Child Welfare

The United Methodist Home for Children, a 107-year-old non-sectarian facility, is closing its residential treatment program this summer. As a result, more than 50 children now in long-term placement will need alternative care, most of them for many years. The board of Methodist Home has independently and painfully decided to discontinue its on-site treatment program as a result of complicated negotiations with the Department of Human Services, which could not be resolved otherwise.

Even as he represented a 20-year-old mother whose sole crime appears to have been poverty, attorney Gerald McOscar was secretly rooting against his client, supporting a judge's decision to tear her 3-year-old from her forever. Then he rushed to trash his client in the newspaper ("Saving foster children from good intent," June 28). McOscar's position, which supports the destruction of his own client's family, is rooted in misunderstandings of the recent history of child welfare and how that system really works.

A series of proposals designed to improve accountability in New Jersey's challenged child-protection system advanced in the Assembly yesterday. However, the broadest of the bills - one that would reconfigure the troubled Division of Youth and Family Services - was put on hold. Critics noted that the bill itself needed an overhaul to ensure that the desired changes emerged, and sponsors agreed, pulling it off the table. Still, child advocates were pleased that measures previously stalled for years appeared to now be speeding along in the stretch run of the session.

Frank P. Cervone is executive director of the Support Center for Child Advocates in Philadelphia (www.advokid.org) Shelly Yanoff is executive director of Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth (www.pccy.org) The headlines shock, leaving a sense of communal failure. Children, born with little support, were betrayed - by their families and substitute families, by officials charged with guarding their safety, by laws and budgets. By all of us. As investigations into recent child deaths begin, we must recognize the multiple challenges the city Department of Human Services faces in supporting Philadelphia's neediest, most troubled families.

Gov. Casey has pledged that he will dramatically improve the state's child- welfare system next year by paying for every abused, neglected and delinquent child who needs care. But child-welfare advocates say the governor hasn't put money where his mouth is. State figures made available this week show that Casey has proposed raising state spending for the children by less than half the amount that his own welfare officials said would be needed under the current system. The $42 million spending increase proposed by the governor represents barely one-fourth of what county officials contend they need to care for mistreated children.

Faced with the monumental $320 million overhaul of the state's child-welfare system, acting Human Services Commissioner James Davy asked taxpayers for a few extra dollars yesterday. Davy is trying to drum up support for a shrinking pot of money called the Children's Trust Fund, given to local groups for the prevention of child abuse and neglect. The fund is partially financed through contributions made on New Jersey income-tax returns. Child-abuse prevention is a key component of the state's child-welfare plan, which must be approved or rejected this week by an independent panel reviewing the proposal for a U.S. District Court judge.

An agreement yesterday on state funding for Philadelphia's children and youth services takes political heat off Gov. Casey and brings financial relief to Mayor Goode at a good time for both politicians. With Democrat Casey facing re-election, he doesn't need to be sued over money for kids in the state's largest Democratic city. With Goode facing a budget crisis that looks gloomier each day, any news of more state help is welcome. So yesterday, both city and state officials were smiling when they jointly announced settlement of a $120 million lawsuit against the state that Philadelphia and other counties filed last month.

The mood was triumphant. Mayor Goode stood beneath the bright television lights one day last May, his Philadelphia office packed with city officials, welfare advocates and reporters, and heralded as a major breakthrough an agreement to help cities care for mistreated children. For the first time, the mayor said, the state Public Welfare Department would give Gov. Casey a child-welfare budget that was based on children's needs rather than on the state's ability to pay counties for their care.

Caught between the needs of abused and neglected children and an empty city treasury, a City Council committee debated yesterday whether to grant Mayor Goode's request for a $57.8 million emergency appropriation. Most of the money - $32.4 million - would be spent to prevent child welfare agencies from closing for the final three months of fiscal 1991, which ends June 30. Several agency officials told committee members that it would be morally indefensible to deny them the money.

On any given day, at least 100,000 children in Pennsylvania have a parent in prison or jail. With the recent release of a joint legislative commission's report on the issue, the commonwealth has begun the important work of taking a serious look at the lives of these children. The report is the result of two years of work by an advisory committee of 38 professionals with a vast array of experience in corrections, child welfare, the courts, and child and family services. There is still a lot to learn, but this much is clear: A failure to address these children's needs will put them at risk of mental-health problems, behavioral issues, juvenile delinquency, and more.

DEAR ABBY: A number of things in the letter from "Uneasy in Indiana" can be red flags for sex abuse. I have worked in child welfare for 35 years. Abusers often start with "playful touching," comment about "cute" body parts, continue after being asked to stop, and make power statements that they can touch the child if they want. If the incident was innocent, why didn't he recognize that it made his daughter uneasy and immediately stop when asked? "Uneasy" already fears he may accuse her of being a paranoid former victim.

By Frank P. Cervone So how did this happen? I've heard that question a hundred times, and asked it more than a few times myself, in the weeks since the horrors of the Tacony "dungeon" were revealed. How did a convicted murderer get custody of children? Did the Philadelphia Department of Human Services know about the years of abuse and neglect allegations against Linda Weston? Unfortunately, we might never know. Child-welfare or "dependency court" proceedings are generally closed to the public - for some good reasons.

Unisys Corp., of Blue Bell, won a $30 million contract from the state of Michigan's Department of Technology, Management and Budget to build and maintain a new child-welfare computer services system, the company said Monday. The system will help social workers track the cases of about 15,000 children in foster care and adoption programs. The new contract will run three years, and the state has the option to extend it for two additional one-year periods. If ordered, additional services could make the deal worth $47 million to Unisys.

NEW YORK - A young mother watched her 5-year-old son's slow, agonizing death in their apartment after she beat him for breaking the television while playing a Nintendo Wii video game - but didn't take him to the hospital because she was afraid of getting arrested, prosecutors said. Kim Crawford, 21, was charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter and ordered held without bail yesterday in the death of Jamar Johnson. Police responded to the home on Friday about 7:15 p.m., and found the dead boy, prosecutors said.

After decades of disarray that put vulnerable children in harm's way, the city Department of Human Services is finally making significant strides in improving how it protects young clients. The horrendous death of Danieal Kelly in 2006 exposed fatal flaws in the dysfunctional agency. The 14-year-old starved while her family was under the agency's supervision. An Inquirer series that year uncovered countless broken policies and practices and a neglected core mission to keep children safe.

TRENTON - New Jersey's child welfare agency has a new leader. Gov. Christie swore in Allison Blake on Friday as commissioner of the Children and Families Department. She took the oath in front of her family and friends, many of whom worked as caseworkers with her years ago. Blake was director of the Institute for Families at the Rutgers School of Social Work and spent 18 years at the Division of Youth and Family Services, where she got her start as a caseworker. "I will do my very best to ensure the safety of the children and families of this state," Blake, 47, of Raritan Township, said after being sworn in in the governor's outer office.

Mayor Nutter announced Thursday that he had hired a child-abuse expert who has intimate knowledge of Philadelphia's child-welfare system as the city's first medical director of the Department of Human Services. Cindy W. Christian is director of Safe Place, the Center for Child Protection and Health, at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. In 2007, Christian was named Pennsylvania Pediatrician of the Year by the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

USA Swimming announced a partnership yesterday with a national children's group to help protect athletes from sexual abuse, a move that did little to placate the most vocal critics of the embattled governing body. The Washington-based Child Welfare League of America, which describes itself as the nation's oldest and largest membership-based organization dealing with child-welfare issues, will help USA Swimming develop new safeguards and conduct an annual audit to ensure enough is being done to prevent coaches from having improper contact with their athletes.

If you can imagine being ordered to tell a stranger about your first sexual experience, you have some insight into the trauma that can be inflicted on child-abuse victims by the judicial system, a Pennsylvania state child advocate explained this week. Joan Mills said the need to reduce that stress underscored the strict accrediting standards set by the National Children's Alliance for child-advocacy centers - conditions that recently passed muster in Chester County. On Tuesday, County District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll announced that the county Children's Advocacy Center has become one of more than 450 accredited members of NCA, a nonprofit in Washington.