The Public Needs COVID-19 Data on San Diego County’s Foster Care System
Foster care is an institution we might have forgotten in the midst of all of the other issues. I am a former foster youth, having spend 13 years in he system, so you can depend on me to challenge the very people in county government who we pay with our tax dollars to ensure foster children are well taken care of.
It has always been local government’s responsibility to make sure our children and our social workers are watched over. We know that the county staff is working hard. Unfortunately, some of our county supervisors are more concerned about daily COVID-19 briefings than doing the work of representing all of the communities impacted by the pandemic. They need to understand the urgency of getting into the weeds to get to the bottom of how to better address this crisis so we can beat the virus, don’t lose any more lives, and don’t stall the reopening of our economy any further.
The reason why we need to know how many foster kids, social workers, and foster parents have tested positive for the coronavirus is so that we can see just how much the system is being impacted and use aggregated data to make better decisions based upon what we see in the numbers. San Diego’s foster care system is large, with 2,800 children. And like the pandemic, it disproportionately involves African American and Latino youth. Black children are nearly 20% of San Diego’s foster care system while Latino children represent nearly 46%…
