As retired heads of two of the City’s leading non-profits, who spent a combined nearly 75 years leading agencies that worked closely with the City’s child welfare agency, we have seen ACS make tremendous progress over time. We have worked with every Commissioner since ACS was created as a standalone agency in 1996 and our dear friend, Nicholas Scoppetta, became its first Commissioner. We have seen tragedies that have broken our hearts, and taught us many lessons. We have also seen the success stories of children saved and families thriving. We have seen progress continue, and in many instances, accelerate, under Commissioner Jess Dannhauser’s leadership.
The child welfare system is charged with keeping children safe and supporting families. Getting it right in every case, for every family, requires compassionate and thoughtful leadership.
It requires highly trained staff who can assess the safety of children and then make the most important decision there is—whether a child needs to be separated from their parents or whether there are supports that can enable the child to remain safely at home.
Our agencies provided services both to the families where children remained at home, and to those where children were removed and placed with us in foster care. Over time, we have seen major improvements. Owing to consistent and continued investments in training and supervision, we have witnessed a dramatic improvement in the quality of practice, particularly those practices related to assessing safety and engaging children and families. And this is not just our opinion—the data bears this out.
Remarkably, there has been a 20% reduction over the last five years in the number of children being subsequently abused or neglected after an ACS intervention. We have also seen the number of children in foster care safely and dramatically decrease over the span of our careers, with less than 7,000 children now in foster care. Children, as a result, are safer and more likely to be home than before.
A key contributor to the safe reduction in foster care is ACS’s continually increasing investments in effective family support services, now reaching over 30,000 children and their families each year. Our agencies were leaders in developing these services, in addition to bringing evidence-based models to NYC that were working across the country. We can’t even count how many times jurisdictions from across the country and the world have reached out to us as they sought to replicate the successful and evidence-based programs we have in NYC. Despite this nationally recognized continuum of services, ACS has appropriately not let up on innovation, continuing to evolve these preventive models based on the latest research and what they are hearing from families to better serve communities across the City. In the past year, ACS has rolled out its new School-based Early Support Model, which provides services to families where they are- in schools- long before a child protection intervention is needed. This is in addition to their Family Enrichment Center expansion from 3 Centers to 30, and the tremendous increase in families receiving child care —all of which are upstream interventions that prevent child abuse from ever happening.
For decades, we have advocated for NYC to do more for youth leaving foster care. Today, ACS and its providers have led the nation in implementing innovative supports that help youth in foster care thrive. This includes Fair Futures tutoring and coaching for over 4,000 young people ages 11 to 26 and College Choice where now over 400 students in foster care are attending colleges throughout the country for free. In short, more youth leaving foster care are engaged in and graduating from college than ever before—and once again jurisdictions from across the country are reaching out seeking to follow our lead.
This progress is not about a single person, but in the wake of an outlandish attack on his character and leadership, we want New Yorkers to know they are fortunate to have Jess Dannhauser at the helm of ACS. We have known and worked with Commissioner Dannhauser for over 20 years. He is a compassionate and effective leader. He is not a bureaucrat who watches from his office. Throughout his career, he has always been engaged directly with youth, families, communities and his staff—learning what works, what needs to be strengthened and making sure his team has the tools needed to do the job most effectively.
As former leaders in this work, we know that nothing is more heartbreaking and tragic as the death of a child. We applaud Commissioner Dannhauser for bringing outside experts to the table to examine what can be done to prevent tragedies. At the same time, we cannot let sensationalized headlines move ACS and the child welfare system in the wrong direction. We know the lasting damage to children and families that result from ill-conceived pendulum swings. We must continue to follow the data, strive to make the best possible decisions for every family, and invest in what we know works so that we always enhance the work together. And we know- Commissioner Dannhauser is the right person to continue to do just that.
Quite frankly, as New Yorkers, we are lucky to have him!
Bill Baccaglini is the former CEO of the New York Foundling and Sister Paulette LoMonaco is the former Executive Director of Good Shepherd Services, two of the leading non-profit providers in NYC.
