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.