Within days of finally earning a state license it had operated without for months, a Santa Clara County-run group home for foster teens was the scene of a physical altercation between staff and at least one teenage girl — an incident that is raising disturbing new questions about the county’s care of abused and neglected children.
A staff member who works at the home begged county supervisors for help last week, describing the system as “dysfunctional.” A state senator from San Jose is demanding the home be shut down. And neighbors who witnessed the altercation and offered refuge for two foster girls who fled to one of their homes barefoot, are calling it child abuse.
“If it were a mom and dad doing this to a child, someone would be calling CPS,” said neighbor Estrella Ojeda, who witnessed the incident last Sunday from across the street, referring to child protective services. “I really don’t understand why the county is letting these places be run.”
The county avoided answering emailed questions about the altercation, instead releasing a statement saying that most of the foster children in the group homes have experienced “significant trauma or abuse, leading to emotional and mental health challenges and associated behaviors.” Social workers are trained in “therapeutic crisis intervention” and de-escalation techniques, it said.
The incident is the latest black eye for Santa Clara County’s troubled Department of Family and Children’s Services, which has faced sharp questions over its care for vulnerable abused and neglected children and teens, including an infant and 6-year-old who died in the last two years in the homes of their department-monitored caregivers. The agency has been the subject of two damning state reports, investigations by the Bay Area News Group and a social workers’ revolt.
Over the past four years, state authorities had threatened the county department with criminal charges for operating a string of “scattered sites” — unlicensed group homes for foster teens — that have had hundreds of runaways, mental breakdowns and assaults. This news organization also has detailed chaos at the homes as told by a pair of teen wards.
The scene of Sunday’s incident occurred in an East San Jose group home, which received a state provisional license Sept. 27. Neighbors there have been complaining about the two-story house since February, saying sirens streamed down their street when one of the first foster teens placed there overdosed on fentanyl. They’ve recorded police calls and vandalism, and worried about strange cars picking up foster girls at all hours. Along the way, they’ve become sympathetic to the foster children living there.
At least twice before, one of the girls involved in Sunday’s incident had run in tears to the neighboring home of George and Patty Kohler, begging to find another place to stay.
“Each kid has a lawyer, a social worker, an advocate — and they run to my house,” said Patty, 70, who welcomed in the distraught 17-year-old. “If you have all these people helping you, why do you need me?”
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The altercation began Sunday evening, when Ojeda, the neighbor, was walking her dogs and heard a commotion.
“F-bombs were flying,” she said.
From the top of her driveway on a rise in the road, Ojeda looked down upon the group home, through the second-floor balcony’s French doors and into a brightly lit room. Two staff members, including at least one man, were grabbing each of the arms of the same 17-year-old girl the Kohlers and other neighbors had come to know.
“They were pushing her toward the wall, but at the same time trying to bring her to the ground,” Ojeda said. “I just thought it was kind of insane because I had been told that the staff can’t touch these girls or these kids. If I were to see it on the street, I would be yelling assault.”
State law forbids workers from using corporal punishment or restraining foster children in any way, as part of their “bill of rights.” In one of the state’s first inspections of the group home, it was cited for not having those rights posted. In its statement, the county said staff abides by those rights.
Within minutes, squad cars were arriving and the two foster girls were darting to the Kohlers’ house. Neighbor Stephanie Carles brought snacks — packages of cookies, beef sticks and bottled water. Ojeda and the other neighbors said the girls showed them fresh bruises on their forearms and a bloody scratch on one of their torsos.
In her story to the neighbors, and in a phone interview Wednesday with this news organization, the 17-year-old recounted how the conflict started when she and the other teenager squirted shampoo on the floor to “slip and slide” in their bare feet. She became upset when a female staff member started video-recording them, so the teen pulled out her own phone camera. Grabbing and pushing between them ensued, she said, and the confrontation with several staff members escalated from there. The teen said she never assaulted anyone and if anything, she was trying to get the female staff member “off of me.”
The girl was relieved, Ojeda said, when she told her she witnessed it.
“Hopefully now someone will believe us,” the girl said.
With encouragement from sheriff’s deputies and neighbors, who didn’t know what else to recommend, the two girls reluctantly returned to the group home that night and shut their bedroom doors.
At the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors meeting last Tuesday, social worker Brice Weber stood before the microphone during the public comment period and said he worked at the scattered site. Wringing his hands, he said, “I’m here this morning to just, with the intention of just saying, you know, help.”
It was one of his co-workers, he said, who had been assaulted Sunday, and upper management wasn’t listening to concerns about their own safety.
“I’ve only been here nine months,” he said, “and it doesn’t take long to realize the dysfunctions that we’re kind of feeling.” It wasn’t clear whether he was involved in the incident or was working that day.
State Sen. Dave Cortese, a former Santa Clara County supervisor, says the scattered sites should close and that he’s working with county supervisor Sylvia Arenas to clear the way for more therapeutic options for troubled teens.
The county says it is operating “consistent with licensure standards.” But it [cq comment=” appears to be violating one of” ] is licensed only as a “transitional” facility, which allows foster kids to stay no longer than three days, 10 with a waiver. One of the teenagers involved in Sunday’s altercation has lived there about two months already and said in an interview she expects to live there for another month or two. Nonetheless, the county says it’s still within proper bounds, as long as it provides the state with evidence it has made efforts to find a longer-term placement for the foster child. What that alternative might be when the county calls these scattered sites homes of “last resort” is unclear.
Cortese, meanwhile, says he’s still going to “demand that the state agency holds them accountable. The state can start making this very painful for the county to continue to operate in rogue fashion like this.”
Neighbor Mark Santanocito, who with his wife raised and adopted two foster sons, said that after Sunday’s altercation, “the county is sanctioning child abuse.” He created a Change.org petition calling for both scattered sites to be shuttered and for the ouster of the county’s Department of Social Services Director Daniel Little and Department of Family and Children’s Services Director Damion Wright.
As neighbor Carles put it: “You cannot simply drop a revolving door of highly troubled foster teens into a rental home in a residential neighborhood and expect anything other than the problems that we’re having. It’s going to wreak havoc in our neighborhood and it’s never going to be right for the kids.”
