Social workers in Philly’s outsourced foster care system have overburdened caseloads, advocates say
An Inquirer/Resolve Philly investigation found that annual staff turnover rates were as high as 40% for the nonprofits that manage Philly's foster care cases.
The city Department of Human Services overburdens frontline workers in Philadelphia’s outsourced foster care system by measuring their caseloads based on the number of families, rather than individual children, that they work with, child welfare advocates told City Council on Friday.
DHS Commissioner Kimberly Ali said the city funds the nonprofits it relies on for foster care services at levels designed to give the average social worker 10 cases at a time. Currently, she said, case managers are averaging 11 cases.
But for DHS, a case is a family — regardless of how many children are in it.
“Most other jurisdictions … measure caseload size in terms of the number of children, not by family," said Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First PA. “We really need the city and the department to reach agreement that we will adopt this best practice.”
Council’s Committee on Public Health and Human Services held a hearing Friday examining the city’s child welfare services in response to an Inquirer/Resolve Philly investigation that found major problems in the city’s unusual foster care system, which since 2013 has outsourced case management to a network of nonprofits known as community umbrella agencies, or CUAs.
“The recent investigative reporting by The Philadelphia Inquirer uncovered systemic failures and raised deeply disturbing questions about how DHS and its contracted agencies are functioning,” Councilmember Nina Ahmad, who chairs the committee, said at the hearing. “These revelations demand transparency, introspection, and urgent reform.”
The Inquirer investigation found that the nonprofits face annual staff turnover rates as high as 40%, that incidents of deaths and near-fatalities have not significantly fallen since the city launched the system, and that the CUAs have faced nearly 70 lawsuits alleging they allowed children to be abused and, in 14 cases, killed.
Ali said she disagreed that DHS was “not meeting its goal of improving outcomes for children.” The agency, she said, has focused on working with families to prevent situations where children need to be removed in the first place.
“During the last two fiscal years, community-based prevention providers serviced over 6,000 children in their own homes and communities by offering supportive services to meet their individualized needs,” Ali testified.
For children in DHS placements, the city continually evaluates the CUAs’ performance, including through its public scorecards, which Ali called “an invaluable performance management tool.”
“It recognizes areas where CUAs are doing well and targets areas that need improvement and technical assistance,” she said.
DHS, which also oversees the city’s juvenile justice services, has a $943.6 million budget this year. A majority of its funding comes from the state. The agency plans to pay the seven nonprofits in the CUA network a total of $115 million in the budget year that begins July 1.
Cooper and other nonprofit leaders who testified at the hearing applauded DHS for reforms over the last decade that have led to a significant decline in the rate of children being removed from their families. Ali said the rate of child removals fell from eight per 1,000 in 2015 to 3.7 per 1,000 in 2022.
Investigations of child abuse and removals are handled by DHS staff, not the CUAs. Once children are placed with new families, social workers employed by CUAs are responsible for checking in on them to ensure their safety and well-being.
The system was created as a reform in the wake of the horrific 2006 death of 14-year-old Danieal Kelly when she was under DHS’s care.
But there has been significant turnover among the groups in the CUA network, and some of the nonprofits have said the city is not doing enough to either protect them from lawsuits or help cover the cost of legal liability insurance, an exorbitant expense in their inherently litigious field.
David Fair, executive director of Turning Points for Children, a former CUA that declined to renew its contract with the city in 2022, testified that his agency “needed to exit the CUA system solely because we could not afford the high cost of liability insurance.”
“Turning Points was proud of our CUA work, and although we had differences with DHS from time to time, we applaud DHS for what we believe is a significant improvement in child welfare practices in Philadelphia,” he said.
Fair offered several recommendations for improving the CUA system, including extending the city’s legal immunity to its contracted providers and reducing workloads on social workers by changing how DHS measures cases.
“One can have 10 cases but be faced with over 20 children, each of whom requires hours of attention and documentation,” Fair testified. “This results in the worker concentrating on completing their paperwork within deadlines, rather than prioritizing what is best for the child.”
High workloads, he said, lead to burnout and turnover at the CUAs.
Ali said DHS has worked to reduce turnover among social workers in recent years and was having success.
“We have made significant investments in the CUAs to improve recruitment and retention efforts, including partnering with local colleges and universities to hire case managers, salary increases comparable to DHS social workers, and mentoring,” she said.
After the hearing, she declined to comment on the question of how DHS measures CUA caseloads, but said she would review all recommendations from the hearing.
Ahmad said the committee will hold another session on DHS’s child welfare services in September.
“When families interact with DHS, often during their most vulnerable moments,” Ahmad said, “we have a sacred obligation to ensure the interactions are rooted in dignity, compassion, and accountability.”