The real “oomph” deficit in Santa Clara County

U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio just taught a master class in how to
deal with bullies. I hope they will take note of it in Santa Clara County.

So far, no one will stand up to the bullies driving the nation’s worst foster-care panic and endangering children’s lives.

Let’s start with a pop quiz. 

A state report alleges that, as the San Jose Mercury News puts it: 

Santa Clara County’s child welfare agency placed vulnerable children in foster homes before completing required safety checks and repeatedly failed to document whether other checks had occurred, a state investigation released Thursday found. 

Here’s the quiz: What is the most likely cause? A.   

A. Leadership has failed to create a “culture of safety.”

B.    Top management lacks “concern for the most needy children in the county,” but the state doesn’t have enough “oomph” to call them out.

C.    Some of the very people offering up and promoting answers A and B helped trigger and escalate a foster care panic so severe that the county has nearly tripled the number of children thrown into foster care, and court cases have skyrocketed even more.  Simultaneously deluged with all those additional children and no place to put them, overwhelmed workers cut corners on safety checks and/or documenting safety checks.

The obvious answer is C. But, of course, since that would implicate The Mercury News, and in particular reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, it’s not offered as an option to readers. (To which The Mercury News almost certainly would respond: We did one story that mentions that there might be a panic, so we never need to mention it again!) 

The state did not investigate the agency; it investigated the agency’s file cabinets. The investigators spoke to no one. So the report’s findings can mean anything from a failure to do something to a failure to properly file the paperwork after doing something. Odds are, there is some of each. But failure to record what’s been done is itself a critical failure. The limits of the report should not obscure its seriousness. 

And for now, let’s assume worst case, assume all the failures are failure to act, that some of those omissions may endanger children - and then ask why it might happen. Rather than examine their own behavior, we get this from some of those who started and continue to foment the panic: 

There’s County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, who orchestrated and reveled in the public humiliation of Damion Wright, who then led the County Department of Family and Children’s Services. Her behavior would be outrageous and unprofessional directed at anyone. But when she seemed to so enjoy humiliating one of the few Black men to hold a high-level position in Santa Clara County government, it “raises questions,” as journalists like to say, about racial bias. After Wright resigned, Arenas settled for merely driving his white successor to tears. 

Sulek chronicled both acts of humiliation with apparent glee, declaring the first “an epic takedown,” while her editors promoted the second with a huge photo of the agency head in tears. 

So it’s no surprise that when the latest report came out, Arenas rushed to put out a statement declaring that the state once again 

is telling our social services agency that it is failing to keep kids safe. While I’m confident the agency will adopt the new recommendations, we need leadership from the top to establish a culture of safety. 

If  Sulek contacted any of the other supervisors, there is no indication of it in the story. 

Then there’s Sulek’s ever-reliable Mr. Insta-quote, Steve “remember-I’m-just-speaking-for-myself” Baron, a member of the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council, who tells us: 

“The deficiencies and noncompliance with legal requirements have probably been occurring for many many years, but have only been identified and revealed because children have died.” 

But, as I’ll get to in a moment, the basic premise of the comment is false. 

Perhaps finding these comments insufficiently inflammatory, Sulek turned to Jeoffry Gordon, a retired family doctor from San Diego. I’ve encountered Dr. Gordon before. He got very upset with this column I wrote for CalMatters. A more detailed discussion of Dr. Gordon's views, some of which are alarmingly extreme,  is available here, though the comments on the underlying website seem to have been taken down. 

So I can't say it was a surprise when, with Gordon, Sulek hit the jackpot: 

“When tragedies happen, such as started with Baby Phoenix, and they keep happening, and after three years you have just as many deficiencies, something’s terribly wrong in resources and management,” said Dr. Jeoffry Gordon, a member of the state-mandated citizens review panel that evaluates child fatality cases. “It borders on the scandalous.” … [Emphasis added.] 

“Nobody expects you to be perfect, but this enumeration of deficiencies speaks to me that the leadership and direction and concern for the most needy children is still deficient in the county,” Gordon said, and the state “does not seem to have the oomph to directly call that out.” 

“You have to look higher up the chain of command into the responsible parties that have not provided the resources, training, direction, or enthusiasm to protect the county’s children.” 

So apparently Gordon somehow got it into his head that no child ever died of child abuse in Santa Clara County until the death of Baby Phoenix. (Even harder to explain is why Steve Baron seems under the same misimpression.) 

Granted, if one gets one’s information only from the Mercury News, one can be left with that impression, but someone who serves on the panel Gordon is on should have at least thought to check. Of course, it’s not true. Tragically, children died in Santa Clara County long before the county tried to do more to keep families together, and they continue to die even as the county rushes to tear apart families at a frantic pace – perhaps sometimes even because the county rushes to tear apart families at a frantic pace. 

Researchers even have developed a formula to predict how many more Santa Clara County children will die or become seriously ill because of the foster-care panic. 

The child abuse deaths Gordon and Baron cite are not because of some particular failing in Santa Clara County. It’s true of every county of Santa Clara’s size, and many counties that are much smaller. In no county or state has a foster-care panic made that any better; the panics only divert us from focusing on real solutions with potential to reduce such fatalities. 

Recall the massive study showing no link between increasing removals of children and reducing child abuse deaths, or vice versa.

Or recall the comment of a staunch defender of foster care, Prof. Jill Duerr Berrick, who, at a meeting last month, told Arenas (who desperately didn’t want to hear it) and her fellow supervisors that it’s impossible to draw sweeping systemic conclusions based on fatalities because they are “outlier events, that are unpredictable and rare.” 

One would think Gordon would know that. Instead, he bases his attack on people who, agree with them or not, have some of the hardest jobs in government, by doing exactly what Berrick says you can’t do. He concludes that the fact that children known to the system sometimes die proves there is a lack of  “concern for the most needy children” and a lack of “enthusiasm” for helping them on the part of county agency leaders. It’s exactly the kind of personal attack that Arenas and Sulek seem to love. 

Gordon may not have known about the research or what Berrick said, but Sulek sure did. She was in the room when the research was cited and when Berrick made her comment. But she left that comment out of her story. 

But Gordon said what Julia Prodis Sulek wanted to hear. At the Mercury News, it seems nothing else matters. How might one describe that approach to journalism? I’d say it borders on the scandalous. 

Equally obscene was the way Sulek linked the report to the death of Jaxon Juarez; neglecting to note the distinct possibility that Jaxon was a casualty of the foster-care panic. 

What the report said 

Now, let's consider the report itself, the product of an investigation by the California Department of Social Services. The report was requested by the County Social Services Agency itself, something the Mercury News neglects to mention. And oddly, given that this is the 21^st Century and a newspaper in Silicon Valley should know how to do this, there is no link to the report itself. (So I’ve uploaded it here.) 

Perhaps that’s because, though the report does indeed paint a deeply disturbing picture, there also are things in it the Mercury News would rather you not know, or at least wants to play down. Mentioned only briefly far down in the story is the fact that, among the cases they examined, the state investigators found none in which the county left a child in danger. 

The report also revealed some strengths among frontline workers under siege. From the report: 

● .. .[T]he review team observed a notable strength in the county’s informal safety assessment and contact documentation that occurred during supervised visitation between the parents and youth. 

The depth and detail of supervised visit contact notes provided significant insight into the parent-child relationship and had the capacity to informally identify supplemental safety and/or case plan concerns that may not be identified during a monthly social worker visit. 

● For youth placed out of county, DFCS almost always continued conducting monthly social worker contacts with the youth, not relying on the placement county for courtesy social worker visits. … 

(This is particularly impressive given that still another harm to children caused by the panic is that so many have to be placed far from Santa Clara County.) 

The report also says: 

● When documentation was present to make a determination, the onsite team did not identify any caregivers with non-exemptible offenses in which youth were still placed in the home, supporting the county’s adherence to this requirement. 

● When present, emergency placement home evaluation contact narratives … provided high-quality documentation of the initial in-home inspection. In these cases, the evaluation included identified actions needed to remediate any deficiencies. 

But note how these two strengths have to be qualified with “when documentation was present.” That means even a best-case reading of the report makes clear there’s a lot of work to be done.  But that can’t happen if the Supervisors continue to let the foster-care panic rage out of control. 

Because Godon is right about one thing: There is an oomph deficit in Santa Clara County. At base, Sulek and Arenas are bullies. And so far, no one’s had the oomph to push back. 

So far, there’s been no equivalent of U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio. She’s an ex-officio member of the Board of the Kennedy Center. She had to face the ultimate bully. But here’s what happened when Donald Trump tried to bully her: 

It was the most unprofessional thing that I've ever witnessed or been a part of. He went into name calling from everything, from trying to say that I was an obstructionist. I was dumb, he said, 'I think you're incompetent.' And I said, 'I know you're incompetent.' … 

And I looked to the chair …  and I said, are we really going to do this? This is unprofessional. But I was not going to let him call me awful things. And he said he was going to hold me responsible if something fell out of the ceiling and killed someone. And I told him, I said, you're already killing people. We're at war. 

We also have people who are starving. You're doing this. And then he wanted to talk about how great he was with developing,  … I reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room. … I mean, it really went there because … I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me, and the facts stand for themselves. 

Now that’s what I call oomph.