Not child’s play
Years of effort & still we see ACS tragedies
EVERY MAYOR from Ed Koch to Michael Bloomberg has tried to fix the city’s troubled Administration for Children’s Services, following the horrific deaths of children that sickened the public.
Each effort at reform ultimately failed to close all the gaps, and each new mayor has again had to grapple with the dilemma of how to fix an agency charged with protecting the city’s most vulnerable population — children at risk of abuse and neglect.
One week into Mayor de Blasio’s tenure, he was confronted with yet another unspeakable tragedy: the Jan. 8 death of Myls Dobson.
ACS had investigated the family and removed Myls from his mother in 2012, placing him with his dad, Okee Wade. When Wade, 37, was sent to jail Dec. 19, caseworkers had no way of knowing he’d left his 4-year-old son with a girlfriend who police said starved, beat and whipped the boy until he died.
The authorities who arrested Wade had no access to ACS records, and in any case, the agency had closed Myls’ case.
“Should we have done something differently? Yes,” said Gladys Carrion, the newly appointed head of ACS at a Jan. 17 press conference.
She is taking over an agency that has more caseworkers on staff than at any time in recent history: with its annual $2.8 billion budget, it pays 1,658 fulltime investigators and 454 managers.
The salary has climbed up too, starting at $42,000 and nearing $50,000 after 18 months. Supervisors make $72,000. But it’s a constant challenge to retain trained employees and handle demand.
Last year, ACS handled 60,998 abuse calls to the state hotline. There were 44 children who died in 2013 whose families had some contact with ACS in the last five years. Four of the deaths were ruled a homicide and 15 autopsies are still pending, the agency said.
Myls’ death has sparked some ACS reforms, including a plan for better communication about criminal histories across agen- cies. But to city caseworkers, the fact that Myls slipped through ACS’ safety net speaks more to the complexities of child welfare than it does to procedural missteps.
“Sometimes you do everything right, as much as you can, and it still goes wrong,” an ACS worker said.
The investigation into Myls' family was well-documented and followed the basic agency rules — light years away from some of the slipshod investigations in the 1980s and ’90s.
But problems persisted through the Bloomberg years, as evidenced by the terrible deaths of Nixzmary Brown in 2006 and Marchella Pierce in 2011.
DC 37 Local 371 president Anthony Wells, who represents child protection specialists, said, “This is an incredibly difficult job with a lot of gray areas. It requires regular training to keep up with the changing protocols and the heavy paperwork, and staff retention is key.”