Live Agents Available!
The Polinsky Children’s Center has been known to violate the rules beyond the state policies. There are people that work at the Polinsky Center with no real training.
Rachel Randolph herself is a residential care worker has said “Polinksy is a temporary shelter for children in need.” She has been an employee with the county for almost a decade. And yet her duties include looking over the campus, as well as housing and support for the Polinsky Children’s Center.
Randolph says that being a representative for the union speaks aloud about the Polinsky Children’s Center. Randolph says, “As a union steward, I get a lot of emails and a lot of phone calls due to being short-staffed, which is on a regular basis, staff feeling they’re not supported. The staff do not feel supported at all.”
There isn’t a lot different you have to do with a children’s emergency shelter at all. It’s really quite simple when you get down to brass tacks. But this one in particular doesn’t seem to really get the understanding of properly respecting the children involved.
Polinsky itself is not a locked facility.
That data qualifies due to the fact that in the past three years and months, there had been beyond 2,000 calls for service in the address of the Polinsky Center. With all sorts of complaints, like disturbing the peace with threats towards weapons and runaway juveniles.
The county themselves had allowed teenagers to live in a similar housing unit. There was also a high concentration of drugs and alcohol on the campus while there had been kids on AWOL (which in itself was a military term indicating “away without leave.”) But for the Polinsky Center in particular, it means when the kids depart from the center minus permission from the staff.
Polinsky has been undergoing renovations to decrease the number of AWOL youth. The renovations are also including the installation of more video cameras and upgrades.
A letter had been sent by the state of California addressing the lack of attention made towards the San Diego County’s Child Welfare Services. A little bit of the letter included a statement:
The County has reported hundreds of children are placed at Polinsky each year, many of whom are under the age of six years old, with an average stay that exceeds the maximum allowable length of stay of ten days for a temporary shelter care facility.
Of course, the Polinsky Center has doubled the number of children under the age of six staying beyond 30 days in shelter care than any other similar sized shelter care facility. With the pandemic itself, there had been a national crisis that had kept kids much longer than anticipated.