Five years ago, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors threatened to close the San Pasqual Academy. This unique educational and residential facility for teenagers in foster care is again under threat.
I spoke out then, and I’m doing so again. Now I am an elected trustee on the San Diego County Board of Education, but I’m speaking out on my own behalf as a professor sociology.
San Pasqual Academy is a home, a school and a community where kids in foster care have opportunities to build relationships with each other and with adults who care deeply about their well-being. This includes senior citizens who live in cottages on the grounds, and are the “grandparents” of the academy.
Staff and volunteers provide basic needs and strive to create a safe and stable environment. The academy was legally designated as an educational facility, not a congregate care center, because it is built to have all of the amenities of a public school, including a gym and football field.
It is the only facility in county that specifically serves teenagers who have been removed from their homes and who can’t or don’t want to live with their immediate, extended or non-relative family members, in traditional foster care, or be adopted by new guardians. For myriad reasons those other residential options aren’t best for the kids who are placed at the academy.
What should be the focus of policy reforms are the economic and political conditions that destabilize families in the first place. These conditions are left unaddressed by policy shifts over the last 5-10 years that prioritize wrap-around services to expedite reunification with struggling parents or kinship care. The result is institutional pressure on the Department of Child and Family Wellbeing to not recommend that kids be placed at the academy.
A part of what is behind that pressure is research showing that kids who are removed from their homes experience drastically higher rates of homelessness and education gaps, and are more likely to be caught up in the criminal justice system. Another aspect is the dire need to address racial disparities within foster care systems by emulating a hard-fought victory of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s.
The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 permanently institutionalized the movement’s work to end the kidnapping and displacement of indigenous children into boarding schools with the intention of erasing indigenous cultures. Violence against Black and Latino children occurred under a similar guise of “child protection,” and persists through over-policing and incarceration. The collective trauma caused by these forms of white supremacist violence informs the steps forward that family reunification policies represent.
But there is an important institutional catch to these policies. We are diverting funding towards family wraparound services without substantively addressing the root causes of parenting challenges. The result is that these services are essentially charity.
The weight and burden of toxic social conditions like the exploitation of workers, profit-motivated healthcare and unaffordable housing, remain the personal responsibility of struggling families. They have access to more services that will help with the symptoms, which is absolutely a step forward, but the cause of those symptoms hasn’t changed. If anything, social conditions are getting worse.
Policymakers and the hard-working, caring experts who work within the Child and Family Wellbeing Department have the most noble intentions. Unfortunately, blocking or thwarting placement for kids who want to live at San Pasqual Academy with the intention of shutting it down — or even worse, privatizing it — is taking one more choice away from kids while they are enduring the worst situations.
Kids who are in foster care now, and the kids who will need a place like San Pasqual Academy in the future, need us to spend our time re-imagining instead of threatening.
Dr. Erin M. Evans is a resident of Santee, an associate professor of sociology at San Diego Mesa College, and a trustee on the San Diego County Board of Education representing District 4.
