State DPW will review child deaths

A bill requiring public reports passed the Senate.

By Ken Dilanian and John Sullivan

Inquirer Staff Writers
October 19, 2006

Pennsylvania's welfare secretary is reviewing the actions of the city Department of Human Services in the wake of The Inquirer's report about child-abuse deaths, she said yesterday.

"You should never be in a situation where you say, 'I followed all the policy and kids died.' Then there must be something wrong with the policy," said state Secretary of Public Welfare Estelle B. Richman, who used to oversee the Philadelphia agency. She spoke shortly after the state Senate passed a bill requiring disclosures about child-abuse deaths.

Richman was referring to a statement last week by Cheryl Ransom-Garner, the current city DHS commissioner, that no policies or procedures had been violated in six cases where children died after contact with her agency.

In two interviews for an Inquirer article published Sunday, Ransom-Garner declined to answer specific questions about the cases on advice from city lawyers.

Richman characterized that stance yesterday as a "restrictive" interpretation of state confidentiality rules.

Richman said she was trying to determine whether she had the authority to waive some of those rules so that city officials could discuss their agency's actions publicly.

"If it's in the best interest of the children of Philadelphia, we need to do it," Richman said.

Mayoral spokesman Joe Grace said in a statement: "The Department of Human Services looks forward to the opportunity to have a thorough discussion with Secretary Richman about all of these issues."

From 2003 through 2005, 20 children died of abuse or neglect after they or their families had been the subject of interventions by DHS, The Inquirer reported Sunday. There were 10 such deaths last year alone.

The article spotlighted three cases in which signs of danger appeared to have been missed or discounted. In one case, neighbors said a mother who killed her infant son had been hearing demons.

On Monday, state legislators and the city controller called for public hearings into the conduct of DHS.

Ransom-Garner has defended the agency in recent interviews.

"Our staff do a heroic job every day," she said last week. "One child death is too many. And from every death we do a review to determine what can we do differently."

Richman was Mayor Street's managing director before she joined the Rendell administration in 2003 to head the state Department of Public Welfare. Among the functions of that department is regulating child-protective services in each county. DHS is the Philadelphia agency.

The Welfare Department oversees the review that is performed each time a child dies of abuse when the child or the family is known to the county agency. Those reviews, which are secret, are designed to find out what went wrong. In some cases, the department can cite the county agency for violating state regulations.

In the last three years, Richman's regulators have not found violations in city cases, state records show.

Yesterday, however, Richman said she intended to look more closely.

"I don't think my staff ask enough questions," she said. "What did you do in that case? Should you have done it this way?"

Richman said she had been reading through the files of children who died after contact with DHS.

She said she wanted to determine, for example, if DHS was working with city mental-health officials to ensure that at-risk parents were getting access to treatment. In two cases The Inquirer spotlighted, mothers with mental-health problems killed their children after DHS left them in their care.

Yesterday, Richman also ordered her staff to examine the records of all DHS caseworkers hired over the last three years to make sure they received the state-mandated 120 hours of training.

Yesterday evening, the state Senate unanimously approved legislation designed to bring Pennsylvania into compliance with federal child-abuse law.

The bill, which is expected to reach final passage Monday, includes an amendment by Sen. Stewart J. Greenleaf (R., Montgomery) requiring state officials to report to the public four times a year about children killed or severely injured by child abuse. The original language called for annual disclosures.

The legislature did not act on another proposal that would have overhauled how counties review deaths caused by abuse. That measure would have cracked the wall of secrecy surrounding death reviews by requiring copies to be released to the public, with the names removed.

Richman said the Rendell administration supported the proposal, which has been pushed for years by Rep. Katie True (R., Lancaster).

"We're 100 percent supporting of it. We're going to try to get it passed by June," Richman said.

True said yesterday that her bill probably wouldn't come up for a vote because she had angered Senate Republicans over unrelated matters.

"I don't think they're real happy with me in the Senate," she said. "It's politics. But we're talking about children's lives. We're not talking about the Katie True memorial highway."

A spokesman for Senate Republicans in Harrisburg disputed her contention, without elaborating.

To read previous articles or comments on the handling of child-abuse deaths, go to http://go.philly.com/dhs