Philly doesn’t have too few foster homes. It has too many foster kids.

We’ve all heard the adage that goes: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” A classic example of that adage is Philadelphia’s approach to the welfare of its children.

In 2016, Philadelphia closed its only juvenile psychiatric residential treatment facility — Wordsworth — after a 17-year-old died in a fight with staff. The city opened another in 2020, but that facility soon lost its license due to “multiple child right violations,” according to the state. Now, the city is asking providers to bid for a contract to create another facility.

So, the plan is to build an institution to replace the abusive institution that replaced another abusive institution. Meanwhile, because Philadelphia still is taking too many children from their homes, there are not enough foster homes, so the children are held in conference rooms.

There are better answers.

The argument for institutionalizing children taken from their parents is that a shortage of family foster homes leaves agencies with no other choice, and, in any case, some children have problems so complex that a family can’t handle them.

Neither claim holds up to scrutiny.

Philadelphia doesn’t have too few foster parents; Philadelphia has too many foster children.

“The plan is to build an institution to replace the abusive institution that replaced another abusive institution.”

This has long been a problem. In 2020, it was reported that Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services tore apart families at the highest rate among America’s biggest cities. To its credit, DHS has made significant progress in reducing that rate. But still, the rate at which children are taken from their homes in Philadelphia is, for example, more than double that of New York City. These removals are not having their intended effect, as there is no evidence that Philadelphia children are twice as safe as New York children.

The vast majority of children taken from their parents are not living in some nightmarish scenario of sexual or physical abuse. Far more often, children are placed in foster care because authorities have confused the parents’ poverty with “neglect” — perhaps parents’ food stamps ran out, or they were kicked off Medicaid and an illness went untreated, or the kids were inadequately supervised while the parents worked. So there is plenty of opportunity for Philadelphia’s DHS to build on its progress and reduce removals to the New York rate — or better. Then, there will be lots of empty foster homes for all those children now trapped in places like a DHS conference room.

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The residential treatment industry typically responds by piously proclaiming they really, truly believe children belong in families. But then they rush to claim that there’ll always be some youth who are simply too difficult for a family to handle.

But even when residential treatment centers are not hellholes — which happens depressingly often — there is no evidence that they can do anything for these young people. On the contrary, the evidence is overwhelming that residential treatment is a failure.

That should be no surprise. The premise of residential treatment is that the best way for youth with serious behavior problems to get better is to institutionalize them with a bunch of other youth with serious behavioral problems, right at the time they are most vulnerable to peer pressure. Why would anyone expect that to work?

This also explains why these places are so often engulfed in scandals over abuse. Predators go where the prey is.

There is a better option.

Philadelphia needs to offer more wraparound services, in which anything a child needs is brought right into the child’s own home, or, when placement is genuinely necessary, a family foster home. There is nothing residential treatment does that wraparound doesn’t do better and at less cost. DHS needs both to cut back on how many children it takes and pour the savings into wraparound services so that parents, and when necessary foster parents, can take care of those “difficult” children.

Would that mean that no Philadelphia child ever again would have to spend even one night in an office or some other awful makeshift placement? Probably not. But it would happen to far fewer children than endure it now.

Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. He served on the Philadelphia City Council Special Committee on Child Separations.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city’s push toward economic justice. See all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.