Tipping point for city DHS reform?

In the span of just a week, the tragic cycle of failure at Philadelphia's Department of Human Services played out all over again.

Three more babies died. Investigations were launched. On Thursday, a tough report was issued, and reforms were promised.

None of that was new. In the last six years, at least 55 children have died in families who had been under DHS supervision.

While the death toll was rising, a city review panel was issuing a scathing report that described DHS as an organization that had lost sight of its central responsibility - to protect vulnerable children.

That, too, was familiar. As the panel noted, report after report in the last 20 years has laid bare the agency's troubles, and suggested answers - to little effect.

This time could be different, say the panel members and city officials. For the first time, they say, there's a consensus that DHS needs a dramatic overhaul.

"Every one knows that change is needed," said panel member Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women's Law Project. Everyone from top administrators to midlevel managers to social workers in the field seemed to be thirsting for it, she said.

Arthur C. Evans Jr., the reform-minded DHS acting commissioner, said the deaths of three more children, even as the panel was issuing its report, "underscores the urgent need to fully implement our reform agenda. That's exactly what we are going to do."

Mayor Street put Evans in charge of DHS late last year, forcing out the previous commissioner and her top deputy, after The Inquirer highlighted a string of deaths of children whose families had been under the watch of the department.

Panel members and other experts were remarkably consistent in their prescriptions for an ailing DHS: The agency needs to refocus on protecting vulnerable kids, lose its insular culture, and develop better systems to evaluate when children are in danger.

Most important, they said, the mayor must appoint a permanent oversight commission with real power to make sure that the agency makes the necessary changes.

In his weekly radio address yesterday morning, Street called the report "a road map to permanent reform."

In particular, Street promised he would carry out the panel's recommendation that he create a special commission to oversee the agency.

The Democratic mayoral nominee, Michael Nutter, praised the panel's report, and said that "DHS must be fixed."

"Their work will create a blueprint for change which I would expect to use if I'm elected mayor," Nutter said. He declined to say whether he would retain Evans.

The report described an agency mired in inertia and resistant to change. Panelists said flatly that some children had died as a result.

In a chilling overview, the report summarized the deaths of 52 children between 2001 and last year whose families had been in the DHS system. The analysis noted 70 percent of the dead were babies - as were the cases in the three deaths disclosed by DHS on Friday.

Officials identified the dead children as:

Seaser Tiller, 9 months old, who drowned Thursday in a bathtub in Northeast Philadelphia when his mother left him to check e-mail. The family, which includes four other boys, was under active DHS oversight. Officials said the agency had received two allegations of abuse, in 2002 and 2006.

Sania English, 2 months old, who died May 26 without any sign of trauma. Investigators said an unsafe sleeping environment - a cluttered crib - may have been a factor. His family also was under active DHS supervision.

Zion Richardson, age 3 months, who died May 23, apparently a case of sudden unexplained infant death. The agency said an unsafe "co-sleeping" situation may have been a factor. Zion's family had been under DHS oversight until March 2006.

Evans promised an "exhaustive internal review of the facts in each case."

The agency's policy is to examine all deaths of children in its system.

As one of the members of Street's DHS panel, Tracy read these "death reviews." She said she was struck by how bluntly the agency had identified its shortcomings and suggested solutions.

"They went nowhere," she said.

This time, Tracy said, she is hopeful that the reports will produce real change.

It has happened elsewhere.

In the Pittsburgh area, social-services expert Marc Cherna turned around the Allegheny County Department of Human Services after taking it over in 1997. Once a "pathetic national disgrace," the department is today a U.S. model, according to one national advocacy group.

"It was a disaster," Cherna said Friday. "They ran the last director out of town. Kids were dying. It was much worse than what Philadelphia is going through."

Cherna, another member of the Philadelphia review panel, said it was important that parents didn't begin to fear DHS workers as too eager to remove children from their homes.

"A key to it is getting the community to buy in," Cherna said. "When I came to town, I said, 'I need people's help.' "

Likewise, experts said, no reform will succeed if DHS workers feel scorned.

Alba Martinez, who led DHS from 2000 to 2004, said workers didn't always have the proper tools. When she arrived, two social workers had to share one phone.

In her tenure, she said, she was able to fix some problems but not others. The agency still uses 400 different forms, and even now, she said, some DHS workers have no cars and use city-issued transportation passes to check on children.

Rita Urwitz, head of the DHS supervisors' union, cautioned that it would be tough for workers to add training, increase home visits, and improve record keeping - all while keeping up with demanding caseloads.

Another panel member, Frank Cervone, an expert on child abuse, said Philadelphia's agency needed to be answerable to outsiders.

For that reason, he said, it was essential that the mayor adopt the panel's call for an outside commission to ride herd on DHS.

"Public accountability will make it happen if they invest some external body with the authority that this panel had," Cervone said.

He and Martinez said DHS must stop being defensive - an admittedly difficult task, Martinez said, when children die and social workers' decisions are second-guessed.

"Bad things will happen," she said. "For a hundred good things they do, one tragedy can cloud everything."

Good social-service agencies learn from mistakes, she said.

"They have to know when difficult things happen, there's an opportunity for change."

In the first of well over 20 articles, The Inquirer reported in October that dozens of children had died after they or their families came to the attention of Philadelphia's Department of Human Services.

More revelations followed, as did firings, hearings, new laws and investigative panels.

News this past week

Day of publication is in parentheses.

Private contractors were paid tens of millions of dollars to check on vulnerable children, but DHS did little to ensure that they did (Wednesday).

Lost records and a plague of other problems were documented for a private agency whose contract nevertheless was renewed repeatedly (Wednesday).

A panel named by Mayor Street called for a sweeping overhaul of the city agency. The experts' exhaustive review concluded that 27 children under DHS care had died of abuse or in suspicious circumstances from 2001 to 2006; and that a dozen others had died needlessly (Friday).

Three more babies, ages 2 months, 3 months and 9 months, have died since May 23. (yesterday).

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See a video

of the panelists discussing their findings at http://

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