Three Bay Area counties could soon be allowed to share information about children identified as vulnerable to abuse and neglect via a first-of-its-kind partnership.
A bill from Assemblymember Mark Stone would enable an organization called the Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust to develop a shared database and environment that Santa Cruz, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties could jointly access.
Under California law, these kinds of databases are currently confined to individual counties.
Rodney Ogawa, professor emeritus of education at UC Santa Cruz, told an Assembly panel on Tuesday that the data trust has been working on the foundation for this project for the last five years.
The trust will include data from all the public schools, as well as health and human services data from the three counties. Each of the counties will continue to maintain its own data warehouse, but the data would be sharable.
"We're not going to change the system at all, but create an environment, through software, where those staff who have authorized access to particular data for work purposes, can go into the system and access those data so they can get it readily and quickly," Ogawa said.
A shared database would be valuable because at-risk children are more likely to move homes and from county to county, Ogawa said.
Ogawa explained that the data trust has been meeting with leaders from education, criminal justice, and health and human services in order to craft the appropriate policies for data sharing, data protection and data access.
Stone said Tuesday that if the tri-county project is successful — he acknowledged it could be "potentially difficult" — he hopes the approach can be extended statewide.
"One of the things I've been working on quite a bit since I've been at the Legislature is to try to find better ways so that the right information about the right child gets to the right place when decisions need to be made," Stone said.
Stone's legislation, AB 597, passed The Assembly Human Services Committee by a 7-to-0 vote on Tuesday. The bill was moved to the Assembly floor.
