For years, people with intimate knowledge of foster care practices at the Department of Human Services cited similar problems: random and subjective decision-making, the confusion of poverty and neglect, an unstable workforce riven by turnover — and more.

Now, those complaints stand a greater chance of being heard after two city councilmembers — sparked by a Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative investigation, published in the Philadelphia Inquirer — launched probes into the city’s foster care operations.

The series of stories focused on dozens of lawsuits filed against the city’s community umbrella agencies, or CUAs, a network of private agencies contracted to provide services on behalf of children who were injured or killed in the city’s child welfare system. The problems exposed by the lawsuits, including constant understaffing and turnover in the workforce and the needless separation of families, traced back to DHS itself.

That same week, City Council, led by at-large councilmember Nina Ahmad, voted to hold hearings about DHS, which are slated to begin on Friday, June 6, and councilmember Cindy Bass called for a special committee — apparently to draw attention to work she conducted three years ago about DHS.

“We’ve been talking about the same problems in the child welfare system for 30 years,” Cathleen Palm, founder of the Center for Children’s Justice, stated in an interview. “We just never fix them.”  

The wish list of issues the various constituencies want to see addressed, then, covers decades of hopes.

Parents and activists

“What these hearings need to reflect is that we already know what the problems are,” said Phoebe Jones, co-founder of the Crossroads Women’s Center, in Germantown, which seeks to address poverty among women. “And more than that, we already know how to solve them. City Council only needs to implement solutions that have already been identified.”

Jones and fellow co-founder Pat Albright argue that an authoritative study was already conducted — by City Council itself.

In April 2022, a Special Committee on Child Separations, co-chaired by councilmember Bass and then councilman David Oh, issued a comprehensive, 52-page report, with more than three dozen recommendations for DHS, City Council and state legislators to enact.

“That report,” said Albright, “has almost everything you need to see. It just needs to be implemented.”

Bass describes her new resolution as a “resuscitation of that first report — and a reconvening. We have a problem with family separations in the city of Philadelphia, and we need to get a look at where we are now.”

Bass hopes to hold hearings in the short term, but acknowledges they might not occur till fall. 

Grounded in interviews with families who experienced foster care, the committee’s first report determined that the city often defines conditions of poverty as “neglect” and needlessly separates families, who then receive insufficient support. 

“There are just too many ways for children to be placed into the system for investigation,” the committee found. “Unfortunately, in the cases reviewed by the Committee, there were hardly any instances of strong questioning and intervention by the courts on the behalf of families facing removal.”

The committee’s recommendations include opening Family Court to the public and the media, investing in high-quality defense teams for families with HHS cases, ceasing the separation of kids and mothers in instances of domestic violence, and perhaps most notably, disallowing family separations under any condition in which social service investments — in other words, cash — can solve the problem.

As Jones and Albright frame it, they routinely see families separated for reasons of truancy, afterschool child care, unstable housing and other monetary issues. “It’s traumatic to separate children from parents,”  Jones said. “So in these typical instances, in which poverty is the driving factor, we shouldn’t be doing it.”

The city, activists often point out, pays foster parents $900 to $1,200 per month — compensation well beyond what it would typically take to provide support services.

April Lee, of Philly Voice for Change, an organization seeking reforms, said she wants to see a child welfare system that “humanizes” parents and families.

“I want to see data collected surrounding how many families have these voluntary safety plans,” she said, referencing a practice described in the Resolve/Inquirer series, in which parents are coerced into giving up their kids without the court oversight of foster care. 

Lee’s group also advocates that “more information be given to communities about our rights when DHS comes to the door,” advocating for a form of family Miranda rights provided in Texas, and seeks to position the community in a leadership role in determining what services are available.

“Poverty should not be a DHS issue,” she said. “We should have what’s necessary in our communities.”

The CUAs

Ahmad, in an interview, appeared focused on the city’s network of private community umbrella agencies, or CUAs, which DHS formed in 2012. “I think it’s time we can address whether or not the CUA system is working,” she stated. But her Council resolution also traced the system’s struggles to DHS. 

“The Philadelphia DHS system has allowed the CUA model to operate with significant failures, such as a lack of adequate oversight, unmanageable caseloads, high staff turnover, and inadequate resources, leading to unsafe conditions for vulnerable children,” the resolution reads.

David Fair, CEO of Turning Points, which dropped its CUAs in 2022 over increasing costs associated with the lawsuits, said he still believes the CUA system can work. “If you look at how the plan was originally formed, to provide community-based services and family supports, that would have represented real change. But DHS has remained committed to their old way of doing things.”

The old way, in Fair’s view, has perpetuated long-standing problems of worker turnover and unnecessary family separations. He also frames the CUAs as a force for good precisely because — as the spate of lawsuits shows — they can be sued. City government is protected from civil lawsuits under state law, but private agencies such as the CUAs are not shielded. 

“With the CUAs, families and kids can seek redress for their injuries,” said Fair, and the public documents associated with court filings create some transparency.

Child advocates

Mimi Laver, chief of the child advocacy unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia,  believes the CUAs don’t operate the way they were advertised.

“The idea of a CUA was that it was supposed to be tapped into the community and serve as a bridge between the community and the people it’s supposed to be serving,” she said. “I don’t believe that’s happening. I don’t see our clients accessing resources in the way they would if it worked.”

City children in foster care usually receive their attorneys through the public defender’s office, so Laver gets some view of the services delivered by the city’s CUAs. What they see, she said, is inconsistency.

A teen who becomes pregnant might hear from one CUA worker that she should have the child because it will force her to grow up, for example, while another child in another CUA might hear about careful decision-making. 

The lack of consistency, said Laver and policy director of child advocacy Marni Gangel, extends well beyond the CUAs. “There’s a lot of randomness that’s built into the system,” said Laver, “so that depending on which investigator a family gets, which case worker, which judge, their experiences can be very different.”

Laver and Gangel also call for greater accountability.

For example, the city currently releases scorecards for the CUAs, which gives them ratings in different categories, such as staff retention. The report cards, however, include no guide to what the ratings signify, so a high rating could mean a 90% success rate in a given metric, or 11.2%, or any number at all. “There’s no way to know,” said Gangel, “so we’d like to see some transparency in how the CUAs are rated and what services they are actually providing.”

Laver and Gangel list a variety of additional issues they’d like to see addressed, including the need to lower the number of kids in foster care, increased reunification rates, and a stabilized workforce in both DHS and the CUAs, because staff turnover drives many of the system’s problems.

“There is a culture that needs changing,” said Laver. “And we need to have a very thoughtful conversation about how we do that … so there is that consistency we’re looking for, and children and families can get what they need.”

Billy Penn is one of more than 30 news organizations powering the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative. Follow at @PHLJournoCollab. This article is part of Resolve Philly’s Our Kids project examining the challenges and opportunities facing Philadelphia’s foster care system.