Jill Porter | Report just more of the same, or will this one bring change?

0 Comments | Philadelphia Daily News, June, 2007

HOW MANY TIMES does it need to be said?

How often does a blue-ribbon panel have to reiterate the deficiencies of the city's child-welfare bureaucracy before systemic changes are made?

The latest report of the dysfunction of the Department of Human Services, released yesterday, brings to 23 the number of reports about DHS over the past 20 years.

That's almost as many reports as there are children - 27 - who died of abuse over the five-year period covered by the study.

The cost of the failure is clearer than ever.

Not just in the heartbreaking suffering of children who are subjected to unthinkable cruelty or beaten to death.

But also in the babies who survive so scarred they grow up to...