| IT CAN HAPPEN ANYWHERE – AND IT NEVER SHOULD
Every child should be safe from harm, but there is a special obligation to kids who are in the child welfare system because they were abused or neglected.
It’s hard to forget the case, more than a decade ago, when a Philadelphia teen was starved to death while under the protection of the city’s human services agency. After Danieal Kelly’s gruesome death, Philadelphia rolled out sweeping reforms that shifted services for abused and neglected children to non-profit organizations that opened services centers for these children in neighborhoods across the city.
Hopes were high that the new Philadelphia model of services for the most vulnerable children would end the decades of failure in child welfare services in Philadelphia and serve as a model for cities across the country. But horrifying exposes by Resolve Philly/The Philadelphia Inquirer indicate that the reforms are, sadly, falling short.
Incidents of child fatalities and near fatalities remained about the same as before the reforms were adopted. The non-profit organizations charged with protected children from more abuse have been sued nearly 70 times for allowing children in their care to be burned, beaten, sexually assaulted, and, in 14 cases, killed.
Hopes for the reforms are dashed and the status quo in Philadelphia is not acceptable. In fact, the tragedies in Philadelphia are not unique. An estimated 20,000 children a year who are in the foster care system are abused in their foster homes. It sounds like a broken record, but more must be done to protect children while restoring their family preservation and promoting their well-being.
It’s hard for elected officials or concerned citizens to push for effective reforms because there is a glaring lack of transparency or opportunities for citizen input. Who better to provide insights, problems, and recommendations that the people with lived experiences in the system?
Although counties are responsible for protecting these children in Pennsylvania, there is no requirement that they establish citizen oversight boards to hold the county accountable and ensure that every reasonable effort is made to heal rather than further harm the children in their care. Citizen review or oversight boards have been dismantled, suspended, or assigned to review regions so large that meaningful oversight becomes unmanageable. That ought to change with a state law requiring every county to have a child welfare oversight board. Philadelphia voluntarily had one for more than a decade. Sadly, the new Mayor disbanded it.
To be effective, county and city elected officials need to be experts about many things, like law enforcement, parks, libraries, and taxes. But many local leaders have little expertise in the complicated child welfare systems that typically have the biggest budgets, and given that they care for children, THE biggest responsibility. (In Philadelphia alone, the child welfare agency budget is $1 billion.) Without knowledge, accountability, and transparency, local leaders are making major decisions about keeping children safe in programs that constitute a sizable portion of the budget.
For instance, Philadelphia City Council could have a bigger impact on the tragically stubborn child death rate for children in City custody if it had deep expertise that ensured Council members could advance new policies and proposals that protect these children from harm. Without that expertise they can’t assess if social worker caseloads are too high, if the agencies that employ them are giving them enough support, or if there are gaps in the service plans that need to be filled systemically.
Of course, it’s not possible for the government to guarantee that no child in its care will ever die or be harmed. But the government must do everything it can to make sure that doesn’t happen. And right now, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, we need to see much more of that.
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