Matthew Kraft’s voice shook as he accepted the “Child Protector of the Year Award” throughout a San Jose luncheon Friday.
“It’s actually really difficult for me to accept this award,” the Santa Clara County social employee mentioned, “given what came before it, and the tragedy that led to it.”
Kraft had tried to avoid wasting Child Phoenix Castro, sounding the alarm that the toddler wouldn’t be secure going dwelling from the hospital together with her drug-abusing mother and father. They’d accomplished little to regain two older youngsters, who been taken away after being “severely neglected,” and Kraft wrote a dire letter to his superiors that Phoenix may die if despatched dwelling from the hospital after her beginning in February 2023.
Leaders of the county’s youngster welfare company, nevertheless, then newly-committed to a coverage that will show extra centered on protecting households collectively than protecting youngsters secure, basically ignored Kraft’s warning. Three months later, Phoenix died of a fentanyl overdose. Her mom, Emily De La Cerda, died of a fentanyl overdose months later. Her father, David Castro, is going through felony youngster endangerment prices.
Kraft’s warnings earlier than Phoenix died and the dearth of accountability by the leaders of the Division of Household and Kids’s Companies — delivered to gentle by The Mercury Information starting in late 2023 — helped result in an overhaul of the company, which continues to be underway, and the final word resignation in late December of its director, Damion Wright.
At particular hearings organized by Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas and her former colleague Cindy Chavez, Kraft and dozens of colleagues demanded reforms and a rebalancing of a system that left too many youngsters in harmful houses.
“He symbolized, as far as I’m concerned, the profiles in courage at the agency who are willing to speak to power to express their concerns about the safety of children,” mentioned Steve Baron, a member of the Santa Clara County Youngster Abuse Prevention Council, the county fee that honored Kraft.
The county’s Division of Household and Kids’s Companies had shifted its insurance policies in 2021, when then-agency Director Dan Little, who has since been promoted to steer the county’s Division of Social Companies, despatched an electronic mail to the workers. It defined that within the pursuits of “healing the historical underlying disproportionate representation of children of color in the child welfare system,” that social employees would work with county attorneys “to prevent the need for removal of children from their homes.”
As an alternative, the letter mentioned, they’d give attention to therapeutic households with companies like parenting lessons and drug therapy applications.
What one in all two state investigations would decide over the previous two years, nevertheless, was 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,” a July 2024 report discovered.
The state investigations additionally discovered that in additional than half the circumstances they reviewed, between July 2022 and March 2024, no security plans had been created for folks that would have helped maintain youngsters secure.
Over the previous 12 months, the county’s youngster welfare company has made quite a few adjustments, together with subjecting mother and father of infants born with medication of their system, like child Phoenix, to “rigorous investigations” and social employees have undergone new coaching to raised implement and monitor security plans for households the place youngsters are allowed to stay of their houses.
Ever since Phoenix’s loss of life, Kraft has been plagued with nightmares “of me screaming or crying,” he mentioned, “and no one hearing.” And with Little and Wright taking little duty for the insurance policies that performed a task in Phoenix’s loss of life, Kraft says he has felt an excruciating burden of guilt over whether or not he may have accomplished extra.
“I don’t like feeling this strongly about it this long after,” Kraft mentioned, “but I do.”
Responding to a request from Supervisor Sylvia Arenas to replicate on his failures in management over child Phoenix’s loss of life, Little final October wrote in a letter that he and the company’s management staff ought to have ensured that “that staff were laser focused on effective safety planning and monitoring” and that they need to have ensured “in all cases where families were unable to keep their child safe, removal of the child must occur.”
Kraft sought a desk job with the county by which he wouldn’t should work with youngsters, and not too long ago was named the LGBT coordinator for youngsters growing older out of the kid welfare system.
Baron, the retired director of the county’s Household Courtroom Companies, was additionally honored Friday with the “angel award” as a “fierce advocate for the safety of children” for his greater than 20 years of service to youngsters. He, too, was choked up on stage.
“I’m accepting this award in memory of the child, Phoenix Castro, whose name and lessons learned from her for shortened life will never be forgotten in this county,” he mentioned.
He thanked those that assist susceptible youngsters — from social employees and public well being nurses to regulation enforcement and home violence sufferer advocates — for his or her work to “transform the traumatic tragedy of Phoenix Castro into meaningful, constructive and durable change” to “focus on child safety at every stage in the process and in all of our work.”
Alex Lesniak, a social employee and union steward, mentioned that many social employees nonetheless have ambiguous emotions about what it took for Kraft to be honored Friday.
“But I also think it’s important that people can see that speaking up, stepping up is the right thing to do,” Lesniak mentioned. “And I really hope that this is more about the department and the county listening to social workers and when they bring these strong concerns up, to take them seriously and not to focus so much on liability, but instead on what are we actually doing to keep children and families safe — because the reason that we’re here honoring him is because how that process went wrong, and how do we not let this happen again.”
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