``Are we 100 percent improved?'' asked DHS Commissioner Joan Reeves. ``Of course not . . . but implementation is under way.''
The class-action suit alleged that DHS workers followed no consistent standards when they evaluated allegations of child abuse and neglect, that a shortage of foster homes caused abandoned infants to languish in hospitals, and that children in the child-welfare system bounced from foster home to foster home.
Although foster care is intended to provide a temporary haven for children at risk, nearly half of the more than 6,000 children in DHS custody at that time had been in the foster system for more than two years, much longer than children elsewhere in the country. The suit also alleged that children waited years to be adopted.
The settlement acknowledges recent reforms that Reeves has begun and establishes a system for exchanging information and monitoring the system for two years to make sure it meets ``generally accepted'' standards of social work practice spelled out in law and the department's new policy manual. The two sides also have agreed that Ruth W. Mayden, dean of Bryn Mawr's Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, will mediate disputes.
``I think this is a particularly good end to what has been a longstanding and acrimonious case,'' said Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights Inc., a nonprofit advocacy organization in New York that brought the suit with the ACLU in April, 1990. Her organization is involved in 10 similar suits across the country.
The agreement was signed on Monday and submitted for approval to U.S. District Court Judge Robert F. Kelly.
