Opinion ID: 3015192
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Foster Care in Pennsylvania

Text: The question remains, then, whether the Servises performed a traditionally and exclusively public function. If so, regardless of their formal designation by the state, they are state actors. The issue thus becomes precisely what function of the Servises to choose as our object of comparison. Should it be their overall duties as foster parents? Should it be their daily care for Leshko’s physical needs? Should it be their decisions related to Leshko’s injuries? The question is critical, for its -13- answer may be outcome determinative. The Supreme Court appears to employ varying approaches to this issue. Sometimes the Court seems to identify the function broadly, as in RendellBaker, which held in a teachers’ suit for unlawful termination that the “education of maladjusted high school students” is not traditionally and exclusively governmental. 457 U.S. at 842. At other times, the Court takes a narrower view, as in Blum, which held in a patients’ suit for unlawful transfer from a nursing home that “decisions made in the day-to-day administration” of the home were not traditionally and exclusively governmental. 457 U.S. at 1012. We will follow the approach in West, which employs the broad methodology of Rendell-Baker. We follow West because, though there are critical factual differences between West and the present case, the claim in that case – negligent administration of medical care – most closely parallels Leshko’s. In West, the Supreme Court considered broadly whether the provision of medical services to injured inmates was a traditionally exclusive governmental function. 487 U.S. at 5456; Sullivan, 526 U.S. at 55 (describing function considered in West as “provid[ing] medical treatment to injured inmates”). We thus will ask whether the provision of care to children in foster homes is a traditionally exclusive governmental function. No aspect of providing care to foster children in Pennsylvania has ever been the exclusive province of the government.4 Even today, while removing children from their homes and placing them with other caregivers arguably are exclusively governmental functions in Pennsylvania, the hands- 4 Following the example of the Supreme Court, we look to the historical practice of the state at issue, rather than national trends. See, e.g, Sullivan, 526 U.S. at 55-57. -14- on care may be tendered by families, private organizations, or public agencies, see 42 Pa.C.S. § 6351, and thus is not exclusively governmental. Organized placement of children in foster homes began in late-19th century Pennsylvania as a service of private societies to protect children from cruelty. See L ER OY A SHBY, E NDANGERED C HILDREN: D EPENDENCY, N EGLECT, AND A BUSE IN A MERICAN H ISTORY 55-61 (1997).5 The Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, for example, regularly removed children from their homes in the late-1800s and placed them in institutions or with other families. Id. at 61. Between 1880 and 1905, two organizations in Philadelphia, the Home Missionary Society of Philadelphia and the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania, placed some 5,400 children in foster homes. See Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Families and Foster Care: Philadelphia in the Late Nineteenth Century, in G ROWING UP IN A MERICA: C HILDREN IN H ISTORICAL P ERSPECTIVE 135, 139 (N. Ray Hiner & Joseph M. Hawes, eds., 1985). “[M]ost children entrusted to the care of [these] agencies were not vagrants picked up by the police nor indigent children removed from their homes by budding social workers, but youngsters whose families deliberately relinquished them to child care agencies.” Id. at 141-42. In 1901, Pennsylvania began supervising the placement of children in foster care and regulating that care. See Act of May 21, 1901, P.L. 279 (“To regulate the treatment and control of dependent, neglected, and delinquent children . . . .”) 5 For a brief period in the early-19th century (from 1820 to 1835), Philadelphia operated a public orphanage, but by midcentury city officials “backed away from direct responsibility for the city’s poor and dependent children,” and private orphanages took over. See A SHBY, supra at 27-28. -15- (hereinafter “Juvenile Act”); Mansfield’s Case, 22 Pa. Super. 224, 235 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1903) (holding statute unconstitutional under Pennsylvania constitution); Commonwealth v. Fisher, 62 A.2d 198, 201 (Pa. 1905) (holding revised statute constitutional). Thus, while over time Pennsylvania began to administer aspects of the foster care system previously performed privately, providing hands-on care has never been, and is not now, an exclusively governmental function. See Milburn v. Anne Arundel County Dep’t of Soc. Serv’s., 871 F.2d 474, 479 (4th Cir. 1989) (concluding, summarily, that “[t]he care of foster children is not traditionally the exclusive prerogative of the state”).