Philly Safe and Sound, the controversial non-profit over seeing a million different programs for kids, decided yesterday that it was closing shop, right as a state audit was being released that didn't exactly look good for the organization.
The state report, issued last Thursday, concluded that Safe and Sound had lax financial controls and doled out money to community-based providers without first signing contracts with them.
Safe and Sound branded the state report unfair and disputed many of its assertions.
The local team said that one of the most troubling aspects found by an accounting firm hired by the state to examine Safe and Sound's books was "that numerous vendors had only post-office boxes and no physical addresses [and] that different vendors were listed at the same post-office box and different vendors had the same physical addresses."
As long as the services that Safe and Sound were going to provide will still be there for Philly kids, then the loss of Safe and Sound is not necessarily a bad thing.
The Philly Safe and Sound organization started as one of 5 similar nonprofits in cities around the Country, with money and supervision from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (as part of their Urban Health Initiative). As I understand it, the point was to provide data driven analysis and research of the best and most effective ways to improve child outcomes in Philly. (The sister programs were in Oakland, Baltimore, Richmond and Detroit.)
However, what Safe and Sound grew into was a largely outsourced Department of Human Services, with much of the City's resources, but with little of the the City's oversight. That is a recipe for disaster.
The underlying current in all of this is that the programs themselves- especially after-school programs for at-risk kids- are still desperately needed, whether Safe and Sound exists or not.
The big , bad wolf is dead
http://phillyneighborhoods.org/
He huffed and puffed and blew the house down.
Good analysis
The place to start with the Safe and Sound saga is the problem that the agency exacerbated thanks to its mismanagement: the need for after-school programs.
That's a big story.
The way I look at it, as a society we have an economy that demands that every able-bodied adult holds a full-time job but an educational system that assumes that there is always an adult at home to meet school-age children.
This disconnect is made worse, as everything always can be, by poverty.
So yes we should be mad: Safe and Sound's mismanagement was not just wasting your and my city tax dollars, which is bad enough; but we should be especially mad that it was wasting the precious few dollars that the city had allocated for its most at-risk kids. That means fewer kids had a safe place to go in the afternoon, fewer kids were given the opportunity to pursue an activity or get some help with homework, and more kids were out on the street.
Another lesson I take from the whole affair relates to a lot of public/private projects. Safe and Sound's failures seem to me symptomatic of a lot of mediocre 1990's social policy that was built around the idea that merely by contracting out services, Government can eliminate waste and inefficiency. Not so easy, I'd say. Contracts to private service-providers can move government tax dollars further from government oversight. Spending millions of dollars without much oversight is, as Dan says, a recipe for disaster, wasteful cronyism or worse.
The way it worked with Safe and Sound, the city turned over a big lump of money to them, and then S&S found private service providers to dole out the money to AND THEN S&S was supposed to make sure those services were, in fact, adequately being provided.
That's too much responsibility for one private agency, I think. When a Government decides that hiring private service providers is the best way to go (always a leap of faith, in my opinion), it at least should hold onto the responsibilities of choosing the contractors and overseeing their work.
Anything else is adding a layer of bureaucracy that we don't need.
Again, as a society we really need to come up with better answers to questions like Where should kids go and What should kids do when there aren't any parents around? Mandatory after-school? Fully-funded on site arts, sports and tutoring activities? Universal preschool? I think we should be talking about them all.
The oldest game in the world
In principle, private contractors can bring a level of expertise and efficiency to specific government projects that the government's in-house staff can't. Competitive bidding can (again, in principle) bring some savings as companies compete for the gig. If the city wants to build a building, it can bring together the best architects and builders in the city and award the contract to the best bid. Then the builder and architect go on to build buildings in the private sector, and the city goes on to administer public programs. This makes sense, since it's wasteful for the city to keep a full building crew on payroll. Anyway, that's the way it's supposed to work.
This process has devolved in two ways. First, we've started outsourcing public and social services that (independently of the government divesting themselves of the business) there is no private market for. Schools, public services, military support -- in the absence of graft, these are simply not profitable enterprise. Nor is there much demand for them apart from government contracts. Finally, when you lose oversight and competitive bidding, we've lost all pretense of a "market solution." All that's left is a license to hand money to friends and allies, changing hands again and again.
tcarmody's right
There’s a limited private market on government services which have little profit.
The irony at the School District where contracting has gone amuck (everything from curriculum to professional development to schools) is that the more the District contracts out, the less internal capacity it has because it cuts staff and programs to pay for and/or reap savings from the contracts it forges. So when things go wrong as they have with the Education Management Organizations (EMOs) that run schools, there’s no way to regain control (look no further than the Chester School District).
Last year the School District’s own staff recommended cutting two-thirds of the privately managed schools. Many advocates called for a revival of the Office of Restructured Schools which had schools similar in demographics and achievement to EMOs and whose academic results outstripped even the average District managed school. But the office had been shut down the year before due to lack of funding.
The state takeover body decided that there was no capacity to reclaim schools from the private companies that ran them. So they simply renewed all the EMO contracts no matter how poorly they were doing. This year the District issued a report on what new contractors they had lined up in case of managerial changes at schools and could only come up with a handful of new options. So when it proposed expanding EMOs to other struggling schools, many parents feared it was simply recycling the same failing managers that didn’t work at other schools, rather than finding ways to address the root causes of problems.
One last note on irony, because of the limited market, the political connectedness of anyone getting contracts with a government entity, and the lack of oversight, the District often ends up paying many contractors more than they would in a truly competitive environment – Edison Schools Inc. for example got paid almost double what other EMOs got paid, and even those other EMOs got paid hundreds of dollars more per student in management fees.
Safe and Sound Disbands
Today is a very sad day in Philadelphia, not only for the employees of Safe and Sound but also for the hundreds of organizations that relied upon this organization for the funding sources that made available after-school programming for children who otherwise would have no where to go at the end of the school day.
As an administrator of one of the many agencies funded through S & S, I can tell you that contracts were not funded until completely signed off and approved, i.e., for our organization. On a regular basis we received site visits; that the PCAPS System kept watch on all dollars spent; that the Core Standards was followed to the letter; and that standards by which we were required to operate were constantly scrutinized by the analysts assigned to each organization.
I believe that what Mayor Street originally intended was to assure the safety of the school children in Philadelphia and to be sure that they were safe after-school every day. Maybe you didn't like his politics, and maybe he knew that and didn't care, but in my life time he was the only Mayor who ever showed the concern that he did for the children of this city and actually did something about the latch-key children and the problems created by mothers in the workforce. When S & S first started the After-School Initiative it was designed with children first. The agencies were always open when schools were closed for the sole purpose of giving the parents the assurance that their children had a place to go and be engaged. As soon as the School Dist. of Phila. became involved, the programs became fragmented. We had to follow the School District calendar. What is the good of an after-school program operating simultaneously with a school district calendar. Parents need coverage for their children when they are at work and schools are closed. When those demands came down on the programs the entire objective of what was originally set out began to change and not for the good. If S & S was not operating up to par, it escaped us, because we only received the finest and the best from all we worked with. It was an honor to have been affiliated with such a fine organization. Thank you to all S & S employees. We wish you the best for the future. Your dedication to the children of Philadelphia will always be remembered.
Creative Lady
Cashcow
Funny how Safe & Sound chose to disband just as they were being audited. This is what happens when you allow great sums of money to be passed out by politicians with little supervision.
A long time coming...
I must emphatically and wholeheartedly disagree with "Creative Lady's" comments. In my opinion, the termination of Philadelphia Safe and Sound's operations is the best thing that could have happened to the after school providers (or at least those who are truly dedicated to serving the needs of Philadelphia youth).
I worked for one of the early collaborating entities on the Children's Investment Strategy, overseeing the disbursement of Mayor Street's ambitious multi-million dollar initiative. Though started under the Rendell administration, this was definitely Street's baby. My days of involvement with the project date back to the early days when Naomi Post (Street's wife) still headed PSS. As a member of management in my organization, I attended dozens of meetings with PSS executives.
Initially, PSS staff was extremely limited...a total of perhaps 4-5 employees. At that point, their role was limited to determining contract amounts and recipients, as well as providing programmatic oversight. The United Way was contracted to oversee training and development. Philadelphia Health Management Corporation (PHMC) was contracted to provide fiscal and contract compliance, as well as to develop software for tracking program information. Eventually, the School District became involved as well (a benefit to the initiative,I believe) in order to create a liasion between the schools and the afterschool programs servicing the same population.
Under this quadrad of agencies, the initiative flourished. There was an adequate division of responsibilities and a resulting accountability for each of the agencies involved. Though Safe and Sound was a very green agency, the project was anchored by the United Way and PHMC, both powerhouses in the non profit world in Southeastern PA. The two agencies, as well as the School District, cleaned the mess up each time PSS faltered.
What happened then? PSS got greedy, pure and simple. They decided that they no longer needed these partner agencies. Why contract out technical, training and compliance oversight, when they could take on these duties themselves and grow their own agencies? The notion that they neither possessed the experience or qualified personnel did not occur to them to be a barrier to success.
I can attest to the fact that indeed, PSS issued payments to Providers without signed contracts and against the advice of their partner agencies. I can attest to the fact that they inflated their staff to unnecessary numbers, and that I was shocked at the complete lack of accountability for their spending, even when specific matters were brought to their attention. I can attest that site audit recommendations were usually ignored by PSS, and that agencies which were flagrantly dishonest and corrupt not only kept getting payments from PSS, their contracts grew over the course of the initiative.
Insofar as their PCAPS database goes, this software only went live in July of 2007. The agency spent a disordinate amount of taxpayer money developing a database fraught with glitches and inadequacies that was largely frowned upon by the majority of the Provider population for the short year it existed.
None of this erases the good work performed daily by a large portion of afterschool and summer programs funded by PSS. Nutter's request for competitive bids for the project is not only a fair and logical proposal, but the responsible thing to do. He has emphasized his committment to continuing this stream of funding. Less public money dedicated to PSS' administrative overhead and more in the hands of the direct service agencies? To me, and in my opinion, to anyone who cares about Philadelphia youth, this is music to our ears. Legitimate, dedicated Providers have nothing to fear.