Who wants to work at the Administration for Children’s Services? There appears to be almost no one.
According to The Post’s reporting this week, the agency is struggling to retain employees, with nearly 30% of its workforce having less than a year on the job.
It is hardly surprising. ACS is trapped in a cycle of failure, fueled by a progressive ideology that keeps children in unsafe homes and a leadership that withholds information about what is going wrong from the public.
And the more than a half dozen abused and neglected children who died while under the agency’s care are only the tip of the iceberg.
Working for a child protection agency has never been easy. Frontline caseworkers witness horrific scenes: children who have been severely beaten, burned, raped, and starved.
Consider 4-year-old Jahmeik Modlin starving to death in a home full of food, but with a refrigerator turned to face the wall, preventing him and his three siblings from accessing it.
Or consider 6-year-old Jalayah Eason Branch, whose mother beat her while she hung from her wrists in a closet.
Child protective specialists, as they are officially known, deal with some of the worst aspects of human nature. #
They stare evil in the face and refuse to look away. However, they do the job for the same reasons as police officers, firefighters, and EMS: they want to help. They want to rescue children from these deplorable circumstances.
Unfortunately, that concept has become obsolete in the age of woke ideology. Activists and leaders in the field now regard the so-called “savior mentality” as a racist, colonialist construct that has resulted in unnecessarily high rates of separation from their families, particularly for black children.
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 found the agency to be a “predatory system that specifically targets Black and brown parents” and subjects them to “a different level of scrutiny.”
Every year, more than 2,000 children in this country die as a result of abuse and neglect, with black children three times more likely than white children to suffer the same fate.
But never mind that. Progressive doctrine requires racial parity, 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 counseling recommendations are frequently made as a mild suggestion. This message has come from the top down, with an increasing number of cases being directed toward an initiative known as Collaborative Assessment, Response, Engagement, and Support (CARES), rather than official investigations.
Only 44% of the reports submitted to ACS result in families receiving services. However, counseling and other “in-home services” such as anger management or parenting classes will not address the long-term and severe issues that many of these families face.
Up to 90% of families involved in the child welfare system nationwide have a substance abuse problem. Many people suffer from serious untreated mental illnesses.
Lisa Cotton had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and an ACS case was pending when she and her 8-year-old disabled son, Nazir, were discovered dead in their apartment last month.
Cotton, according to relatives, was barely caring for her 4-year-old daughter, Promise, when Nazir was returned from a rehab facility and placed in her care. Which “services” would ensure her Nazir’s safety (he needed a feeding tube to survive)?
Clearly, those children had to be removed and placed in a foster home.
Who decided to keep the kids at home?
ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser refuses to explain what happened in these cases. He maintains that state law prohibits him from disclosing this information, but the New York State Office of Children and Families will release reports on these fatalities to the public if the local commissioner says it is not “contrary to the best interests of the child, the child’s siblings, or other children in the household.”
Among all the things ACS has done that are detrimental to Promise Cotton’s best interests, Dannhauser has chosen to draw the line at disclosing ACS’s role in this tragedy.
Indeed, according to an analysis by Lives Cut Short, a project dedicated to reporting child maltreatment fatalities across the country, the case reports that appear to be withheld in New York have received significant media attention.
As the report points out, “It is hard to avoid wondering if the exclusion of these cases from disclosure protects the agency more than the children.”
Dannhauser’s latest attempt to deflect public criticism is to convene a “multidisciplinary panel” to investigate these cases. Who will be on the panel? How will they be selected? Will the public ever learn the results? Nobody knows.
However, without more transparency, neither the public, our elected officials, nor the majority of ACS employees will be able to understand what went wrong and how to avoid future tragedies.
This brings us back to why ACS has such a difficult time retaining employees. It is not the salaries, which range from $57,000 to $91,000 and include all benefits provided by public employee unions, or the caseloads, which are not particularly high in comparison to the rest of the country.
It is that child protective specialists are not permitted to do what they were hired to do: protect children.
ACS is merely a revolving door of dysfunctional families who are reported, re-reported, and offered services that they may or may not utilize. Nothing ever changes. Employees have little power to persuade families to do what they should to get help. Children who are in real danger cannot be removed.
In this way, the problems at ACS are similar to those that the NYPD has faced as a result of progressive ideas such as bail reform. Who wants to be a police officer if you spend your days arresting the same criminals but never getting them off the streets?
Who wants to see the same children being abused and neglected day after day, knowing that there is nothing you can do to help?
Who wants to be labeled a racist by activists and lawmakers simply for investigating the problems that have been reported to them? No one.