Foster teens at Santa Clara County group homes paint disturbing life

SAN JOSE — Grace was 15 and had been removed from her father's care when she first met 17-year-old Destiny at one of Santa Clara County's unlicensed group homes for foster children in the foothills of South San Jose.

'Wanna smoke?" Grace asked her.

The simple invitation led to a wild night out with two teenage boys who also lived there. It started, the girls recounted, when a character in drag at a 7-Eleven parking lot offered them shots of vodka and ended hours later when one of the boys suffered a mental breakdown on a bus ride back from a smoke shop and a homeless man tried to follow them home. At the door before midnight, a house staff member checking for contraband demanded they empty their pockets and shake out their bras before allowing them back inside.

That November night last year was so scary — and so thrilling — that Grace wrote about it in an essay for her freshman English Lit class in an effort to pull up her failing grade:

"I didn't know what to think about my life going down this path," she wrote, "but at that moment, I didn't care."

That was the two girls' initiation into the disturbing and chaotic life in and out of Santa Clara County's so-called "scattered sites," a string of group homes that child welfare officials say is intended to keep the most challenging foster youth safe and in school while working to reunite them with their families or live independently.

Destiny and Grace — along with two other foster youths — reached out to the Bay Area News Group after an investigation by this new organization reported that those group homes were the scenes of hundreds of documented runaways, assaults, psychological breakdowns, a drug overdose and an alleged rape. And at the timethey were all operating without permission or regular oversight by the state of California, which had threatened criminal action against the county.

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."

Their stories come as Santa Clara County is undergoing a public reckoning over child welfare policies that have left vulnerable children with their abusive families in the name of "family preservation." While county leaders defend their policies, saying the foster care alternative can cause more trauma than troubled families, the accounts of Destiny and Grace suggest the county's practices are causing trauma of their own.

The Mercury News is not including the last names of Grace and Destiny to protect their identities because they are minors.

"You opened a can of worms," Destiny said.

"Yeah, we're the worms and we're escaping the can," Grace replied. "And we're like, 'Holy shit, I didn't know there was life outside this can.'"

An 'unlawful' solution

Over the past four years, despite warnings from the state that the scattered sites were unlawful and "must cease," Santa Clara County has run as many as 10 of them. Neighbor complaints and other factors have forced the closure of several over the years. Three remain open. Two that are occupied were recently licensed. But those licenses allow foster youths to stay up to 10 days — a fraction of the time most youths spend at such sites now.

County officials say they are doing the best they can, caring for the most troubled foster youth, typically those who have been turned away by foster families and often their own relatives. Despite lacking state licenses since 2020, the county insisted it was meeting state standards and providing home-like surroundings.

"Like many communities in California, we struggle to find suitable and timely placement for high-needs children with challenging behaviors," the county's Department of Family and Children's Services said in a statement. "The best place for any youth in need of care is in a safe and supportive family setting."

Earlier this month, Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, who has been highly critical of the county's child welfare agency, directed the department to create an alternative to the scattered sites. She recommended using San Mateo County as a model to develop a high-level therapeutic home with mental health professionals on staff that can better support the often traumatized teens.

Other counties around the Bay Area, including Alameda and Contra Costa, have contracted with private providers to provide similar therapeutic homes. In Santa Clara County, private agencies backed out of providing the same programs, so by 2020 the county opened the unregulated scattered sites instead.

They were supposed to be "a makeshift solution because we can't recruit enough foster homes to scale," Arenas said. "Yet this temporary solution has had no end date, nor any real plan for there to be an end date."

Raising each other

Destiny and Grace consider themselves best friends, sisters, mother and daughter — two teenage girls without parents they can count on, thrust into the care of a county that has been running afoul of the law.

Destiny is already a mother. Pregnant at 14, she lost custody of her son at 16 after an altercation with her mother, a woman who was the subject of numerous child welfare complaints since Destiny was a toddler.

"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."

Over lunch at a sandwich shop this summer, the girls described how Grace landed at the group home in South San Jose last year carrying only a plastic garbage bag with her clothes and a vape pen — an icebreaker to make friends. There were no foster "parents" here, only a rotating cast of staff members whom the county trained in "trauma-informed crisis intervention," according to county reports.

Like most foster youths, Grace and Destiny grew up with trauma. Born in China, Grace left there and moved to the Bay Area with her father at age 5 after her parents divorced. She was thrust into the foster care system when she was 11, she said, after running to neighbors and describing a physical conflict with her father over homework. Her odyssey through the child welfare system took her to one foster family, then back to China where her mother had started a new family, back to her father, and then to yet another foster family where the foster mother insisted on nightly family dinners.

"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."

By October, Grace's foster mother had had enough, and the county dropped her off at the scattered site.

Destiny had trouble with authority, too.

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. Each time, the allegations of physical and emotional abuse were deemed "inconclusive."

"They were all ignored," Destiny said. Two years ago, however, after an argument with her mother about her son's care, Destiny was the one hauled away by police. When she was released from juvenile hall four days later, Destiny said, "My mom didn't want to pick me up from jail, so they called CPS."

Destiny's son, then 2, ended up in the custody of his paternal grandmother while Destiny ultimately landed at the South San Jose scattered site. She brought with her an urn carrying the ashes of her grandmother — the one adult she believed understood her best — and asked the staff to keep it safe in their office.

Acting out

Like many children who have suffered abuse or neglect, acting out and breaking rules became a way of life for Grace and Destiny and their housemates at the group homes.

No cooking allowed after 10 p.m.? Unplug the microwave and sneak it into a bedroom.

Silverware replaced with plastic utensils for safety? Try to scare the social worker with a butter knife.

Food locked in the garage refrigerator after hours? Raid the pantry and smear peanut butter and seasoning salts on the counters — or a staff member's car — in protest.

Threatened with being kicked out if you leave the house for more than 24 hours? Go AWOL for days.

"When you try to be our mommy and daddy, you get a little bit of kickback," Destiny said. "We are children that were abused and have not been able to have a voice. We are going to use it now."

They rarely faced consequences. California foster children have a "bill of rights" and social workers are not allowed to restrain them, lock them in or use corporal punishment.

Conditions in the group homes heightened the tension, the girls recounted. Teens with extreme mental health issues, poor hygiene and anti-social behaviors would incite the others. Bedrooms would be crowded with two and three teens at a time, sending some to sleep on living room couches. If an angry kid kicked a hole in the wall, others would make it bigger to climb through. Rats ran down the halls. Ants climbed the walls.

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.

Pulling up the memories on their phones, they giggled like schoolgirls on a sleepover.

Last March, while D››estiny was at school, Grace called her, frantic. The house staff was packing up Destiny's clothes, Grace told her, and moving her to a third scattered site in Morgan Hill.

"They said that it had to do with behavior," Grace told her, "and that we couldn't be together anymore."

They texted each other nonstop over the next week.

"I'm literally sobbing, I miss you so bad," Grace texted her. "I want to die."

Last spring, Grace was failing English Lit when the teacher offered one last chance: write a self reflection. In one long, bleary-eyed sitting, she tapped out 22 pages.

She recounted the failures at every county placement from foster family to scattered site: the days she would go to school drunk and the nights she went AWOL; how she watched a fellow foster youth removed from the scattered site on a stretcher and how her own hallucinations landed her in the hospital; how she cried when her last foster mother kicked her out and how, on that first night out with Destiny, one of the boys broke down on the bus "talking in a baby voice, calling me his sister, and crying about his real mom."

She wrote about the male staff member last March who seemed to be grooming her with his sexually suggestive text messagesand how she reported him to a female staff member.

She wrote about the thrill of becoming a "crazy, senseless, reckless teenager," and how, when depression set in, she skipped school and barely ate.

"I miss my mom," she wrote.

For Destiny, living in the foster system for nine months left her feeling "drained and lifeless, worthless," she said. "I just need a break from these people."

On the verge of turning 18, she just moved into a county-sponsored independent living program — but without her grandmother's ashes. The scattered site staff had lost them along the way.

Destiny is now working to regain custody of her son and sees Grace as often as she can.

"If I can't take care of my son how I want to right now," Destiny said, "I can take care of Grace."

Over the summer, after eight months at the scattered sites, Grace was sent back to live with her dad. She doesn't know how long it will last.

"It's a hard transition," she said, "from total freedom to asking permission for everything."

Earlier this month, Grace finally heard from a sheriff's deputy inquiring about the grooming incident last March. She doesn't know why it took so long for her report to make it to law enforcement. Sources say the staff member recently left the agency.

These days, Grace is making more of an effort to do better in school, but she is uncertain of what lies ahead. Her father has threatened to send her back to foster care. She recently reread the essay she wrote last spring — and dwelled on the comments her teacher left in the margins.

"I do not even know how to comment on this," he wrote.

He felt sorry for what she had to suffer. He wished her well.

"Thank you for this tremendous effort," he wrote. "Take care of yourself."