Out of sight, out of mind

At last count, 233 of Philadelphia's 1,554 children in residential facilities were outside Pennsylvania.

Critics note that a main goal for social-service agencies is to eventually reunite troubled children with their families. Yet faraway locations make parental or guardian visits far more difficult.

And as a DHS administrator noted in a 2005 report on Chad, such far-off facilities have an obvious weakness. It's hard for officials in Pennsylvania to regulate what happens in Tennessee.

Philadelphia officials said they recognized the problem and were moving to solve it.

They said they often had little choice but to lean on out-of-state facilities to care for the city's most troubled youths because many in-state treatment centers wouldn't take them.

Smith, the former Chad executive, said kids who lashed out violently at authority figures were hard to place.

"If a child has hit a teacher, you can be certain they'll have no problem going after staff," he said.

So, each year, Philadelphia shops its most hardened cases to area centers, but ends up sending hundreds to Tennessee, Utah and Virginia for mental-health treatment.

Child-welfare officials in other states, such as Illinois, and the second-largest child-welfare system in Pennsylvania, that of Allegheny County, say they have found ways to keep children closer to home.

Marc Cherna, who heads the Allegheny child-welfare agency, studied DHS as a member of Street's reform panel. He said none of the children under his care were placed out of state.

An agency task force makes sure that even the toughest cases are placed close to home. And money is no object, Cherna said.

"We will pay extraordinary rates for people who are extraordinarily difficult," he said. "Our goal is to return these children back to the community."

In 1995, Illinois was shipping 784 children out of state for care. Eventually, the state realized that counselors in far-flung treatment centers were abusing children.

"We flew to facilities we used in a dozen states, and in every one it got worse and worse," said Ron Davidson, a psychologist who helped the state evaluate the programs.

Today just a dozen children from Illinois are placed outside the state.

"Children just perform better closer to home," said Kendall Marlowe, an Illinois child-service official.

Philadelphia's acting DHS commissioner, Evans, agrees. He wants to reduce the number of children placed out of state.

"It's a very high priority for me," Evans said. "We send too many kids away from Philadelphia."