite clear evidence that the only way to keep them safe was to remove them. In more than half the cases they reviewed, between July 2022 and March 2024, no safety plans were created for parents that could have helped keep children safe.
After investigations by the Bay Area News Group late last year, County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, who worked as an early childhood specialist in dependency court years before entering politics, and former Supervisor Cindy Chavez who retired last month, were the first to call for the overhaul last December.
“If I could just snap my fingers and have things fixed, that would be optimal, because our children can’t wait, and the longer we take to be responsive, the greater the trauma for that child,” Arenas said in an interview last week. “I don’t think we are where we need to be.”
Damion Wright, the director of the child welfare agency, and his boss, Dan Little, who led the agency before being promoted to the county’s Social Services Agency, declined interviews. But in a statement, the department said that baby Phoenix’s death and the scourge of fentanyl “have prompted deep reflection and a concentrated effort … to strengthen how we keep children safe.”
“There is always more to do when it comes to best serving children,” the statement said, outlining some progress, “but these reforms represent significant steps forward to protecting our County’s most vulnerable kids.”
Changes over the past year include:
- The number of petitions filed in juvenile dependency court, which often lead to the temporary removal of a child from an abusive or neglectful parent, jumped four-fold since the first news stories broke late last year.
- Parents of babies born with drugs in their system, like baby Phoenix, are now subjected to “rigorous investigations” to determine the infant’s immediate safety and risk of future harm, and whether the court should intervene to remove the child.
- Social workers have undergone new training to better implement and monitor safety plans for families where children are allowed to remain home as long as parents stick with programs that can include parenting or drug abuse classes.
- Children who report abuse from parents to their teachers are no longer required to have those parents present during interviews with social workers.
- The county counsel’s office, whose lawyers often refused social workers’ requests to remove children from abusive homes, is now taking a less dominant role in decision-making.
- Social workers who had lost the ability to conduct criminal background checks on families now have a streamlined system to do so.
- Plans are underway to create a higher-level, therapeutic group home or homes for foster teens that will have professional therapists on staff.
After baby Phoenix’s death, social workers largely blamed a family preservation policy outlined in a letter to staff in January 2021 from then-agency director Little that prevented removing children from homes “wherever possible,” and gave county lawyers outsized authority to override social worker’s recommendations.
The new policy was well-intentioned and part of a nationwide trend — to right historic wrongs that removed a disproportionate number of children of color from their families. But social workers — and state investigators — say the way it was implemented in Santa Clara County left too many children with abusive or neglectful parents, including baby Phoenix.
Social worker Kraft had warned in an email to superiors that newborn Phoenix could face tragic consequences if sent home from the hospital — her older siblings had already been taken away from the drug-abusing parents who hadn’t followed through on safety plans to get them back. But she was sent home anyway, where she died at 3 months old, fentanyl covering her pink-flowered onesie. Her mother, Emily De La Cerda, died of a fentanyl overdose months later. Her father, David Castro, is facing felony child endangerment charges.
Despite Kraft’s bold plea for baby Phoenix’s removal in 2023, state investigators found that “social workers have been taught to be fearful of removing children from their homes, even when there is a safety risk, because the county may be sued, or children may be placed in an unfit foster home,” state investigators found, according to the state’s second report in July 2024.
In one particularly stark disconnect, in an April 2023 response to the state’s first investigation weeks before baby Phoenix died, Social Services Agency Director Little wrote that although the child welfare agency was removing far fewer children from their families, the “executive team is unaware of a single example where a child was determined to be unsafe” by their assessments “and was subsequently left in the care of the offending parent.”
The state’s second report covering a period before and after Little’s letter, however, found that four of five cases it reviewed with substantiated abuse allegations “allowed children to remain in homes that had safety threats present and removal was the only protecting intervention.”
Social workers say that the implementation of some of the reforms is causing problems of their own. Some removals might be too hasty now, they say, and moving social workers to dependency court to help with the flood of extra removals has left other areas short-staffed, forcing overtime, causing stress and leading some workers to leave the department.
“We’ve increased removals, but we haven’t been able to fix the core leadership issues and core policy implementation issues that are preventing us from retaining workers and providing the services to the families,” said Alex Lesniak, a county social worker and union steward.
Last summer, after an epic takedown of Wright and Little during a board meeting, Supervisor Arenas demanded they each write a “letter of reflection” about their leadership failures that led to the child safety crisis. In his letter, Little acknowledged that the leadership team didn’t do all that was needed to “ensure staff were laser focused” on safety. She said she never received a response from Wright.
Kraft said some kind of personal accountability from Wright would have helped him overcome his own grief and guilt. But Wright has repeatedly emphasized that he was “hired” as agency director only after baby Phoenix’s death, even though he was co-acting director when she died. During a staff meeting in September, when a social worker said it would be helpful if Wright acknowledged he “got it wrong,” he replied, “I hear that and I respectfully disagree.”
“I am still overwhelmed when I think about baby Phoenix and what happened to her and how it was handled and the weight of it,” said Kraft, who still won’t work with children younger than 3.
Arenas has expressed skepticism about whether the right leadership is in place to carry out the reforms, but only the county executive, not elected supervisors, has firing power and has expressed no inclination to do so.
So she is focused on the children.
“We were not making the best decisions for our children and our youth, and those decisions have consequences,” Arenas said. “They are going to eventually come back to us. And this time around, we’ve got to make sure we get it right.”