Philadelphia Foster Care Reform -
JLC-DHS Child Welfare Partnership

Background

The Jerry Lee Center’s collaboration with the Philadelphia Department of Human Services developed directly from the work of students in the classroom. During 2001 a class of graduate students was given direct access to the Department’s client database and conducted a series of analyses for senior department officials. Impressed with the student team’s insights and conclusions, DHS contracted with the Jerry Lee Center to provide data analysis and support for the implementation of a new program to improve results in the city’s child welfare system.

Child welfare is a highly complex policy and practice environment. Operationally, DHS is committed to the overlapping and equal objectives of promoting safety, permanence, and well-being in children’s lives. In Philadelphia the social work with foster children, the foster family, and the natural family is carried out by both DHS and contracted provider agencies that conduct the day-to-day management of children’s cases. Traditionally, the provider agencies were paid on a per diem basis, at a daily rate that covered subsistence expenses and a negotiated administrative percentage.

In 2001 DHS selected Performance Based Contracting (PBC), an evidence-based contracting practice designed to encourage foster care provider agencies to move children to safe and permanent family situations. DHS chose the JLC to help implement this new policy effectively in Philadelphia.

Permanent solutions for children include:

• Reunification – Children are reunited with their birth parents following intensive social work services with the family to prevent future incidences of abuse or neglect.

• Adoption – The parental rights of birth parents are terminated and children are legally adopted by new parents

• Permanent Legal Custodianship (PLC) – Once any possibility of reunification or adoption is ruled out children can be cared for by legal custodians without the often difficult requirement of terminating parental rights.

The goal of PBC is to align agency results in securing permanent solutions for children with financial incentives for success. To accomplish that, DHS establishes a 12-month permanency target percentage. For each child an agency accepts for foster care placement, DHS pays the agency a lump sum that covers subsistence and administrative costs for 12 months. If the agency’s permanency rate exceeds the target percentage, the agency’s caseload will be smaller than expected. Therefore, the administrative cost per child will exceed the negotiated amount. JLC’s role is to monitor each agency’s permanency performance against the target percentage

The Jerry Lee Center's Role in PBC

• Transforming the data in DHS’ financial transaction based system into a complex performance outcome monitoring system;

• Designing and providing the official multi-level quarterly outcome monitoring reports used to determine agency performance, payments, and future contracts;

• Creating and maintaining a SQL database system for DHS personnel to reconcile disputed outcomes with providers;

• Responding to requests for additional data on the status of children in PBC including topics such as length of stay in care, use of emergency shelters, use of in home services, reports of abuse and neglect following permanency, demographic characteristics of the PBC population, sibling group cohesion in foster home placements, stability of foster home placements, and returns to care.

Performance-Based Contracting - Results

• Between the start of PBC on March 1 st 2003 and the end of FY 2007, 10,435 children from 5,445 families received services under the system.

• Permanencies as a percentage of the starting caseload each year rose from 19% in FY 2002 to 31% in FY 2007.

• Meanwhile, less desirable, non-permanent outcomes (such as movements to higher levels of foster care, hospitalization, runaways, and de-stabilizing transfers between agencies) have been reduced from 18% of the caseload in FY 2002 to 11% of the caseload in FY2007.

Internal Performance Management

JLC and DHS have also been working to utilize a performance-based approach to internal management at DHS. JLC is using DHS internal data systems to compute a series of performance measures across the Children and Youth Division and to help the DHS Quality Assurance Director teach CYD unit directors and administrators how to use those measures to manage their supervisees’ performance.

These Internal Performance Management (IPM) analyses concern “headline” performance measures identified by DHS and are intended to provide multiple levels of analysis from a departmental-wide perspective to the supervisor, or social worker level.

The analyses are intended to complement the department’s Cognos data analysis system by providing long term analyses for each Family Service Region and the Intake Center on a quarterly basis. The following chart depicts the intended IPM cycle:

The JLC-DHS Child Welfare Partnership has been successful in bringing performance based management techniques to Philadelphia DHS. As a result of the PBC and IPM experiences, DHS is now actively working with the JLC to extend this model to other areas of the city’s child welfare system and to five new programs that DHS is creating in response to recommendations of the Child Welfare Review Panel. With valuable data analysis and advice, the JLC has been able to make a significant contribution to the efforts to improve accountability and develop performance-based practice at DHS.

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