Carolyn Hill still remembers every goodbye with her nieces.
She had taken in her sister’s children through the city’s foster care system almost one year earlier, and had just returned with the girls and a bagful of McDonald’s when their case manager called and said she wanted to see them.
Hill, who by this time had raised five kids of her own, “all grown and out,” took the call as routine. Minutes later, the case manager arrived with the police. “They took the kids so fast, they didn’t even let them finish their food.
Several months later, her nieces were returned for a visit. The girls, going on two- and three-year-olds by this time, thought they were home. Hill watched them walk upstairs toward their bedroom.
The case manager lured the girls back out to his car with a lie that they were just “going for a ride.”
“That’s the one,” says Hill, “the memory that most hurts my heart.”
It has been 13 years since Hill lost her nieces. She recently was at the Crossroads Women’s Center on Wayne Ave. to talk because “these things are still happening. Families are losing their kids for no good reason. …I still don’t know why I lost my nieces.”
Today, Hill appears to have lost her nieces for no reason at all. She has been part of the Women’s Center, a collaborative project to address poverty among women, ever since. And she and her compatriots see a fresh opportunity to promote change.
Philadelphia City Council, led by at-large member Nina Ahmad, voted this April to hold hearings about DHS after Resolve Philly/the Philadelphia Inquirer published a series investigating lawsuits against the city’s private network of contracted foster care providers for the abuse and neglect of the kids in their care. The hearings are set to begin on June 6.
Decades-long problems—a lack of foster homes with medical training for kids with special needs, persistent understaffing and turnover in the workforce, and the needless separation of families, the series found—all traced back to DHS.
“What these hearings need to reflect is that we already know what the problems are,” says Phoebe Jones, Center co-founder. “And more than that, we already know how to solve them. City Council needs to implement solutions that have already been identified.”
Jones, co-founder Pat Albright, and Hill, a Center coordinator, argue that an authoritative study was already conducted by the City Council itself.
In April 2022, a Special Committee on Child Separations co-chaired by Councilmembers David Oh and Cindy Bass issued a comprehensive 52-page report with more than three dozen recommendations for DHS, City Council, and state legislators to enact.
“That report,” says Albright, “has almost everything you need to see. It just needs to be implemented.”
Bass herself issued a resolution the same week as Ahmad for a Special Committee to “review child separation practices and develop recommendations,” which represents an attempt to bring that 2022 report a fresh round of attention.
“It’s a resuscitation of that first report—and a reconvening,” said Bass. “It was an important issue then, and it’s an important issue now. 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 too little 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 included opening family court to the media and public, investing in high quality defense teams for families with DHS 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—cash—can solve the problem.
As Jones, Albright, and Hill frame it, they routinely see families separated for reasons of truancy, after-school child care, unstable housing, and other monetary issues. Hill, in fact, says that “my living in subsidized housing” was one of the reasons child case managers gave for taking her nieces, “even though I was in the same housing when they gave them to me in the first place.”
Jones and Albright have been fighting such battles in various forms for about 50 years, including at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, arguing that welfare for mothers should be typified as a wage for the work they’re performing and routinely increased to meet the cost of living. In 2006, after meeting women protesting against DHS outside City Hall, they added a fight for foster care reform to their bedrock issues.
Today, they can routinely be seen in Center City, speaking through bullhorns and passing out literature promoting their causes under the organizational names Give Us Back Our Children, Global Women’s Strike, and Every Mother is a Working Mother.
“It’s traumatic to separate children from parents,” says Jones, “so in these typical instances where the driving factor is poverty, we shouldn’t be doing it.”
As public assistance programs shrank from 1982 to 2003, says Jones, referencing author Lisa Sangoi, federal funding associated with foster care increased from $25 million to $5 billion, shifting money from families to foster care agencies.
Germantown, a predominantly Black neighborhood, has particular reason to be concerned about DHS. Nationally, Black people comprise about 13 percent of the population and 25 percent of the youth in foster care. In Philadelphia, the disparity is likewise dramatic, showing Black people comprise about 43 percent of the population and 65 percent of the youth in foster care. A DHS brief published in 2021 showed the area had some of the highest rates of child hotline calls in the city.
The Women’s Center also has reason to be concerned about whether the upcoming council hearings will address their issues.
Ahmad, in an interview, appeared to be focused on the city’s network of private Community Umbrella Agencies, or CUAs, which were formed in 2012 to provide foster care services after DHS conducts an investigation.
The CUAs have since appeared as the named defendants in at least 69 lawsuits alleging the abuse and neglect of children. Most of the suits involved children hurt while in foster care and yielded payouts in excess of $1 million.
Both the CUA’s case managers and DHS’s investigative staff have ongoing problems with turnovers and vacancies, which delay services and family reunifications. DHS also runs a hotline to field complaints about the CUAs, which families typify as short-staffed and ineffective.
“I think it’s time we can address whether or not the CUA system is working,” she stated.
To the leaders of the Women’s Center, whether DHS continues to contract some services to private providers or not is beside the point.
“It’s really simple,” says Jones. “…the answers we need are already published.”
Germantown Info Hub 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. Our Kids is dedicated to prioritizing community involvement and more comprehensive coverage than typically seen in media coverage of this topic.