How Philly can look to New Jersey to fix its child welfare system

The problems bedeviling Philadelphia’s child welfare system — too many kids in foster care, worker vacancies, and lawsuits stemming from child injuries and deaths — have all steadily waned in New Jersey in the last two decades. So what can Philly learn from the Garden State?

In the 1990s, New Jersey’s child welfare system was among the worst in the nation, with too few caseworkers for the number of kids in need. Workers had to constantly scramble, sometimes cutting corners and overlooking children in real danger.

Today, New Jersey looms as a leading example of foster care reform by recognizing earlier than many others the folly of separating thousands of youths from families that, in hindsight, only needed resources and support.

Nancy Carre-Lee, a longtime employee in the New Jersey Department of Children and Families, described the mindset when she started in the 1990s. She would charge in, rescue children from dire circumstances, and put them in foster care, a do-gooding caped crusader.

“But we didn’t know any different,” she said. “As far as I was concerned, I really was a superhero.”

A seismic shift took place in the wake of a New Jersey class-action lawsuit filed in 1999 on behalf of children suffering maltreatment in the state-run foster care system. The suit, settled in 2003, included an external monitor to oversee reforms and millions in new spending.

The state hired 600 new caseworkers, which quickly brought caseloads down. Those workers also received more intensive training and emerged empowered to keep families together.

These new practices reflected a growing body of research that shows kids and families can avoid forced separation and its trauma with social service supports — such as stable housing, Medicaid, and tax credits — which cost far less than foster care.

“During the dark days,” said Carre-Lee, now executive director of staff health and wellness at the department, “it was ‘when in doubt, yank ‘em out.‘” (This catchphrase is still sometimes cited in Philadelphia when case managers err on the side of taking children from their homes, according to current and former case managers.)

“It was a culture shift,” Carre-Lee said.

Since 2003, New Jersey has reduced the number of kids in the state’s foster care system from 13,000 to 2,707 in 2024, a drop of 79%, according to data supplied by DCF.

Philadelphia has touted its own steep reduction of kids in foster care — falling by nearly 60% since 2017. But the city continues to keep more kids in foster care than the national average and has about the same number of children in foster care as the entire state of New Jersey, which has six times the population.

DHS Commissioner Kimberly Ali said that Philly’s poverty rates are higher than New Jersey’s, which makes comparisons difficult.

Poverty, however, is not a legal reason to remove children from their families. Philly takes children living in poverty into foster care at a rate 2.5 times higher than New Jersey.

The problem of equating poverty with neglect stretches to the inception of the modern child welfare system in the 1970s, when State Rep. David Richardson Jr. (D., Philadelphia) warned that language in proposed state legislation included neglect, which would punish families “for being poor.”

A 2022 City Council report, overseen by then-member David Oh and Councilmember Cindy Bass, noted how Philadelphia had emerged as a national outlier in separating families over their economic circumstances.

The “Oh report,” as it is known among activists, outlined solutions such as focusing only on the most serious cases and providing more family support, including high-quality legal defense in dependency cases and direct assistance with food, housing, clothing, and childcare.

To people familiar with New Jersey’s foster care progress, the Oh report’s guidance is familiar. This past year, the state spent more money on in-home services to support families than on foster care.

Stabilizing families appears to have stabilized the workforce, too.

New Jersey has stayed compliant with state lawmakers’ caseload standards of no more than 10 children in placement per worker, and it reduced turnover among case managers to less than 10% for almost 20 years straight, a singular accomplishment in child welfare.

By comparison, Philly’s community umbrella agencies (CUAs), a network of privately contracted foster care service providers, have annual turnover rates of about 35%.

Pennsylvania caseworkers said “overwhelming workloads” drive turnover, according to a June report by Pennsylvania’s Office of Children, Youth, and Families.

The report also noted that when caseworker turnover is high, fewer families are reunified. A likely result is that families can wind up separated permanently.

Some child advocates worry that New Jersey has gone too far in keeping families together. But the numbers suggest that New Jersey’s lower caseloads and small foster care population have not compromised safety.

Statewide rates of maltreatment, which includes both abuse and negligence, fell 68% from 2010 to 2023.

New Jersey also has the third-lowest child mortality rate in the country, one that has been stable for years, according to a 2022 federal report.

With fewer foster care cases, child welfare workers can devote more time to those cases where real danger may be present, Carre-Lee said.

Philadelphia, by comparison, “still faces the risk of having overwhelmed itself,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. Wexler just published a Rate of Removal Index, comparing the nation’s big cities, and determined that Philadelphia still has the highest rate of removal in the country, and the second-highest when poverty is factored in, trailing only Phoenix. Only 10% of children in foster care were removed from their homes for physical abuse, according to a 2023 report by Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children.

“It’s taken in too many kids who were not in any real danger,” Wexler said.

Activists in Philadelphia are banding together to try to promote continued change here. Pat Albright, of the Every Mother is a Working Mother Network, said that the Network is using the Oh report recommendations as a model, particularly its emphasis on economic support.

Any family condition that can be remedied with money — housing assistance, food, clothing, and childcare — “shall not constitute neglect and shall not be cause for [an] investigation,” the report states.

Such a move would represent seismic — and welcome — change for the child welfare system. A report published last year by the Pennsylvania Office of Children, Youth, and Families quotes and connects this section of the Oh report to its own findings: “Caseworkers emphasized that substance use, homelessness, and poverty drive many of the [General Protective Services] reports coming into their counties,” but could be staved off by preventive services. “These types of GPS concerns could be prevented by dedicated outreach … before reaching the level of child abuse or neglect.”

A little money can go a long way. An annual $1,000 earned income tax credit reduces a family’s involvement with child protective services and the risk of separation by 8% to 10%, according to a study by the nonprofit policy center Chapin Hall.

» READ MORE: Inside Philly’s hidden foster care system, where parents ‘voluntarily’ give up their children

Some of the more compelling evidence for reducing the use of foster care comes from the COVID-19 crisis. Kids stayed home from school during the lockdown, away from teachers, who by law must report any suspicion of child abuse or neglect.

Child advocates predicted that kids would pay the price in increased abuse. But as federal aid was paid to parents all over the country, traumatic abuse-related injuries decreased. Some child welfare scholars caution against drawing firm conclusions, but some reformers argue the data are clear.

“What does it say when it turns out that children are actually safer if the entire child welfare apparatus is disrupted for a while?” Wexler asked. “I think it tells you the current model, which relies on the separation of families, doesn’t work.”

To Carre-Lee, a key driver for improvement, at least in the Garden State, may be the humbler mindset she and some of her colleagues have adopted. “I see myself so much differently today,” she said. “I’m not a superhero. I’m a collaborator with these families. I’m a partner.”