Fresno County orders immediate review of child welfare system in wake of CPS revelations
A retired Fresno County Child Protective Services director is going to carry out a review of the county’s child welfare system, and will help restructure a foster care oversight committee, The Bee has learned.
Catherine Huerta will conduct the review, and the state is willing to step in to provide resources.
Huerta served as an assistant director for Fresno County Department of Children and Family Services for two years, and five years as director. She retired in the spring of 2011 after working for the county for a total of 37 years.
Huerta was the assistant director in 2002 when a scandal that became known as the “motel kids” surfaced.
After foster children’s current office living conditions came to public light, Huerta reached out to Fresno County Administrative Officer Jean Rousseau about her concerns. Conversations then began about how she could help, and those plans were finalized on Thursday, she said.
Huerta will start a review of Fresno County’s child welfare agency immediately. Child welfare is now under the Fresno County Department of Social Services.
“I just want to stress that this is not an attack on a department,” she told The Bee on Thursday. “It’s looking at a system issue, and system issues aren’t about people, they are about systems, bureaucracies.”
Tricia Gonzalez, director of child welfare at the Department of Social Services, didn’t respond to a request for an interview by The Bee on Thursday. Delfino Neira, director of the Department of Social Services, was copied in the request, but he also didn’t respond.
The Fresno Bee first reported last week of living conditions for children awaiting a permanent home after being removed from their parents’ custody, and for youth already under the care of Fresno County who have “blown” their placements. Social workers raised concerns of the children’s office living conditions at the CWS Office, Fresno County’s main hub for Child Protective Services in downtown Fresno.
Social workers also raised concerns about working conditions that leave many social workers overwhelmed, retention and training of staff.
Huerta said her review will take a thorough look at the system, including working conditions. She said she will provide recommendations with long-term solutions. There is no deadline for her volunteer work to be completed, but she said she would like to work as quickly as possible.
A priority in the review, however, will be to identify why the agency is having difficulty placing children in good homes, and to address issues of why the children are there in the first place, she said.
‘Motel kids’ in 2002
“I sort of lived through an experience that’s similar to what’s happening now,” she said, referencing the “motel kids” issue of 2002. Back then, county officials decided to place children in motels so they had a bed and showers, but it became a “big issue in the community, for obvious reasons.”
“I personally, strongly believe that children should really be in homes, never in a building, never in any type of a temporary facility,” she said.
After the “motel kids” scandal, Fresno County’s foster care standards and oversight committee was born.
“That oversight committee was designated to work with me, and help solve the issue of having kids in motels, and they did,” she said. “And they were a very powerful committee.”
Rebuilding oversight committee
Today, the committee has nearly half of its positions unfilled, with seven vacancies. The only Fresno County supervisor who has all the required appointments is Nathan Magsig.
Huerta said agencies, such as child welfare, are “very fragile in a way,” and need community oversight. She’s hoping Fresno County supervisors will fill the current vacancies on the committee.
Her hope, she said, is to restructure the committee to get it to a level where it “can provide the same type of oversight” that helped her in 2002.
“I think, over the years, ...maybe the (committee’s) direction changed a little bit,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t looking at their focus as holding the department accountable for their work.”
Huerta is hoping to work with the committee and the community to resolve the issues that exist within the agency today. She wants to include foster care agencies as well, but most importantly, she wants to hear from social workers.
“We have a lot of people in the community that care deeply about kids, and the foster care system, and I’m hoping that we can bring them back to the table,” she said. “ We can include the social workers that are doing the work because they’re the ones that have to do the work, so I want to make sure they come to the table.”
Sacramento experience
A similar issue also emerged in Sacramento County in 2017. The situation led to a Sacramento County Grand Jury investigation. The investigative report highlighted various findings, such as CPS being focused on “ineffective recruitment strategies rather than considering innovative approaches to gain more placement models for the expanded population it serves.”
CPS had also hired staff to recruit placements for children, but the investigation found, the staff were “unable to focus their efforts due to other job activities.”
The office where CPS would house the children in Sacramento was in a “high crime neighborhood” that placed staff and “traumatized youths in undue danger.”
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