At last! One news organization gets the makeshift placement story right!

Once touted as a model institution, the Glen Mills School was closed after
the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed widespread abuse.

The Philadelphia Inquirer zeros in on real solutions 

Here’s something I never thought I’d see in a story about children trapped in night-to-night placements because family policing agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) had no place else to put them: 

Advocates say what’s needed now is to address the short-term glitches while pursuing the long-term vision of supporting more families at home — not backsliding into the era when congregate beds were ample and eagerly filled by a system that saw removing and institutionalizing kids as an easy fix.

But there it was, in one of two outstanding stories in The Philadelphia Inquirer Thursday.  It’s taken a long time. 

For as long as I’ve been following family policing – and that’s more than 45 years now - I’ve been reading stories exposing the horrors inflicted on children forced to endure days, sometimes months in makeshift placements such as family policing agency offices, hotels, hospital wards, jails – even parked cars. 

As I recall, every one of those stories got the solutions wrong.  Oh, there might be a token paragraph somewhere about how “prevention” is a really good thing.  But that part about “not backsliding into the era when congregate beds were ample and eagerly filled by a system that saw removing and institutionalizing kids as an easy fix”?  Never! 

Instead, the reporters would accept as gospel the party line from the “residential treatment” industry. It’s always some version of: “See, we need to build more places to institutionalize kids!” Or, “See? We told you you shouldn’t have shut down our hellholes sorry, therapeutic communities!”  

It would have been easy for The Philadelphia Inquirer to fall into the same trap.  After all, Philadelphia has made significant progress in reducing the number of children torn from their families.  But Philadelphia now has a serious problem with children staying night-to-night in family police agency conference rooms, among other awful places.  Workers sum up the conditions there as “chaos.”  And Philadelphia either shut down or pulled kids out of several institutions in recent years – because the institutions themselves were so abusive. 

But perhaps because colleagues of reporter Samantha Melamed exposed horrific abuse in some of those institutions, such as Glen Mills (which is now closed) and Devereux, she wasn’t ready to accept the idea that the answer is to reopen them, or build new ones. 

Yes, the story includes the usual claim from a residential treatment trade association representative, whining that, now that the city has “reduced capacity” (by refusing to warehouse all those children in hellholes) it’s “destabilized the industry” making it hard to find placements for children with “really complex or sophisticated behavioral health needs.”  

But instead of simply accepting this claim at face value, Melamed broadened her source base.  For starters, she explained Philadelphia’s longstanding dismal status as a child removal outlier: 

For years, Philadelphia DHS removed children from their homes at one of the highest rates in the nation. It was an agency shaped, in many ways, by its response to abuse scandals including the 2006 starvation death of 14-year-old Danieal Kelly while under DHS supervision. 

Now, the city is part of a national and statewide push to stop institutionalizing kids, spurred on by the federal Family First Prevention Services Act. That shift comes amid a widespread recognition that abuses happen in those institutional settings, too — and with startling frequency. It’s also an acknowledgment of racial disparities: Black children account for 13% of Pennsylvania youth, but 35% of those in foster care and two-thirds of those in state juvenile-justice placements … 

But the story goes on to explain that, even with the improvements, Philadelphia still is an outlier when it comes to tearing apart families.  That means there still is plenty of opportunity to free up “capacity” by not filling family foster homes with children who don’t need to be there. 

From the story: 

In the child-welfare system, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia’s Kathleen Creamer said the city needs to double down on preventing family separations. 

Already, she noted, Philadelphia DHS has reformed its process for screening and investigating abuse allegations, and increased funding for legal aid for families. It also begun holding rapid-response meetings to enlist extended families to help kids in danger of being removed. She said that work now needs to go even further, reallocating some of the millions that would be spent on group homes or foster care to properly fund the supportive services that can help families working to stay together. 

“The question is, what’s the policy solution for this?” she said. “The policy solution is to stop separating so many families. We don’t have good placements for them, so let’s actually try to work with the family.” 

Indeed, in a sidebar serving as what Malamed herself tweeted is “the tl;dr version” of the story she includes that paragraph I quoted at the top: 

Advocates say what’s needed now is to address the short-term glitches while pursuing the long-term vision of supporting more families at home — not backsliding into the era when congregate beds were ample and eagerly filled by a system that saw removing and institutionalizing kids as an easy fix. 

The residential treatment typically responds by saying something like: Even if you have enough families, what about all those children with “really complex or sophisticated behavioral health needs”?  

But even when residential treatment centers are not hellholes, there is no evidence that they can meet “really complex or sophisticated behavioral needs.”  On the contrary, the evidence is overwhelming that residential treatment is a failure. 

In contrast, Wraparound services, in which anything a child needs is brought right into the child’s own home, or, when placement is genuinely necessary, a family foster home, do work.  There is nothing residential treatment does that Wraparound doesn’t do better and at less cost. 

How does it work? differently for every child – that’s the point.  So the best way to understand Wraparound is to let one of its pioneers, Karl Dennis, give you an example: 

But perhaps the best indication of why building more institutions won’t work comes in this part of the Inquirer story, the ultimate example of the adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result: 

Wordsworth, Philadelphia’s lone juvenile psychiatric residential treatment facility, was shut down by the state in 2016 after 17-year-old David Hess died in a fight with staff. A replacement opened in 2020 — then quickly lost its license, too, due to what the state said were “multiple child right violations.” (The city last year invited two new providers to negotiate contracts for yet another replacement, but it’s not clear when such a facility may open.) 

So what if, instead of trying to build an institution to replace the abusive institution that replaced another abusive institution, Philadelphia invested those funds in Wraparound programs and other supports for families? 

What if, at the same time, Philadelphia built on its progress to date and reduced its rate of removal to, say, that of New York City?  That would be well under half the Philadelphia rate.  What if Philadelphia then said to the foster parents in those now-empty homes: Take in the relatively few children who really need placement – and we will bring into your home whatever help the children – and you – need to cope with those “really complex or sophisticated behavioral health needs” and make the placement work? 

Would that mean that no Philadelphia child ever again would have to spend even one night in an office or some other awful makeshift placement?  Probably not.  But it would happen to a hell of a lot fewer children than endure it now.

A Blueprint for Child Safety

I am proud to serve on a special committee of the Philadelphia City Council examining the child welfare system in that city.  We released our report today.  Here is my statement.

 

Remarks of Richard Wexler, executive director,

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, for:

PROTECT OUR CHILDREN: A RALLY TO REFORM DHS

Councilmember Bass, Councilmember Oh, members of the committee, affected families and friends. 

I regret that, because I am over 65, and because Amtrak has failed to show the same wisdom as the City of Philadelphia concerning masks and indoor spaces, I can’t be with you in person today.

At the first virtual meeting of our committee I said this: 

Philadelphia has been leading the nation since before it was a nation. There is no shortage of talent or creativity. So my hope is that we frame recommendations that won’t just make Philadelphia no worse than other cities, but will allow Philadelphia to leap ahead and become a model of what child welfare can be.  I want there to come a time when people from all over America say: We need to do it the Philadelphia way.  

Today, we release a report filled with concrete recommendations to help achieve that goal.

But to get these reforms, one thing above all else must happen.

Our policymakers must no longer be suckered by the Big Lie of American child welfare: the false claim that massive intrusion on families and all the terrible suffering that inflicts upon them is somehow necessary to keep children safe.

To those to make that claim I have one simple question? Did it work?

Back when Philadelphia was tearing apart families at the highest rate among America’s biggest cities, did child abuse disappear? Did children “known to the system” stop dying? 

The people who want to sucker you into thinking that we need massive intrusion into families are the people who built and maintain a system that has done just that for decades, and it has failed.

Nationwide, the system they built inflicts emotional trauma on one-third of all children, and more than half of all Black children, through needless investigations.

The system they built exposes children to the high risk of abuse in foster care itself.

And the system they built so overloads frontline workers that they can’t investigate any case properly.

The system they built, in the name of child safety, has made all of Philadelphia’s vulnerable children less safe.

So why in the world should we keep listening to them?

All of us here today are the true advocates of children’s rights.  We are the true defenders of child safety. We are the true child advocates.  Today, we release a blueprint for child safety.

In closing, there are some people I’d like to thank.  First Councilmembers Bass and Oh, for their leadership in bringing this issue to the forefront and demanding action.  I’d like to thank Tyler DeBusi for his tireless staff work, and my fellow committee members for their abiding concern for Philadelphia’s most vulnerable children, both on the committee and in their day jobs.

I want to thank the family defenders at groups like Community Legal Services and the Medical Legal Partnership at Penn – their model of high-quality family defense should be available to every family.

There’s another group I want to thank.  Frontline DHS caseworkers and their union.  Overwhelmingly, they want what we want – safe children and strong families. Sometimes we disagree profoundly on how to get there, but nothing in this report should be taken as a condemnation of their dedication and their concern as they do some of the hardest jobs imaginable.

Even if none of these recommendations is adopted, I think this committee has had a positive effect.  It is one of the reasons DHS has changed for the better.  There still is a long, long way to go. Philadelphia no longer is worst, though it still tears apart families at a far higher rate than many other cities.  But DHS deserves credit for beginning to make crucial changes.

That brings me to whom I want to thank most: The families.

The movement to change this system has been building for nearly two decades, starting with the work of DHS-Give Us Back Our Children.  But I believe a key turning point was the two days of City Council hearings that led to this committee’s creation.  The hearing was only supposed to go a few hours.  

But families rose up almost as one to defend their children against the harm inflicted on them by DHS.  One after another after another they told their stories; it took two days to hear them all.  The City Council listened.  That put pressure on DHS, and the creation of the committee keeps the pressure on.

I hope DHS will embrace these recommendations and use them to accelerate progress.

Thank you.

Read the full report.

Read the story about the report in Billy Penn.

Read the story in the York Daily Record

Lessons from two child welfare court decisions

Update, May 7, 2021: To his credit, during a virtual hearing of the Philadelphia City Council Special Committee on Child Separations on May 6 a top lawyer for the city's Department of Human Services says that, when it comes to the Philadelphia case discussed below, "we might have gotten it wrong" and "The Supreme Court came down in the right way."

1. Yes, families DO have Fourth Amendment rights when the family police are at the door.

2. No, caseworkers cannot evade accountability by claiming they were too stupid to know they’re not allowed to lie in documents used in court.

 The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has issued a scathing rebuke to Philadelphia’s family police agency, the Department of Human Services, rejecting the idea that its caseworkers are effectively exempt from the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and a similar clause in Pennsylvania’s constitution.  On the contrary, said the court: 

We expressly hold that there is no ‘social worker exception’ to compliance with constitutional limitations on an entry into a home without consent or exigent circumstances. 

Across the country in Colorado, a federal court has rejected still another claim by family police caseworkers that somehow they have what amounts to a right to lie. 

The two cases have something in common: Both reflect the arrogance of a system with near-absolute power and no real accountability, a system in which people see their cause as so noble that it can justify violating everything from the Fourth Amendment to the Ninth Commandment.* 

The Philadelphia story 

On May 22, 2019, Philadelphia’s family policing agency, the Department of Human Services, received a call, apparently anonymous, from someone alleging that three weeks earlier a family had been sleeping outside the offices of the Philadelphia Housing Authority – suggesting that the family was homeless.  Then, on May 21, the caller said, the mother was back allegedly with one of her two children, outside the authority’s offices for eight hours and it was “unknown” if the child was fed during that time. 

A Philadelphia agency that helps homeless families contacted the mother who said no, she is not homeless.  She is, however, an activist who regularly protested outside the Housing Authority offices.  Further suggesting the family was not homeless: The caller who made the neglect report gave the family police the family’s home address. 

The mother says her children were not with her during her protest on May 21, and the call to DHS was retaliation for her political activity.  But even had the children been with her, does DHS think families should be required to notify family police and/or the general public whenever they feed their children?  Had mom had her child with her, would she have been expected to yell “Hey, look everyone!  I’m feeding my child!  Don’t call the family police on me!” – or face an allegation that it was “unknown” if a child was fed?  Does DHS think any time a child decides the food in the school cafeteria is too “gross” and decides to skip lunch – which might mean he doesn’t eat for eight hours – the school and/or the parents are guilty of neglect? 

Based solely on these allegations, DHS demanded to enter and inspect the family home (a somewhat odd demand when the allegation is homelessness). When the parents refused, DHS came back with police.  The parents still refused.  

The good news: DHS didn’t simply cry “emergency!” and tell the cops to break down the door and take the kids – you know, the way they do it in Arizona. 

The bad news: They didn’t do the right thing: apologize and just go away. Instead, they dragged the family into court and sought an order forcing them to let DHS in.  Despite the fact that the only witness to testify at the hearing, a DHS caseworker, contradicted some of the allegations in the case, the court readily agreed; illustrating once again that judges in family policing cases are far more prone to wield rubber-stamps than gavels. 

The court’s decision was based on the allegations and the mother’s “demeanor” when she testified (I’ll get back to that). The court order not only allowed the family police to poke and pry all over the house but also specifically barred the mother from recording the interaction. 

The inspection took place and found nothing wrong.  The allegations were false.  The family had endured the trauma for no reason and a family police caseworker wasted time that could have been spent on a case in which children really were in danger. 

The mother appealed the decision allowing the family police to barge into the family home.  A mid-level appeals court overturned the ban on recording interviews but upheld everything else.  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court strongly disagreed. 

DHS’ argument was the argument family policing agencies always make. It boils down to: We’re not like those other police, we’re just kindly caseworkers who are here to help – and besides our cause is so noble that if you interfere with us in any way children might be hurt!  So we should be able to do what we want when we want to whomever we want. 

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court pointed out, however, that by this reasoning someone accused of mass murder would have more Fourth Amendment protection than a family in which a mother is accused of maybe, possibly not feeding her child for eight hours.  The Supreme Court cited with approval an earlier Pennsylvania case deriding similar claims.  In that decision, the court noted that the sweeping claims of family police agencies 

Would give the state unfettered and absolute authority to enter private homes and disrupt the tranquility of family life on nothing more than an anonymous rumor that something might be amiss.   Despite their exaggerated view of their powers, the Fourth Amendment applies to them, as it does to all other officers or agents of the state whose requests to enter, however benign or well-intentioned, are met with a closed door. 

The Supreme Court also rejected DHS’ claim that being allowed to force their way into a
home and search anywhere and everywhere, through children’s rooms and into closets and cupboards is just, as the agency actually claimed, “a minimally-invasive spot check.”  (Indeed, were that so, one would think DHS would have welcomed a recording documenting their kindness, benevolence and the minimal nature of their intrusion.  Instead, they got the court to specifically prohibit the mother from recording the search.) 

In short, even the family police need “probable cause.”  And, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision makes clear they sure didn’t have it in this case. 

Recall the allegations: Homelessness and the child may or may not have been fed for one eight-hour period.  As the court explained: 

Having located the family’s home and repeatedly finding Mother and Father there, any allegation of homelessness was rendered moot. If all of this was not sufficient evidence of a lack of homelessness, by the end of the evidentiary hearing DHS unmistakably confirmed that it no longer considered the family to be homeless, as it requested an order to conduct a home visit at the very house where caseworker Richardson had visited twice on the day in question. At that juncture, the only remaining allegation … was that the anonymous reporter had not observed Mother feed one of the children on a single day for approximately eight hours. The DHS caseworker’s characterization of this allegation as “inadequate basic care” was hyperbole. 

As for the mother’s demeanor, the Supreme Court pointed out the obvious: 

[W]e note that Mother’s demeanor may well have been, in whole or in part, a reflection of her frustration based on her view that the entire episode was in retaliation for her  protesting  activities.

Writing in The Imprint, Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University Michigan Law School summed it up perfectly: 

In many ways, the decision was unexceptional. The Court simply applied decades of Fourth Amendment law to the facts of the case, and ruled that the government had no basis to enter the parents’ home. … None of us would want a social worker to be able to search our home based on such flimsy evidence provided by an anonymous report. 

But this decision is a significant win because all too often, well-established legal rules and principles are discarded by family court judges in the name of protecting children. … In any proceeding involving litigants with power, we would never tolerate this. Think about a medical malpractice claim involving a rich doctor, or a criminal case involving a high-profile defendant. Fraud allegations against a Fortune 500 company. We wouldn’t even allow a slight deviation from the rules. Lawyers would scream. Appellate courts would intervene. The system would move quickly to protect the powerful.     

But in child welfare, not only do we tolerate this, attorneys are often chastised when they demand that well-established processes be followed. … 

Thanks to pressure from family defenders, grassroots family advocacy groups and two members of the Philadelphia City Council, David Oh and Cindy Bass, though it’s still worse than its counterparts in most big cities, DHS is not as bad as it once was.  It is showing a little more self-restraint.  

But this case illustrates why counting on family police to restrain themselves will never work.  DHS’ claim of vast powers to effectively ignore the Fourth Amendment combined with a claim about how this intrusion is no big deal illustrates the urgent need for accountability.  And the fact that a trial court actually bought DHS’ b.s. is one more indication of the urgent need to open court hearings in Philadelphia (and everywhere else they now are closed) to the press and the public. 

The Colorado case 

Family police caseworkers have what is known as “qualified immunity” from civil lawsuits.  In layman’s terms that means you can’t win a suit against them unless their behavior was flagrantly malicious or flagrantly stupid.  In particular, they had to be clearly on notice that what they were doing was illegal and/or unconstitutional. 

So, for example, in the Philadelphia case discussed above, it’s possible that the judges put in the statement “We expressly hold that there is no ‘social worker exception’ to compliance with constitutional limitations on an entry into a home without consent or exigent circumstances”  [emphasis added] in order to put caseworkers on notice that they can’t claim qualified immunity if they fail to comply. 

Some readers may recall a California case in which a caseworker actually tried to claim what amounted to a constitutional right to lie.  If, in fact, she lied under oath and provided false evidence to a court (she did not admit it) then it still was o.k., she claimed, because there was nothing explicitly telling her that’s a violation of the rights of the parent who was suing her. 

In a decision aptly characterized as an “Epic Dis,” the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals soundly rejected this claim, saying, in effect that the worker could be sued under what should probably be called the stupidity exemption to qualified immunity.  

Now the issue has arisen in another federal court. Once again, the immunity claim was dismissed, but this time the “dis” wasn’t quite as epic as it should have been. 

This time the case involved Krystal O’Connell, a Colorado mother convicted of killing her child, in part based on a confession she says was coerced and notes from a caseworker, Marcia Tuggle, in which she claimed O’Connell confessed.  O’Connell served ten years in prison before a new trial was ordered.  Prosecutors declined to try her again.  Her case is now listed in the National Registry of Exonerations. She is now suing a police officer who conducted the criminal investigation and Tuggle, who was conducting a child abuse investigation.  Full details are in this excellent account from Colorado Politics. 

This time, Tuggle, now a former caseworker, argues that if she, in fact, fabricated a confession (she does not admit to doing so) she’s still entitled to qualified immunity because courts have only explicitly said this is prohibited in a criminal investigation or if it’s done during a child abuse investigation then it’s prohibited only if the false statements were used to advance that specific investigation.  

Tuggle argues that in this case she was just there on behalf of child protective services and any alleged fabrication was not used to advance that particular investigation.  As for the fact that her allegedly falsified notes were a factor in a criminal prosecution, well, how could she possibly know that would happen?  Apparently, the fact that the notes she wrote allegedly fabricating a confession were from a joint interview in which the police officer conducting the criminal investigation was asking the questions did not clue her in. 

A federal district court did not buy this.  The judge noted that two prior court rulings in very similar cases “and, frankly common sense” should have made it clear to the caseworker that what she allegedly did was unconstitutional. 

When Tuggle appealed, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that caselaw specifies that, in addition to specific court precedent “a right can be clearly established when it is obvious.”  The appellate court decision quotes from a prior decision from the same circuit which declared: 

“After all, some things are so obviously unlawful that they don’t require detailed explanation and sometimes the most obviously unlawful things happen so rarely that a case on point is itself an unusual thing.” 

But here’s the scary part.  The decision of the three-judge appellate court panel was not unanimous.  One judge actually bought the caseworker’s claims.  As the dissenter put it: 

As the district court observed, “common sense” should have informed Defendant that “a social worker, like any other public official, cannot knowingly create false information in furtherance of an investigation.” Yet, neither common sense nor our prior case law would have informed Defendant that she could not do so for constitutional reasons, as opposed to some general, moral reason. 

Even if one buys that, it raises another question: 

Why would any “child welfare” agency hire someone who, if, in fact she did what is alleged, didn’t know that fabricating evidence for any kind of investigation is unconstitutional, and/or is so lacking in morality that she would hide behind legal hairsplitting to commit an act even the dissenting judge could not justify on moral grounds?  Unless of course, that is the essence of the culture of the agency itself. 

At a minimum, it would be prudent for Colorado and every other state passed laws explicitly stating that it is illegal to lie in a legal proceeding and illegal to create false evidence – even in a child abuse investigation.  Because clearly, this is a field that has trouble grasping the obvious. 

*-In some faiths it’s the Eighth Commandment.  As the lawyers might say, the circuits are split.

For more about these cases:

Philadelphia: 

Kathleen Creamer of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia discusses this case, another Pennsylvania case,  and other child welfare issues on The Imprint podcast.

See also  The Imprint story, The Volokh Conspiracy blog and the analysis from CLS Philadelphia.  

Colorado: 

See this story from Colorado Politics

Police caught on tape reveal Philadelphia’s culture of child removal

When Philadelphia cops literally took the child and ran, they knew where they could get back-up if they wanted it.

 

Police smashed the windows of a mother's SUV, then dragged her and her children out.
What came next was worse. (Video by Aapril Rice)

By now you’ve probably at least heard about the story; perhaps you’ve seen the video.

 In the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police version, a two-year old was rescued from rioting by one of their officers. They posted pictures with this caption: 

 “This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing this Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”

 But that’s not what happened. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

 Philadelphia police pulled a woman from an SUV during unrest in West Philadelphia Tuesday morning, beat and bloodied her, separated her from her toddler for hours, and kept her in handcuffs in the hospital, her attorneys said Friday.

 The toddler also was injured, they said. 

 The thing is, the lawyers’ version is the one that’s backed up with video.  

  

But here’s the part of the story I find striking.  According to the mother’s lawyers

  …police at the scene refused to tell her where her child would be taken, saying only “he’s gonna go to a better place, we’re gonna report it to DHS," presumably referring to the Department of Human Services, the city’s child-welfare agency.

 Fortunately, that apparently didn’t happen.  The lawyers say that after hours apart, during which the toddler was kept in the back of a police cruiser in his car seat, (which reportedly still had glass from when the police broke the windows of the SUV), and a trip to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to treat his injuries, mother and child were reunited.

 But what does it say about the culture of Philadelphia law enforcement and Philadelphia child welfare that the first instinct upon encountering a Black mother and her young child trying to slowly and carefully drive away from trouble is to, literally, take the child and run, apparently secure in the knowledge that Philadelphia DHS would back them up? How many other times have police threatened Black families with needless separation of their children because they knew the child welfare agency is their eager partner?  After all, Philadelphia tears apart families at one of the highest rates among America’s big cities.

 In fact, the child was at risk of needless removal at least twice. The mother is lucky that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia didn’t simply assume she must have caused the toddler’s injury and call DHS – given their well-known hair trigger for such reports, and the fact that Philadelphia DHS encourages just that.  (I’m assuming they didn’t actually call DHS. So far there are no reports of a caseworker showing up at the family home.)

 Though it’s more likely to happen in Philadelphia than in many other big cities, this could have happened anywhere. All over America you can do almost anything you want to a Black family as long as you claim that “The only thing [you] cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”

UPDATED: Philadelphia DHS is lying about parent-child visits

Never, ever assume that Philadelphia’s child welfare agency can’t sink lower.

Now the agency is lying about federal guidance concerning visits between foster children and their parents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An excellent story on the online news site Billy Penn includes this claim from a p.r. person for the Philadelphia Department of Human Services about why the agency has cut off in-person visits.  According to the story:

…family visits “per the Order of the Philadelphia Family Court and federal and state guidance, are now to occur by video or phone.” [Emphasis added.]

I don’t know what the state is saying but the claim about federal guidance is false. In fact, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Children’s Bureau (CB) recommends precisely the opposite.  This letter from the director of the Children’s Bureau states:

CB urges all courts, CIPs [Court Improvement Programs], and administrative offices of the courts to:

● Discourage or refrain from issuing blanket court orders reducing or suspending familytime;

● Be mindful of the need for continued family time, especially in times of crisis andheightened anxiety;

● Remain cognizant that interruption or cessation of family time and parent-child contact can be traumatic for children;

● Continue to hold the child welfare agency accountable for ensuring that meaningful,frequent family time continues;

● Become familiar with ways in which in-person visitation may continue to be held safely;

And the list goes on – all of it encouraging precisely the opposite of DHS’ behavior. You can read the actual federal guidance, in full, here The section on visits is on page 3.

I suppose one shouldn’t have expected any better from an agency whose past efforts include the notorious Pyramid of Bull------t.

But during a pandemic one would hope the agency would rise to the occasion instead of sinking even lower.

As for the order of Philadelphia Family Court that raises two questions:

● Why is the court issuing an order that contradicts federal guidance?

● Why isn’t DHS fighting that order?

Philadelphia DHS has a new scapegoat for the City’s obscene rate of child removal: Philadelphians!

DHS Commissioner Cynthia Figueroa seems to be suggesting that Philadelphia is a cesspool of depravity so much worse than other cities that it explains why they take away so many children. (But they’re commissioning another study of the problem.)

           

       

            The Philadelphia Department of Human Services has been taking so much heat for tearing apart families at the highest rate among America’s biggest cities, (worst among the top five, a close second to worst among the top ten, even when rates of child poverty are factored in) that it has commissioned a new study of the problem.  At the same time, the department has a new scapegoat for the swath of family destruction it cuts through the city’s poor neighborhoods: Philadelphians.

            Those are among the takeaways from agreat story by freelance writer Courtenay Harris-Bond in Philadelphia Weekly – the first in a three-part series. (Links to the rest of the series are at the end of Part One.)

            UPDATE, NOV. 15: When I first saw the story, I overlooked the excellent column that accompanies it, from Philadelphia Weekly editor Kerith Gabriel. Don't make the same mistake!

            The story includes chilling accounts of the harm done to children by needless removal from parents or extended families -- to which DHS and its commissioner, Cynthia Figueroa, respond with a litany of excuses, some familiar, some new.

            The good news: DHS no longer appears to be denying its extreme outlier status outright. (Remember the Pyramid of Bulls**t?)  And DHS even is commissioning a study of the issue.  (At least I hope that’s good news. DHS already has a study, but apparently prefers to ignore it, which raises the question of whether DHS is just going from consultant to consultant until they find one that will tell the agency what it wants to hear.)

            The bad news: Having acknowledged its outlier status, DHS can’t face up to the fact that the fault lies with DHS. They can’t admit that they are the primary reason why Philadelphia tears apart families at nearly triple the rate of New York City and nearly quadruple the rate of Chicago.  So we get the excuses:

            ● First DHS tries to divert our attention from the number of children taken away over the course of a year – entries into care – to a different statistic, the “snapshot number,” which shows the number of children trapped in foster care on a given day. Philadelphia does badly in both categories, and both numbers are important. But it’s entries that really shows a jurisdiction’s propensity to tear apart families.

            ● Then a p.r. person for DHS says that “We’re all reporting in the same categories to the federal government, but how you define that category can be different.”

           But what we’re measuring here is foster care, not subcategories. The federal government does have a clear, standard definition of foster care that every jurisdiction is expected to follow.  There also is a clear, standard definition of an entry into care.  It’s true, some places cheat.  But unless DHS has evidence that every other big city is engaged in a cheating scandal that would make Felicity Huffman blush, there is no reason to doubt Philadelphia’s outlier status.

            Indeed, a consultant hired by DHS itself came to the same conclusion, and issued an exhaustive report on how to fix the problems – a document DHS apparently wants to ignore.

            ● Then DHS points out that they’re placing a greater proportion of children with relatives instead of strangers than they used to.  That’s true – and that is an improvement. But kinship care is still foster care.

            ● Then DHS dredged up the Sandusky excuse.  All those new laws passed in the wake of the scandal surrounding former foster parent and group home operator Jerry Sandusky prompted many more people to report their slightest suspicion of child abuse, so of course that would lead to a spike in child removals.

            That is the standard excuse offered up by child welfare systems whenever there is a foster-care panic – a sharp, sudden spike in removals of children from their homes following a high-profile child abuse tragedy.  And it doesn’t hold up.

            First of all, every big city has foster-care panics – New York City has had at least three since 1995 – but in spite of that, Philadelphia takes away children at a far higher rate.  And Philadelphia has been an outlier for well over a decade. The problem goes back well before the Sandusky scandal (and, in fairness, well before the current leadership at DHS).

But also, during a foster-care panic, what rises most is the proportion of bulls**t reports alleging child abuse and neglect.  That’s because anyone and everyone is constantly encouraged to report anything and everything, so they do just that.  And, of course, “mandated reporters,” such as school personnel, who can be punished for failing to report, are even more scared than usual, so they’re even more prone to report cases they know are ridiculous.

Those same new state laws that Philadelphia blames also apply in Pittsburgh, of course. But in metropolitan Pittsburgh, the longtime director of the human services agency knew that a lot of the new reports would be absurd and demanded that his staff not panic. So there was no increase in foster care in Pittsburgh.  (Though it should be noted, the rate of removal in Pittsburgh also is way too high.)

DHS suggests it’s all YOUR fault

            ● But the most striking excuse of all is the one in which Figueroa seems to be blaming Philadelphia’s high rate of removal on – Philadelphians.  From the story:

“The number of children in DHS care reflects the safety, risks, and environments of children in Philadelphia,” Figueroa said. “We are doing everything we can to keep families together.”

            Now that’s odd.  Because Philadelphia’s rate-of-removal is out of line with all of the five biggest cities and all but one of the ten biggest cities even when you factor in rates of child poverty.  In other words, compare entries into care to the number of impoverished children in each city and Philadelphia is still an extreme outlier.  Indeed, those consultants DHS hired and then ignored did a special comparison to other high-poverty cities – and Philadelphia still was an outlier.

Citing cities such as Detroit, Baltimore and Milwaukee, the consultants noted that these places “also have high rates of children in poverty, but do not experience out-of-home care rates even approaching those of Philadelphia.”

            So what Figueroa really seems to be saying is that “the safety risks and environments of children in Philadelphia” are far worse than the “the safety risks and environments of children” in other impoverished cities. In other words, Philadelphia is some kind of cesspool of depravity beyond what is found in any other of America’s biggest cities.  She prefers to blame the people of Philadelphia rather than take responsibility for her agency’s failure.

            As for the part about “we’re doing everything we can to keep families together” – I believe that. In fact, that’s the problem. The Philadelphia Department of Human Services is doing “everything we can.”  But the leadership at Philadelphia DHS doesn’t know how to safely keep families together - and they don’t want to learn.

            

Read NCCPR’s full analysis of Philadelphia child welfare here.

And there’s more about the DHS Excuse Machine in these blog posts. (Scroll past this one after clicking on the link.)

News and commentary round-up, week ending May 13, 2019

●Last week I posted a link to an op-ed column by a family defender in New York City about the kind of family that doesn’t have to worry about having child protective services in its life.  This week: Another family defender writes in the New York Daily News about the kind of family that does.

●From Honolulu Civil Beat: An excellent story about a family faced with two kinds of trauma. First, the children were needlessly taken because the mother was herself a victim of domestic violence.  And now, the mother may be denied the career she’s wanted all her life because she can’t get off the state’s central registry of alleged child abusers – a registry she never should have been on in the first place.

●I have a column in Youth Today about how the foster care-industrial complex is trying to get legislation through Congress that would more than double federal foster care spending – and remove the last federal fiscal brake on needless foster care.

●Vivek Sankaran has a column about how his own experiences illustrate what’s revealed by a new study: High-quality family defense, using the model pioneered in New York City, dramatically curbs needless foster care, with no compromise of child safety.  And this story discusses East Bay Family Defenders, which is bringing the New York model of family defense to Alameda County, California.

●In another column Sankaran talks about foster youth who endured years of abuse in foster care, finding strength in their relationship with each other – and their mother.

●I have a blog post about why Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services is the Kellyanne Conway of child welfare agencies. They both have a fondness for “alternative facts.”  (And, of course, they’re both deeply involved with the needless separation of families.)

● Youth Today has a story about a court decision that stops the New York City Administration for Children’s Services from sending out the police to arrest foster youth who run away.

● And The New York Times has an op-ed that says not one word about foster care or the child welfare system – and yet explains exactly how to fix it.

The Philadelphia DHS Pyramid of Bulls**t

Fortunately, it’s no match for the Bar Graph of Reality:

For full details on time periods, methodology and sources
 see the NCCPR Big City Rate-of-Removal Index

  

The Philadelphia Department of Human Services (DHS) is the Kellyanne Conway of child welfare. 

Under the leadership of Commissioner Cynthia Figueroa, the agency has developed a fondness for  “alternative facts” – desperately spinning data (and recent history) in the hope that no one will notice the simple truth: Year after year after year, Philadelphia tears apart families at either the highest or the second highest rate among America’s biggest cities, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  (Come to think of it, justifying the needless removal of children is something else Conway and Philadelphia DHS have in common.)

Yes, the most recent data show that, due to a slight decrease in removals in Philadelphia, and a big increase in Phoenix, Philadelphia is again in second place among the ten largest cities. Narrowed down to the five largest, Philadelphia is still #1. And what is consistent year after year is that these two metropolitan areas – Phoenix and Philadelphia -- consistently tear apart families at rates far above all the others.

Recently, I discovered that DHS had outdone itself, when I found something toward the end of the department’s most recent Quarterly Indicators Report.  It wasn’t entirely a surprise. Ever since Philadelphia journalists caught on to the city’s extreme outlier status, DHS has been in full alternative facts mode.  As I explained in a blog post in February:

Here’s what DHS is claiming, according to a tweet from the agency: “Last year of 19,325 families reported, 3.8% had children removed due to safety.”  In a tweet of her own, Figueroa claimed that “Philadelphia’s removal rate is inline with the National average and other big cities.”

What’s new is the visual.  Call it, the DHS Pyramid of Bullshit.  It looks like one of those classic “food pyramids” but it’s designed to reinforce the false impression left by the tweets. Here’s why the operative word is bullshit:

The basic number DHS doesn’t want you to know

For starters, nowhere in the pyramid does DHS ever tell us the actual number of times children are taken from their parents in Philadelphia each year.  So here’s the actual number for federal fiscal year 2018:

2,718

In fact, I have not been able to find the number of entries into foster care anywhere on the DHS website.  The figure is easy to find for every other community in the top ten – even for Phoenix.

How do we know the 2,718 figure is correct? Because every state and locality has to report entries into foster care to the federal government. And, though it takes awhile, the federal government makes these totals public.  That’s how Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children pulls together data for every county in Pennsylvania.  You’ll find the figure for Philadelphia in this report at the bottom of page 2.

So why won’t DHS even provide this one basic number?  Why won’t the agency tell the press and the public something as basic as “How many times a year are children taken from their parents in Philadelphia?” 

The answer, of course, is that the real number is so embarrassing – it shows how vastly out-of-line Philadelphia is with every other big city except Phoenix.

So instead, the Pyramid of Bullshit includes only the claim that children were removed from 739 families in City Fiscal Year 2018.  But even that makes no sense, since that would mean taking an average of nearly four children per family.  So some data seem to be missing.

Compared to what?

The other problem concerns what measure is used to compare the number of children removed from their homes.  The logical choice is to compare it to something objective.  So one should either compare entries to the number of children or the number of impoverished children in each community. 

With its fondness for "alternative facts," 
and its willingness to justify needlessly 
separating families, Philadelphia DHS is the
Kellyanne Conway of child welfare agencies
(Photo by Gage Skidmore)

When you actually do that, you get the Bar Graph of Reality that appears at the top of this post comparing entries into care to the number of impoverished children in each of the five largest cities.  You’ll find another Bar Graph of Reality for all ten big cities at the end of this post.  They show that Philadelphia is nowhere near “inline” with either the national average or other big cities – except Phoenix.

We think factoring in poverty is the fairer method, but in our NCCPR Big City Rate-of-Removal Index, we do both.  (For the record, if you don’t factor in poverty, Philadelphia is even worse, #1 in child removal instead of #2.) The Index also provides links to sources for all data.

But a key part of the DHS Kellyanne Conway act is to avoid using anything truly objective for comparison. So instead she offers the number of families reported as alleged child abusers and the number of families investigated.

But that figure is itself easily manipulated.  If, as Cynthia Figueroa reportedly does, you urge people to just use their “intuition” and report anything and everything and if, as Cynthia Figueroa seems to believe, every sports injury might be abuse and therefore should be reported, and if, every few years, as it is prone to do, the Pennsylvania Legislature passes a spate of new laws demanding an that ever more people report their intuition, then the number of reports and investigations will artificially increase.

In contrast, DHS can’t manipulate the number of children living in Philadelphia or the number living in poverty (though if DHS really wanted to curb child abuse and neglect, reducing the latter number would be a great way to start.)  So the logical comparison is the number of times children are thrown into foster care compared to the number of children living in poverty.

That’s reality.  The only way to change that reality is for Philadelphia DHS to stop needlessly harming so many children by consigning them to the chaos of foster care. 

And Philadelphia DHS could do it, too. If only what passes for leadership there would devote as much creativity to alleviating poverty and curbing needless removal as it did to crafting its Pyramid of Bullshit.

For more details about methodology see this earlier post.

For full details on time periods, methodology and sources see the
NCCPR Big City Rate-of-Removal Index