New plan means DHS must be a better boss
The horrendous starvation death of Danieal Kelly in 2006 exposed serious flaws in the city's Department of Human Services and its inability to protect vulnerable children.
New plan means DHS must be a better boss
The horrendous starvation death of Danieal Kelly in 2006 exposed serious flaws in the city's Department of Human Services and its inability to protect vulnerable children.
A recently announced reorganization of DHS will try to addresses those weaknesses by giving private contractors direct supervision over cases of abused and neglected children. It goes without saying that such a move will require much better oversight than DHS has provided in the past.
Nonetheless, the overhaul at this point has to be seen as another positive step being made by DHS Commissioner Anne Marie Ambrose since she took over the troubled agency in 2008. An overhaul of how DHS handles cases was among three dozen reforms recommended by a blue-ribbon panel after Danieal’s death.
Initial investigations would still be conducted by DHS, and the agency would remain legally responsible for the children under its system. The plan is modeled after similar approaches in New York and Florida. But there are serious questions about whether it will work in Philadelphia. Between 2008 and 2011, 29 children in Philadelphia died from substantiated child abuse. DHS was involved in 12 of those cases.
Under the new program, called Improving Outcomes for Children, DHS will contract 10 private companies, which it calls community organizations, to deal directly with children in foster care and families who receive in-home services. Ambrose says the current system will be streamlined so families don’t get mixed messages from working with several case workers and agencies.
Families will be assigned to community organizations in their neighborhoods, which should make it easier for them to attend meetings closer to home and build trust with social workers. In turn, their proximity should allow contracted agencies to forge better relationships in the community and identify problems earlier.
It is hoped that the plan will clarify roles and responsibilities to prevent the missteps that occurred with Danieal. The 14-year-old child with cerebral palsy weighed only 46 pounds when her bedsore-covered corpse was found in a rundown rowhouse. DHS and the private contractor assigned to her case failed. Her parents and several DHS workers and contractors were later convicted of criminal charges.
By phasing the plan in over four years, Ambrose will have time to make changes as necessary. She also told the Inquirer Editorial Board she wouldn’t hesitate to scrap the strategy if it doesn’t work. That’s the right attitude.
DHS must make sure its contractors and subcontractors are doing their jobs — and when they aren’t, it must act before a child is harmed. DHS has for decades used outside agencies to handle cases, but never to this extent. To make it work, DHS must provide better supervision than it has.
But DHS has done nothing to strengthen and improve the oversight skills of DHS staff. The in-house training program has been relegated to providing training to provider agency staff who will be providing services.
DHS is reverting to the service model it relied on in the '70s and will simply serve as a pass-through for city (10%), state (50%) and fed (40%) money as in our taxes.
Sadly, anybody with the history of teh agency and who might have insight into the strength and limitations of the [old] model has retired. What is also sad is that a lawyer who served as deputy state secretary for children and you has such a history and actually successfully sued DHS on behalf of his client because DHS relied on a service model that placed 90% of responsibility on private agencies and provided no support to its own staff role of overseeing the providers - caseloads typically exceeded 150 children because DHS staff did not have any real planning responsibility, therefore current regulatory limitations on caseload size are not applicable unless or until a serious breech occurs like another Danieal Kelly.— nebulus
