Santa Clara County nearly tripled child removals. Is fear driving the decisions?
Santa Clara County nearly tripled child removals. Is fear driving the decisions?
- September 7, 2026
- Kelley Fong, sociology, gives expert insight in The Mercury News
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Research in all 50 states over the past 15 years, however, shows that states that increased their foster care entries saw no decline in child deaths, said panelist Kelley Fong, associate professor of sociology at UC Irvine who studies policies affecting youth in the child welfare system.
“The reactive impulse is to say … that our response has to be to compensate and shift our national foster care entry numbers back up,” Fong told the supervisors. “We’re not seeing, in a national perspective, that that is related in any way to maltreatment fatalities.”
Read in full, courtesy of The Mercury News.
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