The Honorable Teresa Guerrero-Daley’s courtroom looks like all
the others inside the South County Morgan Hill Courthouse
– save for the plethora of plush, cuddly faces of pandas,
leopards and puppy dogs peeking out from the witness bench, judge’s
dais and jury stand.
The Honorable Teresa Guerrero-Daley’s courtroom looks like all the others inside the South County Morgan Hill Courthouse – save for the plethora of plush, cuddly faces of pandas, leopards and puppy dogs peeking out from the witness bench, judge’s dais and jury stand.
“Those?” noted Daley, acknowledging the cheerful herd of synthetic creatures. “I put those stuffed animals there to make it feel more homey. The children who come here get to pick one and take it home.”
If success had a road map, the one belonging to Daley would be riddled with detours: The esteemed judge of the Superior Court of Santa Clara County was also a high school dropout who ran away from home at the age of 15 with a boyfriend six years her senior.
“I came from a very traditional, conservative family,” said Daley, who in 1967 exchanged vows in a “shotgun” wedding ceremony in the small California town of Cutler.
With three older sisters who had been “properly” proposed to, Daley said her “poor parents” weren’t expecting a rebellious streak from their fourth.
The middle child of seven, however, is living proof that being the black sheep in one’s family is not indicative of what the future can hold.
She went on to become the first undercover female agent to be hired at the San Jose Drug Enforcement Administration, the first lawyer in her family, the first Latina to be elected to the Santa Clara County judicial system and a driving force that helped launch the first education-specific dependency court in the nation for junior high-age children, called Middle School Education Court.
With encouragement from her sisters, the young wife pulled herself up by the bootstraps, earned a high school diploma and went on to the College of Sequoias, a community college located in Visalia where her counselor told her, “I’m going to put you in bonehead English.'”
“I told him I didn’t want bonehead English,” said Daley, leaning back in her chair inside a spacious corner office flooded with afternoon light.
The walls were covered with framed newspaper articles, numerous diplomas and certificates. On a bookshelf behind her, three primate figurines mimed “see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.” A bronze statuette of Lady Justice decoratively draped in a woman’s scarf stood to the left.
“He had dropped the gauntlet,” said Daley. “I was going to prove him wrong. And I did.”
A San Jose State alumna now assigned to the Juvenile Dependency Court of San Jose, the mother of four – ages 43, 42, 40 and 28 – helps re-center eschewed paths of at-risk foster youth who need a little guidance from someone who can level with them. She presides over 400 cases a year and has given away some 1,000 stuffed animals in the past two years, which are donated by local businesses.
Daley often works with children who go to school dirty, hungry and lice-infested, have been exposed to domestic violence, or are severely neglected by parents who take drugs and sleep for several days on end.
The judge upped her youth advocacy efforts in January 2011 with the implementation of Middle School Education Court, an ambitiously comprehensive program striving to improve the education outcome of middle school foster youth from newborns to 19-year-olds. Designed to improve the overall academic performance, test scores, GPAs and attendance rates of Santa Clara County middle school foster youth, the system brings all the agencies directly involved with adolescent foster youth under the umbrella of the court.
“It’s a vehicle by which we’re truly impacting one child at a time,” said Daley. “We’re getting beneath problems we were not identifying before.”
The concept for Middle School Education Court originally sprouted with the Silicon Valley Children’s Fund, 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that identified Junior High as the crossroads.
“Middle school is so critical for youth,” said Vickie Grove, executive director of eight years with Child Advocates of Silicon Valley, another one of the agencies involved with Middle School Court. “If you don’t identify gaps and needed resources during this period of time, children fall behind and it becomes incredibly difficult to help them catch up in high school.”
Where the SVCF lacked the resources required to fully implement the idea, however, Daley said the court is able to navigate the confidentiality and legal hurdles surrounding foster care children.
Now, Grove said agencies from all over the country are observing the strategically coordinated program and asking, “how are you able to do this?”
“Judicial leadership,” Grove continued. “It’s very much a team effort. It’s outstanding.”
Rather than working in “silos,” Daley counters, “I’m not just a judge … we need to work collaboratively in education, and change how we view our roles.”
In a nutshell, the Middle School Education Court implements the oversight necessary to help maintain stability for at-risk youth, or those dwelling in unstable living scenarios. It’s a dance of communication and coordination carried out by schools, social workers, judges, lawyers and legal advocates for youth; ensuring needs don’t fall through the cracks.
“She really connects with each and every child,” said Grove of Daley, who allocates time for private one-on-one sessions in her chambers with every child.
“She lets that child know she cares about them, and that she is responsible for helping them succeed,” said Grove. “I think that’s really powerful.”
After nine months of cementing the program into place, Daley said all the moving parts required to keep the machine running are “starting to gel.”
She splits her time between the San Jose and Morgan Hill courthouses, and calls Juvenile Dependency Court “the most meaningful assignment I’ve ever had.”
After “a lot of low points” in her first marriage, the mother of four who divorced in 1977 and remarried in 1979 speaks from a platform of hard-knock experience.
“It wasn’t an amicable divorce,” said Daley, of the split from her first husband. “So unfortunately, the kids paid the price. They were bounced from place to place.”
She grew up in the small town of Cutler, where the city’s main crop of tomatoes was celebrated every year with a tomato festival. Daley gained both a tiara and a husband the year she turned 15, as she was crowned queen of the festival and married an escort to one of the runner-ups three months later.
“I met him in ’67,” she said, her voice drifting in memory. “And I hated tomatoes.”
After dropping out of school, Daley remembers being “so glad” she didn’t have to sit in class anymore. It took several years, she said, to realize landing a job without skills and education is no picnic.
When asked if she sees herself in the children she works with, the former teen-age rebel replied, “absolutely.”
“Sometimes one of the young men or women tell me, ‘well, I’m only graduating at an alternative school,'” she said.
At which point Daley – who at once worked as a janitor at a turkey farm to help pay the bills – will share with them her life’s story.
“I let them know they should never be embarrassed by their roots,” she said. “The point is they accomplished something, and it will lead them from there.”
