The Long Road to Family Reunification

Early last spring, Nichole Macauley thought her three-plus year dependency court battle was finally over. After countless hearings, a revolving door of case managers, and years of painstaking compliance with court-ordered plans, the Philadelphia mother of three saw the outcome she wanted within reach.

“‘Reunification! We’re going for reunification!’ That’s what they told me,” she said.

When she arrived at court, however, a city attorney informed her that reunification was “off the table.”

For Macauley, whose children now range in age from five to 16, the blow proved devastating. She spent the following weeks vacillating between hope, anger and a depression that kept her in bed sometimes till late morning. She had, however, half expected the disappointment. She had long suspected that decisions about her children were being made by forces that had less to do with facts or law than with administrative inertia, workplace churn, even bad vibes with her case manager.

Her case now stretches past 40 months, while federal law calls on case managers to seek “permanency” if a child ever spends 15 out of 22 months in foster care. Permanency can mean finding the kids a legal guardian, adopting them out or reuniting them with a parent.

The reasons for this extraordinary delay reflect four chronic weaknesses in the child welfare system in Philadelphia and beyond: a workforce crisis that undermines relationship building among case workers and families, a hostile stance toward domestic violence survivors, and resistance to the byzantine process of placing children across state lines under the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children.

All that, plus something far more amorphous yet no less important: Those bad vibes. In simple terms, Macauley hasn’t endeared herself to the judge or staff working on her case.

Each flaw is well known among system professionals. And each flaw bears potential solutions. Combined in a single case, they reveal how the most meaningful solution requires a culture shift: to prioritize serving kids and families over separating them, and family relationships over relationships with case workers.

Domestic violence punished twice

For years, Macauley was the only victim of her abusive husband. But in March 2022, one of her sons reported that his father had body-slammed a sibling to the floor. Macauley — who has never been accused of abusing her children — also tested positive for an illegal drug, a result she attributed to contact with her husband.

Within days, Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services (DHS) had swept the children into foster care. In response, Macauley left her husband, secured stable housing and started racking up negative drug tests. She also sought a domestic violence-related shelter that might take herself and her children but never succeeded.

“If there had been some place where I could take myself and the kids, early on, I might not be in this position now,” says Macauley.

Last year, more than 10,000 people received help from Women Against Abuse through hotline, counseling, legal or housing services. They represent a fraction of the 100,000-plus domestic violence calls the city receives through 911. Executive director and president Joanna Otero-Cruz says Women Against Abuse had to turn away 294 people during the last fiscal year.

“We operate the only two domestic violence or emergency shelters in the city of Philadelphia,” says Otero-Cruz. “And we serve more than 1,200 individuals each year through those safe havens.”

Each safe haven, says Otero-Cruz, has more than 100 beds, so entire families can be accommodated but stays can be short. They also offer transitional housing, up to 18 months, for families through Sojourner House, which served 62 such families last fiscal year. But the need is far greater than Women Against Abuse can accommodate.

Women Against Abuse’s most recent IRS filing shows it takes in 90% of its revenue through government funding and grants. Its revenue stream has remained flat dating back to 2018, without even inflation-related bumps, suggesting the service provider could use a lot more help.

“Unfortunately, given the current political climate, I don’t see expansion,” says Otero-Cruz. “That is the reality that we’re living in right now. It’s really challenging.”

Experts who’ve reviewed Macauley’s case argue that the steps she did take — leaving her husband and compiling negative drug tests, in particular — should have been sufficient for reunification. Instead, she found herself stuck, in part because of how the system often treats survivors of domestic violence: not as victims, but as co-offenders.

“This happens constantly,” says Donnell Reid, a domestic violence counselor working with about 20 survivor-clients per year. “The mothers have never abused their kids, yet they’re only granted supervised visitation. The system doesn’t seem to understand how domestic violence works, and it punishes survivors the same as perpetrators.”

Macauley, too, has frequently been restricted to supervised visits.

Reid adds that while exposure to domestic violence harms children, severing them from their non-abusive parent only compounds that trauma. “I understand the need to protect kids, but when you take them from their mothers, you make it worse,” she says.

Philadelphia DHS has made significant improvements, Reid points out, including employing domestic violence consultants to guide case managers. But Reid says progress is uneven, especially in the courts, where survivors and alleged abusers are often treated as equally culpable.

City judges do receive some domestic violence training to recognize its nature, causes and dynamics, but Reid believes greater training is necessary for judges to understand how separation punishes kids and families who’ve already been traumatized.

For Macauley, the climate of judgment around her past abuse was put in the response to her filing a Protection of Abuse order against a boyfriend years after leaving her ex-husband. In 2024, angry over the loss of her children, she started tearing up her bedroom in an angry fit. Her then-new boyfriend wrapped her up in a wrestling hold, which triggered memories of past abuse she suffered from her ex-husband. She fled and filed a Protection from Abuse order. Weeks later, when she was training to work as a healthcare assistant, the instructor taught the same restraint hold her new boyfriend had used. Realizing he had been trying to help her, she withdrew the PFA.

Some observers might see the episode as a sign of growth in her immediate move to seek the order in the first place; others might see reason to doubt the safety she could provide her children going forward. The very act of filing it created fresh concerns among social workers. Domestic violence is a well-established risk factor for child abuse — not to mention the trauma a child experiences upon witnessing a parent being beaten.

The delay in reunification continued. Now, as of February, Macauley says she has ended her romantic relationship with her boyfriend, and has had no self- or third-party reports of domestic violence for more than 18 months since she first filed and withdrew that PFA against him. She also attends ongoing programs for domestic violence, according to documentation she shared for this story.

“I don’t want to repeat any old patterns, “ she says.

A workforce in constant flux

In 2024, Pennsylvania released a statewide Caseworker Recruitment and Retention Study, in a kind of slow-moving reaction to a workforce crisis that gained momentum during Covid-19. Philadelphia was not alone in seeing vacancy rates among DHS investigators of about 30% and turnover rates of 40% to 50%.

In the big picture, data like this remains an abstraction. But in Macauley’s story, the effects are specific. By her own count, Macauley has had nine different case managers.

Each change erased progress. Phone calls went unreturned. Requests for mental health support slipped through the cracks. In one instance, per text messages viewed by Resolve Philly/Next City, Macauley told a new case manager that she couldn’t understand why her children hadn’t already been returned to her.

“Because you’re in an ongoing domestic violence situation,” he responded.

At that point, Macauley had been free of her ex-husband for seven months. The new worker simply hadn’t read the file.

While the problem intensified during Covid-19, the issue of turnover and difficulty recruiting has haunted the child welfare field since its inception. The academic literature is filled with studies about it. Current Child Welfare League of America CEO Linda Spears calls it “a perpetual problem,” saying: “Virtually every agency deals with it, to some degree. And you just do your best to manage it.”

The effects on children and families run deep. Research shows that each new worker unnecessarily delays permanency and prolongs foster care stays by months or even longer, keeping kids who could be living at home in flux, often with strangers. The Pennsylvania Office of Children, Youth and Family Services study found a direct correlation: Increased turnover yields fewer family reunifications. New case managers need to build their own relationships with families to feel comfortable bringing them back together

The efforts agencies make to manage it — which can include burdensome caseload sizes for their workers — can lead to further problems, including decreased safety for kids. One recent, novel study found that county-level foster care systems under active consent decrees and outside oversight typically reduce their caseload sizes dramatically and reduce child mortality rates by 21%.

In fact, one of Macauley’s children was abused and moved again after he was placed in foster care, per emails viewed by Resolve Philly/Next City. Still, the problem is so perpetual that professionals in the field begin to look at it as unchangeable — like a mountain on the landscape.

“The problem of turnover is minimized,” says Jessica Pryce, a former case manager now teaching social work at Florida State University. “Caseload size and turnover are treated like minutiae, when in reality these factors affect everything — even whether families can reunify.”

Philadelphia has perhaps even sought to manage around the perpetual crisis by masking it, measuring caseloads in a way that field standard-bearers like the Child Welfare League of America reject. The city measures each family counts as a single case, no matter how many children are involved.

On paper, an average caseload size of 11 doesn’t look so bad. What workforce crisis? But in practice, 11 cases can mean a worker is trying to manage all of the needs and appointments of 20 or more children — well beyond industry standards. If the city measured each child as a case, as the Child Welfare League of America recommends, the workforce crisis would be easy to see.

“We’ve been arguing to the city for a long, long time to calculate caseloads the way they do in the rest of the country,” says union officer Gabe Li. “But they refuse to budge.”

Councilmembers Nina Ahmad and Cindy Bass questioned how DHS measures caseload sizes during city council hearings last year, but there is no indication DHS will change this practice.

For Macauley, this has meant entering court again and again with witnesses unfamiliar with her history, her compliance, and even basic facts about her situation. “I don’t get anywhere in court,” she said in an interview with Resolve Philly/Next City two years ago. “The case managers testify … sometimes they don’t even know what’s going on.”

A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Council of Children, Youth and Family Services says that salary raises supplied by DHS have stemmed some of the bleeding, but the workforce still can’t be described as stable. The large caseload sizes Philadelphia maintains are also associated with increased burnout and turnover, keeping the workforce problems locked in place.

Nationally, only the state of New Jersey has succeeded in reducing annual turnover rates to 10% or less for about 20 years, becoming the gold standard among child welfare systems. Officials accomplished this through greater investment in hiring and training staff to bring down caseload sizes.

Ultimately, the number of youth in foster care declined by 80% during this same timeframe, largely because New Jersey case managers had more time to spend with families and feel comfortable keeping them together.

If Philadelphia had adopted similar reforms to stem its own workforce crisis, experts say, Macauley would likely have her children back today.

“Those first two or three years, when my case manager was changing all of the time, were really rough,” she says, “I’d feel like maybe I made some progress with somebody and then it was like, ‘OK. We’re starting over.’ Again and again.”

The interstate problem

In 2023, Macauley tried to stabilize her life and impress her case manager by buying a house in New Jersey. She thought the move would demonstrate permanency and independence. But she hit another barrier: The Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), meant to facilitate child placements across state lines.

“I thought I was doing something great for me and my kids,” Macauley says. “But buying a house right across the bridge only delayed things more.”

In theory, the compact exists to ease kinship care or reunifications when family members move. In practice, case managers often resist triggering the process because it requires substantial paperwork and coordination, including a mandatory home study by the receiving state to approve the placement.

The ICPC process also triggers voluminous paperwork — one set of documentation for Pennsylvania, and another for the state to which the family is relocating.

Researchers like University of Michigan family law expert Vivek Sankaran have long noted extraordinary delays in interstate cases. In a study Sankaran conducted with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, home studies necessary for the replacement of a child were completed within the mandated 30-day time period just 30% of the time. Home studies in another 30% of the total cases reviewed weren’t completed within 90 days.

Interstate placements can also be denied for arbitrary reasons, even for birth parents. The Sankaran study found placements denied for reasons both vague and small: insufficient living space, unstable housing, the need for a parent to sleep on a couch to accommodate children. Another denial read “financially fragile,” even though, under federal law, poverty is not supposed to be a reason to place a child in foster care.

In 2020, civil attorney Nadeem Bezar filed a lawsuit on behalf of a three-year-old boy in Philadelphia, who had been placed stably with an uncle who planned to adopt him. After the uncle informed case managers that he planned to move with the boy to New Jersey, the child was abruptly removed from the man’s house and placed in what’s known as “stranger” foster care. According to the suit, the boy suffered catastrophic abuse after this needless move from blood family.

“The ICPC exists to prevent exactly that,” Bezar tells Resolve Philly/Next City. “But agencies avoid it whenever they can.”

When Macauley’s case manager learned of her Jersey home purchase, she advised her to immediately sell the house. When Macauley called the city’s complaint line for families with DHS cases, the worker there also told her she’d be best off selling it. Macauley, seeing she’d lose money in the process and still have nowhere to move her kids, resisted.

This stagnation continued for a few weeks, till Resolve Philly/Billy Penn sent written questions to Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services, seeking answers as to why Macauley’s case had languished. Within days, by coincidence or media scrutiny, she got a call from a case manager to “begin the ICPC process.”

Including the time the city spent trying to avoid it, the ICPC process took more than a year. During that year, Macauley filed and withdrew that PFA. New Jersey, citing doubts over the PFA, rejected her.

The original ICPC process was adopted in 1960, and features what scholars call antiquated language and out of date protocols. A revision was introduced in 2007, which includes strict timelines and enforcement mechanisms in cases where they aren’t met. The revision also eases protocols around placements with parents, which would have lowered the barriers for Macauley.

But the revision requires 35 states to pass laws adopting it to go into effect. That hasn’t happened yet, and Pennsylvania is among the states who have not yet voted for the new version.

So for now, the system remains locked in place, flaws and all.

The rule of vibes

By last fall, two of Macauley’s children were moved to live with her stepmother, giving her more consistent access. Her youngest, however, has remained with a stranger, away from his mother and siblings.

Despite clean drug tests and a move back to Pennsylvania, reunification has remained elusive. The only potential sticking point now seems to be the PFA and its withdrawal — both of which were based on Macauley’s word.

One particularly cruel twist in Macauley’s tale is that the stress of being unnecessarily separated from her kids, and the need for emotional support, might have had adverse effects on Macauley’s decision-making. Her relationship with a new boyfriend bloomed two years after she’d lost her kids into the foster care system.

The continued delay in reunification reveals just how much power the system holds over people’s lives, down to determining who they can date — and, in this instance, whether or not they believe Macauley’s assurances that she and the boyfriend are now only friends.

Child welfare professionals informed of the details in Macauley’s case assess it as “marginal” — industry shorthand to describe cases where the facts don’t justify keeping the family apart long-term, let alone any termination of parental rights.

“The majority of these cases are about relationships,” says April Lee, who co-founded Philly Voice For Change, which advocates for reform of the foster care system. “That’s always my biggest guidance for parents. Your case is better off if the case manager likes you. It shouldn’t be that way, but personalities often determine who gets the resources, and referrals for services, and who doesn’t.”

Macauley admits she hasn’t always softened her words, sometimes calling her children’s foster case “kidnapping” — an accusation case workers take personally. The strained relationships become part of the record, even if, by law, they shouldn’t matter. And though she has had this same case manager for well over a year, their relationship has never warmed.

“It’s personality conflicts,” says Sarah Katz, director of Temple’s new Family Justice Clinic. “I think it’s a design flaw. Parents in child welfare are subject to these judgments of compliance — judged by jumping when they are told to jump and graciously asking, ‘How high?’”

Emotions, including anger, should be expected from a parent denied their own children. “But every time a parent expresses any emotion of any kind, it contributes to this bad relationship or ‘lack of vibe,’” Katz says.

Philadelphia employs family team conferences, a process in which case managers and social service staff meet with families in a non-judgmental and collaborative setting. The meetings, touted by the influential Annie E. Casey Foundation, were supposed to foster better relationships among workers and families and alleviate their adversarial nature. The meetings are supposed to give families a chance to lead the conversation, to talk about their strengths, challenges and what if any needs they perceive.

The city has seen a drastic downturn in the number of kids in foster care, a prized goal for reformers in a system where 85% of children are separated from their families for reasons other than abuse. But family team conferences get mixed reviews.

Academic literature notes that family group conferencing doesn’t appear to reduce child welfare involvement or out of home placements. Power imbalances and hard feelings between parents and case managers persist.

Macauley’s mother, Florence Boerner, says she was invited to one such conference, which devolved when her daughter was asked to re-take a drug and alcohol class she’d already successfully completed.

On her daughter’s behalf, Boerner questioned why. Everyone “started getting upset, and I was never invited back,” she recalls.

Boerner says this happened with the family’s current, long-term case manager, who she says also informed Boerner that she has had “too many names.”

“She was doing background checks on me when she said this,” says Boerner, who was seeking to take in her daughter’s youngest child. She has had three names: two married, one maiden.

DHS holds different types of family team meetings, at different stages of services or foster care, says Lee of Philly Voice for Change. “These meetings can be helpful when the services and the meeting are tailored to the individual family rather than a box to check off for the institution,” Lee says.

The family team meetings, however, look a lot like the rest of the system — governed by protocols that case workers sometimes simply waive or ignore. The meetings are also overseen by a “neutral moderator” from DHS, which is not a neutral party in the case. Sometimes, the case workers come in and ask for parents to meet new objectives not called for by the judge, says Lee. If parents sign off on those, they become beholden to them.

“It goes back to the personality thing,” says Lee. “I see it happen often where the parent is not informed, for instance, that they can invite whoever they want to the meeting.” Macauley and her mother, too, thought they needed the case worker’s invite.

For Lee, the most important solution is knowledge.

“What would really help is for families to have the knowledge of their rights and what powers they have, and how their family is supposed to be leading these meetings.”

What next?

Late this summer, Macauley phoned this reporter again with an update on her rescheduled hearing. “Now it’s set for Oct. 6,” she said. “We’re going for reunification.”

This time, she thought, would really be it. But it wasn’t.

Her case manager refused to endorse reunification. The judge agreed.

November passed. Then December.

The case languished for 40 months. At the start of the new year, Macauley’s attorney, Steve Cohen, told Resolve Philly/Next City that “there will be no termination of parental rights. She’s a loving, committed, non-abusive parent.”

The facts suggest Nichole Macauley is all of that. Yet on Jan. 7, Macauley emerged after a status hearing in shock.

Her case manager appeared comfortable leaving her older children in the home of Macauley’s stepmother, where she has regular visits and can maintain her connection with them. But the case manager told the judge she intended to “explore adoption” for the youngest child, a 5-year-old boy.

What’s more, there was some discussion between the judge and case manager about providing visitation time between the kids and their birth father, despite the allegation of abuse against him that kicked off this child welfare case.

Court papers from that date still list reunification as the primary goal and also typify Macauley as “moderately compliant” with the agency’s requests. The court’s unwillingness to allow reunification seems to revolve solely around Macauley maintaining contact with the man she filed, and withdrew, the PFA against more than a year ago.

Why, exactly, is any of this happening?

“I think if you hadn’t been through something like this, you’d never believe it,” says Macauley. “It makes no sense to me that I don’t have my children.”

This story originally was published by Next City, one of more than 30 news organizations powering the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative. This article is part of Resolve Philly’s Our Kids project examining the challenges and opportunities facing Philadelphia’s foster care system. You can read other stories in the series here.