Earlier this year, the county grand jury issued a report critical of San Joaquin County’s Children’s Services. The county prepared it’s official response, which you can read about here. The Board of Supervisors today approved that response without discussion.
But it still came up at the meeting. Michael Perez, a former county social worker who has been critical of the county’s ability to adequately protect children, came to the meeting to talk. He waved a thick stack of papers he said were pages of minutes for the Children’s Services Coordinating Commission since 2007. Part of the commission’s duties is to help prevent child abuse.
He said there was no evidence in those 321 pages that the commission had ever considered how the high numbers of cases being handled by each social workers could be putting children at risk. “Not once has the issue been brought up,” he said.
He didn’t bring up events north of the county border, but the Sacramento Bee posted a story about a CPS oversight committee issuing a new report on Sacramento County.
According to the story, the report noted: “Struggling to keep up with increased work demands, social workers use sick time and vacations to stay on top of caseloads.”
