After a year of controversy and the deaths of two children, a union representing Santa Clara County social workers is calling for an independent investigation of the child welfare agency’s top leaders, blaming their management for “a series of alarming consequences.”
Social workers on Tuesday plan to present a petition and demand accountability during the public comment period at the Board of Supervisors meeting. They have argued that department leadership’s policies have frustrated their efforts to protect kids they knew were in danger from abusive or neglectful parents.
“There have been so many missteps in leadership to handle the crises and the tragedies that we’ve had,” said Alex Lesniak, a Santa Clara County social worker and chief union steward who helped draft the petition, “as well as just a patchwork of implementing changes that have just overburdened workers.”
The agency’s leaders have maintained that child safety is their first priority and they have implemented a series of reforms that lowered the bar to remove young children from risky, abusive homes as well as better monitor whether parents are completing parenting and drug programs to keep their children safe at home.
The call for action comes six weeks after Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, during a public meeting, lambasted Department of Social Services Director Daniel Little and Department of Family and Children’s Services Director Damion Little for failing to take personal responsibility for the failures of the agency. The only county official with authority to fire department heads is County Executive James William, who previously led the County Counsel’s Office which helped guide some of the child welfare agency’s controversial policies.
The union’s petition names Little and Wright, as well as Wright’s Assistant Director Wendy Kinnear-Rausch, and blames them for compromising the safety and lives of children in their care, fostering distrust among employees and opening up the agency to negative media coverage.
The child welfare agency has been under intense scrutiny ever since the Bay Area News Group began investigating the May 2023 fentanyl overdose death of 3-month-old Phoenix Castro, who was sent home with her drug-abusing father over the objections of social workers. And just last month, a lawsuit revealed that 6-year-old Jordan Walker, who was stabbed to death in August 2023 in his great grandmother’s San Jose apartment, had been recently placed there by the child welfare agency despite warnings that felons and drug addicts often stayed there. His uncle has been charged with murder.
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Over the past 18 months, California’s Department of Social Services has twice investigated the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services, issuing two scathing reports, the first of which agency leaders kept secret from the Board of Supervisors until the Bay Area News Group wrote about it. One of them called out as “unlawful” a string of so-called “scattered sites,” county-run group homes for foster children that the county ran without state licenses for four years.
In the wake of baby Phoenix’s death, when the agency’s policies came under scrutiny for favoring “family preservation” over child safety, Supervisors Arenas and Cindy Chavez called for major changes to the operations of the agency, which now are under way.
But social workers, who protested last year at a board of supervisors meeting after baby Phoenix’s death, aren’t happy with the progress. Lesniak said that while most efforts appear to be looking forward, few are looking at the mistakes of the past.
“There’s nothing wrong with looking forward, but my concern is that we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past if we don’t at least incorporate those lessons and those losses,” Lesniak said. “And you know, to quote Supervisor Arenas, do we have people on the bus who need to be or shouldn’t be? That’s not something that I’m in a position to answer.”