The Testimony of David Fair: The State of Child Welfare

There is an ongoing crisis in child welfare (see https://cwla.org/perspective-the-workforce-crisis-in-child-welfare-might-be-the-tip-of-an-iceberg/…) Mr. David Fair a contributor of The Neoliberal Journals and The Neoliberal Round testified today at the Philadelphia City Council on the incredibly serious crisis taking place in the child welfare workforce. Rev. Renaldo McKenzie, host of The Neoliberal Round have discussed this with Mr. Fair before on The Podcast, Rev. McKenzie is a former child welfare specialist. He tweeted today that: #Childwelfare: From homelessness, to lack of resources and funding, poor educational outcomes and deplorable wages. The fluff of paperwork which does not do justice to the real issues in child welfare – lack of funding, families do not have money to raise their kids and communities are depressed. Philadelphia is one of the poorest cities in the country and violent teens demonstrate the child welfare problems. No social program will work if we do not get social welfare or child welfare right.”

Mr. David Fair Deputy Chief at Turning Points for Children spoke to the City Council Committee on Children and Youth Child Welfare Workforce Crisis

Monday, March 13, 2023, and shared his testimony with me. He will be speaking with Renaldo McKenzie in an interview on Sunday at 3pm for The Neoliberal Round Podcast on Child Welfare discussing his testimony The podcast will be aired later on Sunday evening.

David Fair, Deputy Chief of Turning Points for Children, Philadelphia.

The Testimony:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

My name is David Fair, and I am the deputy chief executive officer for Turning Points for Children. Turning Points currently operates the largest Community Umbrella Agency and Foster Care programs in the Philadelphia area, serving almost 3,000 children daily, and primarily as a result of inadequate funding, we have experienced significant staffing challenges in both programs in recent years.

We have and will hear of the details and the numbers which show the crisis in child welfare that chronic underfunding has wrought, for both DHS and its providers. But what you might not hear of is the extraordinary stress and trauma related to the provision of child welfare services, and of the toll such stressors take on those remarkable people who choose to do this work every day. Turning Points is honored to employ over 600 of these amazing people, who go to incredible lengths every minute and every hour to reach our over-arching goals – that every child be safe and that every child be with their family whenever possible.

I have been honored to serve on the Philadelphia Child Welfare Workforce Task Force and to have been part of developing the urgent report and recommendations that you have before you. I will leave to others at this hearing to provide the details, but the report makes clear what anyone in child welfare has known for a long time – that our lack of support for those on the frontlines of caring for our most at-risk children feeds child abuse and neglect rather than reducing it.

To be clear: by failing to pay a living wage to child welfare workers at all levels; by overwhelming those workers with unnecessarily burdensome paperwork, which often drains them of their energy and often has little relationship to the safety and well-being of the child, by thinking that it makes sense to assign caseloads of up to 30 and more children at one time – by creating a system that is destined to fail so many families, we as a community of caring Philadelphians simply are not doing the best we can for the children and families who come to us for help.

As the largest community-based child welfare organization in the region, Turning Points therefore has both the largest child welfare workforce in the system and the biggest challenges to finding and retaining those workers. This is not because of lack of effort on the part of Turning Points or its funders at state and city DHS. Earlier in this hearing, Commissioner Ali detailed the extraordinary efforts that DHS is making for fiscal year 2024 to improve compensation for child welfare workers. That is important progress. But it is not enough.

The bottom line is that we as a community, as represented on this City Council and legislatures on the state and national levels, have been unwilling to make the necessary investment of energy and dollars that is required to reduce child abuse and neglect in our communities. I’ll say it again: We, the people of Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania, have been unwilling to spend what it will take to keep our children safe.

That failure is what leads to a 45% staff turnover rate in our system, significantly higher than is experienced in other public and private systems. It’s what leads to 60- and 70- hour workweeks, because we are unwilling to pay for on-call and overnight workers to respond to the 24/7 nature of child welfare crises. It’s what creates extraordinarily high caseloads, which results in lower quality work for more and more children and families every day. It even undermines the ability of child welfare workers to care for their own children, as the urgencies of constant crises often prevent them from being there for their own families when needed.

There is a simple solution: Pay a living wage. Provide the kind of training and technology that supports good social work rather than just good paperwork. Stop starving city agencies such as DHS of the funds they need to support systems of care that actually work – and which by actually working, ultimately reduce the cost for the city’s taxpayers. I’d be happy to work directly with members of this committee to explore in more detail the specific challenges that our providers face.

Working with at-risk children and families can be incredibly affirming and inspiring work. But it should be no surprise that that commitment and inspiration is worn down by poor working conditions and even poorer compensation.

The challenges facing children, families and workers involved in child welfare – as detailed in the workforce report – are in many ways complex, but in some ways, they are simple to understand: If we invest in the safety and security of our children, and in the livelihoods of the courageous heroes who go out every day to assure that safety and security, more children will thrive, more families will remain whole, more communities will be safer. If we don’t, we are turning our backs on those children, on those families, and on those workers. And that begs the question: Do we really care?

Thank you for your attention.
David Fair, Deputy Chief of Turning Points for Children.