Two teenage girls describe their difficult lives inside the Santa Clara County foster system, including at unlicensed homes.
Destiny, 17, and Grace, 15, both lived as foster children in Santa Clara County’s unlicensed “scattered sites” group homes over the past year where they say the county has failed them, both by the chaotic atmosphere living with highly troubled kids and the excessive freedom that has caused its own problems.
Both girls were eager to describe their tumultuous lives at the county’s scattered sites, including a creepy interaction with a male staff worker who asked Grace about her love life and secretly texted her from a private number that she was “cute like in a kitten sort of way.”in the name of “family preservation.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, right, listens to Santa Clara County Department of Family and Children’s Services Social Work Supervisor Suzanne Romero outside the Board of Supervisors meeting in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023. “We both know we need a mom, and we don’t have one. We both know we need a dad,” Destiny said. “So the most comforting thing out of this whole situation is just having each other.”
“I was like, dude, that was too much for me,” Grace said. “I raised myself. It’s hard for me to listen to someone else tell me what to do.”Throughout her and her brother’s childhoods, social workers appeared at their home 19 times, court records show, including when Destiny was 3 and told a social worker her mother had choked her in a grocery cart, and when she was 15 and reported her mother had put her in a chokehold, claims her mother denied.
Grace and Destiny chronicled their experiences in photos — the peanut butter on the counters, the holes in the walls, the rats. They shot videos on their phones of the times police squad cars would show up to calm down a foster youth having a manic episode or threatening suicide. They watched the spectacles from the front yard, wrapping themselves in blankets and taking selfies.
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