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A longstanding Danville-based childcare provider that contracts with San Ramon Valley schools is facing allegations of child abuse and neglect in a recently filed lawsuit.
The complaint filed Aug. 30 in Contra Costa County Superior Court alleges that the anonymous plaintiff, a 4-year-old attendee of the Kids’ Country site at Vista Grande Elementary School in Danville at the time, was able to leave the premises via a gate that was left open twice in the course of a less than five-week period in 2022.
“The culture of lack of sufficient supervision over children in Kids’ Country’s care and the pattern of CDSS policy violations created the conditions for the incidents on which this Complaint is based upon,” the family’s attorneys wrote.
“Kids’ Country has prioritized expansion over compliance with well-established childcare policies and has failed on numerous occasions to protect vulnerable children in their care. Kids’ Country has avoided accountability for repeatedly placing children in danger and has violated the public trust,” they added.
Representatives for Kids’ Country had not responded to a request for comment as of Tuesday evening. Attorneys for the childcare provider had also not yet to file a response to the original complaint as of that point. A case management conference is scheduled for Jan. 6.
Kids’ Country currently operates at 15 different sites throughout the San Ramon Valley Unified School District, offering before- and after-school, enrichment, and summer camp programs for young children.
“We are aware of the litigation, and student safety always remains a top priority in SRVUSD. We are not named as a party, and Kids’ Country is its own corporation and has a facility use lease to utilize our school sites,” district spokesperson Ilana Israel Samuels told DanvilleSanRamon. “We will be closely monitoring the situation, and our policy is to not comment on pending litigation that is connected in any way to the district.”
According to the California Department of Social Services and attorneys from the Dublin-based civil rights firm Abraham and Gautam, the plaintiff first left through the front gate at Vista Grande on Nov. 11, 2022 and had proceeded to begin attempting to walk home before being picked up and returned to their parents by a neighbor.
Jeannette Gravelyn, site director for Kid’s Country’s Vista Grande program and a defendant named in the complaint, reportedly acknowledged the first incident in a statement during a subsequent investigation by CDSS.
“She felt they should have handled the child’s feelings better, supervised (the child) more closely, and not left positions to meet with visiting staff,” CDSS officials said following the investigation, according to the complaint.
The incident reportedly resulted in a citation for lack of supervision by CDSS, as well as a meeting with Kids’ Country staff to “prevent this type of incident from occurring again”.
But it did happen again, according to attorneys and CDSS, yielding a second Type A investigation when the same child asked to go to the bathroom on Dec. 16, 2022 and instead left the site through the front gate once again, this time going unaccounted for 15 minutes.Â
According to attorneys and previous reporting from DanvilleSanRamon referenced in the complaint, the incidents in question are far from the first in which Kids’ Country has faced allegations of abuse and neglect – and penalties from the state – in the course of its nearly 50-year history.
“They have been receiving class a violations from the California Department of Social Services licensing constantly, and over the past decade they’ve been letting kids out without oversight,” attorney Gautam Jagganath told DanvilleSanRamon.
Jagganath pointed to a long history of allegations and violations going back to long before the birth of the plaintiff in the complaint, including Kids’ Country sites being cited for “serious violations” in 2011 for four different instances of children being left outside without supervision.
Three of those incidents were the year prior, with two children left unattended outside at Country Club Elementary School in San Ramon while the rest of their peers were brought inside in September 2010, and two more children left unattended outside at San Ramon’s Bollinger Canyon Elementary School site in August 2010.
In the earlier incidents that Kids’ Country was cited for in 2011, the children also left the premises and sought to make their way home. Two who left the Green Valley Elementary School site in Danville in March 2010 were spotted after leaving the site, with two other unsupervised children reportedly leaving and successfully walking all the way to their homes in 2008.
A week later, according to reporting from DanvilleSanRamon, all four of those elementary school sites – Country Club, Greenbrook, Bollinger Canyon and Green Valley – were at risk of having their licenses revoked by the state in 2011. They were ultimately placed on a three-year probationary period through 2014 on the promise that staff would be stationed at the sites’ gates in order to prevent children from leaving.
According to CDSS, Type A represents “the most serious type of violations in which there is an immediate risk to the health, safety or personal rights of those in care, including lack of supervision”.
All of those sites continue to be open in the present day, with no documented Type A violations in the past three years. That hasn’t always been the case in the years since the end of the probationary period however, according to the complaint filed this year, which points to additional violations including another Type A citation for a 2015 incident in which two children left the premises at Country Club and walked home without being discovered missing for approximately two hours.
In 2017, Bollinger Canyon received another Type A citation following a CDSS investigation which found that one child had stabbed another with a pencil while in class in front of a teacher, who had failed to intervene.
“It shocks the conscience that California Department of Social Services decided at this point in time to not revoke Kids’ Country licenses to care for children in light of the extensive history and the very recent probation period,” attorneys wrote in the complaint filed this summer.
The incidents at Vista Grande that are in question in the pending lawsuit led to Type A citations according to CDSS, with the complaints having been substantiated by the state investigation into the facility.
While the two incidents in which the same child went missing are the major subject of the current lawsuit, attorneys for the plaintiff are also seeking to illustrate an overall pattern on Kids’ Country’s part – and at the Vista Grande site – that has been ongoing for decades.
Examples in the complaint include the site beginning to operate prior to being fully licensed upon its debut in 1986, lack of required records including background checks for teachers and staff in its early years, and two assaults against children in the program – one in 1992, in which a teacher allegedly held a child’s head in a toilet and flushed it, and one in 2009 in which a teacher allegedly slapped a child on the arm hard enough to leave a mark.
