“The system works as well as the people who run it. And sometimes we have to ask a question whether we have the right people on the bus to actually carry out the work.”
— Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, to County Executive James Williams and social services department heads over over the slow pace of reforming the agency’s protocols for removing children from dangerously negligent or abusive parents in the year since 3-month-old Phoenix Castro died of a fentanyl overdose under her drug-addicted father’s care.