Who wants to work for the Administration for Children’s Services? Almost no one, apparently.
A recent report from The Post highlights that the agency is facing challenges in keeping its employees, with nearly 30% of its workforce having less than a year of experience on the job.
This situation is not unexpected. The agency is overwhelmed by a progressive approach that keeps children in unsafe environments, paired with a leadership that conceals issues from the public, trapping ACS in a pattern of failure.
And the more than half dozen abused and neglected kids who have died under the agency’s supervision are only the tip of the iceberg.
Being employed in a child protection agency is inherently challenging. Frontline workers are confronted with harrowing situations, such as children who have been severely abused, burned, sexually assaulted, and neglected.
Think about 4-year-old Jahmeik Modlin starving to death in a home full of food, but with a refrigerator turned to face the wall so that he and his three siblings could not access it.
Or 6-year-old Jalayah Eason Branch, whose mother beat her while she hung from her wrists in a closet.
Child protective specialists — as they’re officially called — come into contact with some of the worst aspects of human nature.
They stare evil in the face and don’t look away. But they do the job for the same reasons as police officers, firefighters and EMS — because they want to help. They want to rescue children from these intolerable situations.
Unfortunately, that idea has become passé in the era of woke ideology. The so-called “savior mentality” is now considered by activists and leaders in the field to be a racist, colonialist construct that has resulted in black children in particular being unnecessarily separated from their families at disproportionately high rates.
ACS even commissioned its own unscientific survey called “Racial Equity Participatory Action Research and System Audit” — which was featured on the front page of The New York Times and public radio — and which found the agency to be a “predatory system that specifically targets Black and brown parents” and subjects them to “a different level of scrutiny.”
More than 2,000 children in this country die from abuse and neglect each year and black children are three times as likely to suffer this fate as their white peers.
But never mind that. Progressive doctrine demands racial parity and so children are left in unsafe homes, month after month, year after year — because, as one employee told The Post, “Caseworkers are taught at their academy to keep the nucleus of the family together” and “inexperienced workers do not want to upset their supervisors so they recommend to keep the family together, asking for counseling.”
Even the recommendation for counseling is often nothing more than a mild suggestion. This message has come from the top down, with more and more cases being pushed toward an initiative called Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement and Support (CARES), rather than official investigations.
Only 44% of the reports that come to ACS end with families getting services anyway. But counseling and other “in-home services” like anger management or parenting classes are not going to fix the chronic and severe problems that plague many of these families.
Up to 90% of families involved in the child welfare system nationwide are dealing with some kind of substance abuse problem. And many are suffering from significant untreated mental illness.
Lisa Cotton was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and had an ACS case pending when she and her 8-year-old disabled son, Nazir, were found dead in their apartment last month.
According to relatives, Cotton was barely managing care of her 4-year-old daughter, Promise, when Nazir was brought back from a rehab center and placed in her care. Which “services” were going to ensure that her Nazir (who needed a feeding tube to survive) would be safe?
Clearly those children needed to be removed and placed in a foster home.
Who made the decision to keep these kids at home?
ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser refuses to tell the public what happened in these cases. He continues to say that state law prevents him from releasing this information, but the New York State office of Children and Families will disclose reports on these fatalities to the public if the local commissioner says it’s not “contrary to the best interests of the child, the child’s siblings or other children in the household.”
Of all the things that ACS has done that are contrary to the best interests of Promise Cotton, Dannhauser has chosen to draw the line at coming clean about ACS’s involvement in this tragedy.
Indeed, according to an analysis by Lives Cut Short, a project devoted to reporting child maltreatment fatalities nationwide, the case reports that seem most likely to be withheld in New York are the ones that received significant media coverage.
As the analysis notes, “It’s hard to avoid wondering if the exclusion of these cases from disclosure protects the agency more than the children.”
In Dannhauser’s latest bid to stave off public criticism, he has announced he will convene a “multidisciplinary panel” to examine these cases. Who will be on this panel? How will they be chosen? Will the public ever find out the results? No one knows.
But without more transparency neither the public, our elected lawmakers or even most ACS employees will know what went wrong and how to avoid future tragedies.
Which brings us back to the reason ACS has such a hard time retaining employees. It’s not the salaries, which range from $57,000 to $91,000 and include all the benefits of public employee unions, or even the caseloads, which are not particularly high compared to the rest of the country.
It’s that child protective specialists aren’t allowed to do the job they were hired to do — protect children.
ACS is just a revolving door of dysfunctional families who are reported and re-reported and offered services which they may or may not use. But nothing ever changes. Employees have little leverage to get families to do what they should to get help. And kids who are in real danger cannot be removed.
In this way, the problems at ACS are not dissimilar to what the NYPD has experienced in the wake of woke ideas like bail reform. Who wants to be a police officer when you spend your days arresting the same criminals day after day, but they are never actually taken off the streets?
Who wants to keep seeing the same kids being abused and neglected day after day knowing that you can’t do anything to help them?
Who wants to be called a racist by activists and lawmakers just for investigating the problems that are reported to you? No one.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she helped to found Lives Cut Short. She is the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.“
