December 2008

Remember Danieal

• No doctor or school for Danieal, who had cerebral palsy from birth
• No home visits by DHS workers, despite state regulations mandating monthly visits
• No risk assessments or other indications that safety in the home was ever considered
• No file notes by the social workers
• No case record review for supervisory personnel
• No contractual or programmatic oversight of the private-agency in-home services provider

You may recall that following a series of investigative reports in The Philadelphia Inquirer in fall 2006, Mayor John Street dismissed key DHS leaders and convened the Child Welfare Review Panel. I served as a member of the nine-person Panel of local and national experts. Our charge was to “engage in a comprehensive process to assist the City by ensuring the immediate safety of all children in its care, reviewing all child deaths in the last five years, and recommending reforms in DHS policies and practices.” We delivered to Mayor Street an extensive set of recommendations, and Mayor Nutter’s administration has embraced the Panel’s report as their roadmap for reform.

What have we learned? The list of lessons is long, and sadly familiar. The children and youth agency’s mission had become so large and its values diffused that child safety became one of many goals and tasks, and then those most critical of tasks too often went unfulfilled. An ineffective personnel program frequently failed to discipline or even identify bad workers and bad practices. We saw the lack of a sense of urgency, ironic and dangerous for a clientele in which every case demands prompt, effective attention. These two reports are bookends to a story of leadership failure at every level of this public agency. Danieal’s case was the “canary in the mine” for a system that could not see its own profound dysfunction.

What is our role as advocates, professionals and citizens? Child welfare is the responsibility of the entire community. For advocates, these problems define our role: to ensure that information is acquired, shared and acted on; to press for what the child and family need; to surveil the system for gaps, and ring the bell for reform.

The Child Welfare Review Panel also highlighted dozens of internal and consultant studies and reports, examining virtually every aspect of the agency over more than two decades. One is forced to ask: What will be different this time? What is the solution?

Certainly leadership matters most. We believe that the Nutter Administration and its child welfare team in Deputy Mayor Dr. Don Schwarz and Commissioner Anne Marie Ambrose are on the right track. Urgency must be restored from top to bottom: each case, each child, and each decision matters.

Transparency will keep the entire system focused, honest and responsive. The permanent Community Oversight Board will continually review the agency’s policies and practices, giving the entire community an insider’s view. Performance must be measured and evaluated at both the case level and system-wide, and all efforts must be data-driven with information that we can all access and study. We must be able to answer key questions like “are kids safer today under DHS service?” and “are we achieving permanency?” Stakeholders must be continually engaged, with leadership roundtables, community meetings, and family involvement.

The agency must become self-correcting, and it must be able to receive criticism from within and out. Supervisor training has already begun to create a positive atmosphere and practical improvement. Provider agencies, acting as agents for government, must be held to high standards of practice and provided the resources to deliver. A statewide Children’s Ombudsman and local customer service responsiveness will give child welfare’s many consumers the confidence that problems are addressed. In general, accountability must be a hallmark of public service.

Finally, we must continue to demand quality in DHS and provider agency practice. Perhaps Danieal’s case was an aberration in its extremity of neglect and indifference, but the tale is telling: she lay for weeks in a darkened, decrepit bedroom, and her few visitors acted as if she wasn’t even there. She literally starved to death, painful bedsores covering her entire back.

Child-centered practice must treat each child as if he/she is the only client in the room. So often we hear from our volunteers and staff: “Am I unreasonable in asking for ‘x’”? or “Does it seem strange that I can’t even get a call back?” The caseload of a child welfare system is filled with difficult and challenging cases: teenagers, victims of sexual abuse, children with mental health issues and education deficits, medically needy children, siblings waiting to be adopted. Each of these populations would challenge the smartest and best-resourced of systems, yet our big-city child welfare system has hundreds of each! We must together find each child valuable, important, and deserving ...as if they are our own.