Panel: DHS improving but needs to do more | Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/25/2008

By John Sullivan

Inquirer Staff Writer

The Department of Human Services has made significant headway in rethinking how it protects children in Philadelphia but has far to go before its reforms find their way to the streets, a panel of experts reported yesterday in the first independent review of the agency since a shake-up in 2006.

The agency achieved 14 of 30 changes recommended last May by a blue-ribbon panel appointed to address failings that led to the deaths of 25 children, said Carol Spigner, who chaired both groups.

She cautioned, however, that DHS had a history of “false starts” and that only through continued work and strong leadership could it ensure the safety of the city’s most vulnerable children.

“This is urgent. We need to keep focus on it,” Spigner said during a news conference at City Hall, where the Community Oversight Board presented its report to Mayor Nutter.

Spigner, a University of Pennsylvania professor and a national expert on child-welfare issues, implored the mayor to make the changes a priority.

Nutter did just that – immediately signing an executive order that expands the board’s membership and widens the scope of what it can look at.

“You examine the entire operation. I think you have an opportunity here,” said Nutter, noting that he had spent more time at DHS than any other office during his first 17 days as mayor.

“I want the system fixed,” he said. “I want children to be safe. I want our families to be brought back together.”

The new report addressed only issues within the city – not examining other key areas such as the agency’s reliance on out-of-state facilities. Last summer, for example, a Philadelphia teen died of strangulation after a scuffle with staff at a facility in Tennessee.

“We’re encouraged to see that the Nutter administration is moving quickly to address issues but also that they understand there is work left to be done,” Estelle Richman, Pennsylvania’s public welfare secretary, wrote in an e-mail. “Out-of-state placements are just one of the areas that we feel needs improvement.”

Spigner said her board’s expanded powers would allow it to study such issues in the future.

This summer, the panel will present the results of a more detailed review of DHS reforms, based on information to be gathered from cases.

The board needs “to understand how the changes that are planned and rolling out will affect kids,” said Spigner.

The 78-page review is the first largely independent examination of DHS since late 2006, when Mayor John Street fired the top two officials following an Inquirer investigation that raised questions about the deaths over three years of more than two dozen children whose families were known to the agency.

Nutter has yet to appoint a new commissioner but said his administration had undertaken a national search.

Meanwhile, Arthur C. Evans – the acting commissioner who was appointed by Street and who has been widely praised for undertaking the reforms – will continue to oversee an agency that has been in chaos at times as it has implemented change.

Evans served on the community board as a cochair, but the order that Nutter signed yesterday eliminates his position to avoid any perception of bias.

Street appointed Evans shortly before he asked the panel of national experts to scrutinize DHS and find ways to fix it.

That group reported that the agency had failed in its most basic mission and that children died needlessly because of “significant system failures.”

It recommended that DHS undertake 30 policy changes, including a broad agency effort to focus more specifically on its core mission: child safety.

In September, four months after that report came out, Street appointed the community oversight board to make sure the changes were adopted. Three people served on both panels.

Yesterday’s report said DHS was meeting many of the time lines for reform.

The most significant advance the agency has made, the report said, is in training workers in a new safety assessment form they can use in the home to help ensure children are safe.

That effort has been nominally marred by a disagreement with the state. The city agency initially developed an assessment tool and trained its workers in it, but state officials said they wanted to develop their own tool, which could be used elsewhere.

When that tool is finished, city workers will have to be retrained. Then they will be required to formally assess each child’s safety every six months.

DHS also has created two new units responsible for seeing children under age 5 within two hours of a credible abuse report to the city’s abuse hotline.

But the board said the current strategy was not working well because it added a layer of workers that could cause delays. It asked DHS to devise another solution.

Another improvement involves the way the agency oversees the outside contractors that handle much of the work.

Among the cases detailed by the Inquirer was that of Danieal Kelly, a 14-year-old with cerebral palsy who died of neglect while DHS and a private provider, MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, were supposed to be checking on her.

The agency later hired the Annie E. Casey Foundation to improve its contractor oversight unit, and the expert panel asked DHS to more clearly define the roles of its own workers and private providers in home visits.

The department has also added a unit that will review evaluations of outside providers and, beginning this summer, will conduct spot checks on each contractor’s work.

Meanwhile, DHS has closed or stopped sending children to 19 contractors. None had been shut by the department before that.

Still left for the agency to do in the coming months, the panel reported yesterday, is for social workers to conduct monthly face-to-face contacts with all children in the city’s care.

Rita Urwitz, head of the DHS supervisors union, said employees supported the reforms but needed more resources.

“Seeing children more frequently and getting out there quickly and being in the community are all important,” she said, and added:

“The city and the state need to say more than they believe it. They need to provide for it.”

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Read the full report at http://go.philly.com/dhs

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Contact staff writer John Sullivan at 215-854-2473 or johnsullivan@phillynews.com.