Social Workers

A 92-year-old woman was fatally struck by a car Thursday when a fellow resident of a Cherry Hill senior housing complex lost control of the vehicle in the facility's parking lot, township police said. Rose Weber, who was pushing a walker in the lot of the Raymond and Gertrude R. Saltzman House in the 1400 block of Springdale Road, died at the scene shortly before 3 p.m. Authorities believe Shirley Braverman, 82, "stepped on the gas instead of the brake" while backing out of a space on the north end of the parking lot, said Lt. Sean Redmond.

A new crisis has overtaken this city. Almost overnight, it seems to those who are trying to deal with it, thousands of Philadelphia children are without parents. Newborns are deserted in hospital nurseries. Toddlers are left alone in crack houses. Neglected and battered children are reported by concerned neighbors and deposited at city agencies by overwhelmed relatives. At the city's Department of Human Services, these children wander the halls, holding plastic trash bags that contain their meager belongings - a few items of clothing, some toys, maybe a teddy bear.

SO JILL Porter thinks locking up social workers is a good idea. Figures, since she has never had to go from crack house to crack house in search of a newborn child to investigate reports of child abuse and neglect. Figures, since neither she nor Judge Kevin Dougherty have ever had to trudge up a five-story tenement in the blazing summer heat to rescue an abandoned infant living in squalor and filth. Our city social workers are dedicated to the welfare of all children and go above and beyond the call of duty every day of their working lives, risking their own health and safety to secure the health and safety of the city's most vulnerable children.

I READ the articles commending the Philadelphia teacher of the year and the police officer who won the Fencl Award. I congratulate both. But where is the recognition for the Department of Human Services staff who work tirelessly to protect the city's most vulnerable citizens, the children of Philadelphia? Yes, we've gotten some negative press lately regarding child fatalities, but there's so much good that comes from this agency for children removed from unsafe situations, reunified with families made safer through services, permanent homes found for children where reunification isn't an option.

Department of Human Services social workers have two major complaints: "There's not enough workers, and there's not enough resources," says Ed Nowak, a shop steward of District Council 47, of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. State inspectors who visited Human Services late last year confirmed that caseloads are high. The inspection, which came about a month after the city closed its file on 3-year-old Sylvia Smith, the West Philadelphia child found starved to death in May, revealed that one social worker was handling 95 cases - 65 more than state regulations permit.

Some 12,000 social workers in state Welfare Department offices and hospitals plan to walk off the job at midnight after rejecting a three-year contract offer last night that included a two-tier system of raises. RoscoeJohnson, president of Local 668 of the Service Employees International Union, also known as the Pennsylvania Social Services Union, said 2,000 union members in Philadelphia voted last night to strike when the contract expires tonight. A state spokesman said the state would try to keep hospital and Welfare offices open tomorrow with management personnel if the union walks out. "Obviously the commonwealth wants to resolve the differences and doesn't want any termination of services," said spokesman John Taylor.

Social workers not amused by 'Norm Show' He's maddened scores of fans who have walked out on his off-colored comedy routines, he's annoyed his former bosses at "Saturday Night Live," and now Norm Macdonald has even irritated a group of people who are ordinarily known for their empathy: social workers. In his new sitcom "The Norm Show," Macdonald's tax-evading character is told by a judge that he can go to jail, or perform community service by becoming a social worker. He chooses the second option.

Social workers are not miracle workers. No one feels worse than the social workers who handled the cases of 3-year-old Sylvia Smith, who starved to death at the hands of her mother, and of 2-year-old Malik Richard Barnhill, who died of abuse and neglect in a North Philadelphia rowhouse. Is it the social worker's fault these two children died? Mayor Goode says so. He said they "did not do all that they should have," and recommended that the workers and their supervisors be disciplined.

For Tracey Skolnick, the three days of intense training in Norristown amounted to a crash course in child-welfare issues - a sort of Real-Life Social Work 101. "When you first come (to the job), you don't know anything," said Skolnick, a case worker for Montgomery County's Office of Children and Youth for just 2 1/2 months. "It's overwhelming. " Now, she says, she will manage her eight cases with more confidence. And organizers of the state-mandated training hope she will have even more competence.

Department of Human Services social workers have two major complaints: "There's not enough workers, and there's not enough resources," says Ed Nowak, a shop steward of District Council 47 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. State inspectors who visited Human Services late last year confirmed that caseloads are high. The inspection, which came about a month after the city closed its file on 3-year-old Sylvia Smith, the West Philadelphia child found starved to death in May, revealed that one social worker was handling 95 cases - 65 more than state regulations permit.

A 92-year-old woman was fatally struck by a car Thursday when a fellow resident of a Cherry Hill senior housing complex lost control of the vehicle in the facility's parking lot, township police said. Rose Weber, who was pushing a walker in the lot of the Raymond and Gertrude R. Saltzman House in the 1400 block of Springdale Road, died at the scene shortly before 3 p.m. Authorities believe Shirley Braverman, 82, "stepped on the gas instead of the brake" while backing out of a space on the north end of the parking lot, said Lt. Sean Redmond.

A Vineland Public Schools social worker was arrested today and charged with sexually assaulting a male teenage student under her care, Cumberland County Prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae said. Stacey L. Johnson, 44, of Bridgeton, also was charged with witness tampering for allegedly telling the boy not to talk to police. None of the sexual assaults took place on school property, Webb-McRae said. She did not disclose how investigators learned of the incidents, which occurred when the boy was 16 and 17. Johnson was the boy's social worker at school, the prosecutor said.

The city removed a social worker from active casework Tuesday after The Inquirer revealed repeated failures by the city's Department of Human Services to intervene in the ongoing abuse of 6-year-old Khalil Wimes that ended with his parents being charged with his murder. In announcing the step involving the social worker, Mayor Nutter also said DHS would review all child-welfare cases handled by the worker and her supervisor. "Our hearts are very heavy for Khalil," Nutter said, adding, "We will conduct a complete review of everything that happened in this case.

When police arrested the parents of Khalil Wimes and accused them of starving and torturing their 6-year-old son to death, Mayor Nutter decried the boy's demise as tragic, but said the city could not have prevented it. Philadelphia's Department of Human Services had no official oversight - no "open case" - for Khalil Wimes, the mayor stressed. "None," Nutter told reporters in March. "Next question. " In fact, Khalil had spent the final months of his life beaten, bone thin, desperately ill, and out of school - and DHS had failed to see what was right in front of it. An Inquirer review of Khalil's death - including interviews with his siblings, foster parents, and other family members, and a review of police reports, court documents, and DHS files - found the city missed many chances to save him. The child welfare system plucked Khalil from a safe home and put him in jeopardy in the first place, then failed to rescue him when he was hurt, The Inquirer review showed.

Holiday charitable requests can overwhelm those with big hearts but modest means. Every penny matters in trying times, but surely no one believes a $100 donation will end homelessness or cure cancer. My second grader desperately wants to protect polar bears from extinction, but how do I break it to her that the $50 we gave in her name was devoured by bureaucracy? How might we, as a family beholden to a budget, perform tangible acts of generosity? Gene and Michele Rice found a way to make their donations have an impact on a basketball court, in a recording studio, onstage, and on a karate mat - places that children go to pursue passions or even fleeting interests.

LINDA ANN WESTON claims that she doesn't know her birth date, the current year or how to spell "cat. " She thinks that George W. Bush is still president. Yet, Weston is the alleged mastermind of a Social Security and welfare-fraud scam that spans several states and possibly includes dozens of victims. Again and again, for decades, she has duped federal Social Security Administration officials, state welfare employees, police and social workers across the country: *  She had scammed at least $7,500 a month - or roughly $90,000 a year - in Supplemental Security Income on behalf of herself and at least 11 others, including four mentally disabled people that she allegedly imprisoned, with little food and no bathroom, in a dark boiler room in a Tacony apartment building.

Theodore Corbin, medical director of Healing Hurt People, a violence-intervention program of the Drexel University College of Medicine, can pinpoint the moment he pledged his career to emergency care. It was 1992, the day his father's car skidded on black ice near 30th Street Station. Corbin's mother was in the passenger seat. Corbin, then a first-year medical student, sat in back. "Teddy, check on your mother," his father said before staggering from the car. Her seat had collapsed and she had passed out. When she came to, she told her son to check on his father, who lay unconscious at the side of the road.

AMERICANS find themselves in a struggle for the soul of our nation yet again. Some see it as an economic struggle, some see it as a social struggle, some see it as a political struggle. But really it comes down once again to a moral struggle - how do we define ourselves as a nation and how do we fix what isn't working in America today? This is what has motivated so many Americans to occupy Wall Street and Main Street from coast to coast. We've seen a government powerless to act, a government mired in gridlock, a government plagued by dysfunction where influence is for sale to the highest bidder.

A few weeks ago, when news broke of the Tacony house of horrors, I was too repulsed to read the stories or watch the breathless television accounts. I didn't want to know the sordid details, so for a while I ignored the case. What a luxury. But some people don't have that luxury. People who are paid every day to tend to the traumas meted out by the worst among us. People who, for the most part, are noticed only when they fail, because the consequences of their mistakes are so unspeakably tragic.

THE SAD STORY of Danieal Kelly concluded yesterday after the final three defendants convicted for contributing to the handicapped girl's 2006 starvation death received prison sentences. "I know I let my daughter down," a downcast Daniel Kelly, 40, said moments before he and two social workers were each sentenced to 2 1/2 to five years in state prison. In July, a jury convicted the absentee dad of child endangerment for turning Danieal over to his ex-wife - her mother - even though he knew she was an unfit parent.