Philly City Council votes to hold hearings on DHS after Inquirer series on foster care failings
“Caseworkers are severely overburdened, oversight is inconsistent and the system has allowed dangerous conditions to persist for far too long,” said Councilmember-at-large Nina Ahmad.
City Council has unanimously passed a resolution to hold hearings about the Philadelphia Department of Human Services in the wake of The Inquirer’s series on failings of the foster care system.
Those articles, reported in collaboration with Resolve Philly, traced a wave of lawsuits against the city’s network of privately contracted foster agencies back to DHS itself.
“Caseworkers are severely overburdened, oversight is inconsistent, and the system has allowed dangerous conditions to persist for far too long,” said Councilmember-at-large Nina Ahmad, introducing the resolution Thursday.
Ahmad said the hearings should not be about finger-pointing but “real, transformative change.”
The series documented how, for more than a decade, Philadelphia’s DHS has outsourced care for children involved in abuse and neglect investigations to small, private nonprofits. Beginning in 2012, in the wake of a horrific case of child abuse, Philadelphia established community umbrella agencies, or CUAs, in 10 service districts across the city.
The idea was to streamline, to localize, and to better serve youth in need with smaller, neighborhood-centered welfare agencies.
But Resolve Philly and The Inquirer found systemic breakdowns across the network of private companies contracted by the city’s DHS. Since their founding, the CUAs have created distrust among Philly families and been sued nearly 70 times for allegedly allowing children in their care to be burned, beaten, sexually assaulted, and, in 14 cases, killed.
At least 50 of these lawsuits resulted in settlements or verdicts of $1 million or more, court records and interviews showed.
One article in the series focused on “voluntary” agreements made by parents to give up their children to avoid losing them to the foster care system. Parent advocates told reporters that such placements can allow kids to return home far more quickly than formal foster care. But parents report feeling coerced into accepting the agreements.
Ahmed called that practice “harmful.”
“DHS has pressured many parents, primarily Black and brown, into signing over … their children without legal representation, often under the threat of formal foster care,” she said.