An agency that works, helping kids and their families
Allegheny County’s Children, Youth and Families agency is among the most creative and effective in the country, thanks to a strong director and outside support, writes former PG reporter
Marc Cherna came to Pennsylvania from New Jersey to run Allegheny County’s Children, Youth and Families agency in 1996, a time when CYF was a national disgrace for endangering children rather than aiding vulnerable families.
The agency Mr. Cherna agreed to run and reform too often placed youngsters with dangerous caretakers who injured or killed them. It refused to explain its actions and policies to the public, which both paid for and suffered from them. And it placed AfricanAmerican children with white foster parents instead of qualified relatives.
Now, 22 years later, the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, which encompasses CYF and is directed by Mr. Cherna, is a national leader in pioneering programs, including most recently a predictive risk modeling tool that helps CYF caseworkers more accurately determine which of the 14,000 allegations of child abuse and neglect the agency receives annually require investigation. It is the first child welfare agency in the world to use this kind of tool.
Mr. Cherna’s achievements have made him among the most celebrated and longest-serving directors of child welfare departments in the country. His success is crucial to a healthy Allegheny County because DHS serves 20 percent of the population in any given year through its constituent programs. Those provide services to children, the aging, the homeless and people with addictions, intellectual disabilities and mental health issues.
Mr. Cherna made DHS part of the community, not an agency imperiously imposed on the community. To foster trust and transparency, Mr. Cherna engages stakeholders, including clients, civic and religious groups, school districts and universities, and judicial and elected officials. In the early days, this was not easy because many of the stakeholders were pretty angry about how CYF had treated them.
The Western Pennsylvania foundation community was vital to the turnaround of CYF and the creation of DHS. The foundations have awarded DHS more than $20 million in grants since 1997, when the R. K. Mellon Foundation, the region’s largest, convened seven other philanthropic organizations to work toward successful unification of four county departments to become DHS.
The foundations created the Human Services Integration Fund, which the Pittsburgh Foundation administers. Over two decades, some 20 foundations and organizations have contributed to the fund.
The fund itself was groundbreaking for the foundations for two reasons. One was that they had not traditionally worked together on projects. The success of this one led to other collaborations.
The other reason was that the foundations typically had not funded government programs. Philanthropies are not in a position to perennially subsidize public services. The Allegheny
County foundations determined, however, that they could finance experimental projects to improve government programs.
The late Gerri Kay, who served as a senior vice president at the Pittsburgh Foundation when the integration fund was launched, and Marge Petruska, who was senior program director for children, youth and families at The Heinz Endowments, were instrumental in the success of the fund.
Jeanne Pearlman, who replaced Ms. Kay as the Pittsburgh Foundation’s senior vice president for program and policy, said Ms. Kay met Mr. Cherna soon after he arrived in Pittsburgh and worked tirelessly to pioneer ways for the private foundation sector to provide sustained support for innovation in the public sector, creating a prototype that has since been replicated.
For the integration fund to work, though, the foundation community had to trust Mr. Cherna. Both Maxwell King, president of the Pittsburgh Foundation, and Grant Oliphant, president of The Heinz Endowments, said Mr. Cherna earned trust quickly. Mr. King said Mr. Cherna came to Pittsburgh with a reputation as a reformer and, from the outset, civic leaders saw that he had great potential to solve problems.
Mr. Oliphant said funders saw that Mr. Cherna was personally committed to modernizing and improving the human-services system and that he would leave if he were unable to accomplish visionary service improvements for children and families.
Some of the projects the fund supported, such as consolidating the administrative functions of all four DHS agencies into one building, saved the county hundreds of thousands of dollars. Others were cutting-edge transformations that made DHS a national model.
One of the first initiatives sponsored by the integration fund was construction of a DHS data warehouse. The four agencies that merged into DHS had maintained separate computerized information systems. The integration fund gave DHS $2.8 million to combine and enhance those systems. The result is a data warehouse that now contains several hundred million records from 29 sources, including schools, courts, jails and child-welfare agencies, on about 1 million people.
In 2014, a Mellon Foundation grant funded creation of the predictive risk-modeling tool that is used when the agency receives an allegation of abuse or neglect to score the risk to children on a scale from 1 to 20, with the highest numbers requiring immediate investigation. The data warehouse is integral to the scoring, which means that integration fund grants from 20 years ago helped establish the stepping stones that have led to the development of this unique tool.
The risk-modeling tool weighs numerous factors, such as contact with the justice system and drug treatment, to determine a score. Race is not among the factors included because it did not improve accuracy.
Developed for DHS by a team of experts from California and New Zealand universities, the tool helps childwelfare call screeners make better decisions, preventing families from being subjected to unnecessary investigation and focusing more of caseworkers’ time on families that really need help.
Risk-modeling was launched in August 2016, but not before the community was consulted at meetings and a session at which DHS invited comments from 30 community and civic group representatives, among them the ACLU and court officials. The tool was also subjected to a professional ethical review and two types of evaluation, paid for by the integration-fund grant and a grant from a national organization, Casey Family Programs.
The ethical assessment determined that the tool was so much more accurate than relying solely on human analysis that declining to use it would be unethical.
Still, there are issues. The information on which the tool relies comes from government agencies. As a result, most is about impoverished families who use government services such as welfare, food stamps and Medicaid-funded drug and alcohol treatment. It does not contain that kind of data on wealthy families and those using private health insurance.
This means the predictive-risk results may tend to give lower scores to wealthy white families than to families of color, who have disproportionate contact with courts because of law enforcement focus on their communities, and to poor families, though records of contacts with public services do not always raise scores.
DHS has taken steps to try to account for this. For instance, supervisors can overrule low scores when they believe other evidence indicates an investigation should be conducted. In addition, a score is never revealed to investigating caseworkers, preventing them from harboring biases from the outset. DHS also allows families to see the information about them in the database.
At this early stage, as the predictive-risk tool is tweaked and enhanced and watched closely by childwelfare agencies across the country, Mr. Cherna continues to work to ensure that it is an ethical, unbiased and accurate instrument. He also is contemplating ways to expand its use to further improve the prospects of children, youth and families. Twenty-two years after Marc Cherna arrived in Allegheny County he remains a reformer on a mission.
Barbara White Stack is a former Post-Gazette reporter who covered CYF and Juvenile Court for a decade. She now works for the United Steelworkers.