Enormous Strides for NYC Children and Families

John Mattingly, MSW, PhD, Commissioner, Administration for Children’s Services (ACS)

Over the past eight years, the Administration for Children’s Services, the nation’s largest city-administered child welfare system, has made enormous strides for children and families in New York City. There are approximately 25,000 fewer children in foster care—a 48% decline—from our 1995 foster care census. The adoption rate has steadily increased since 1996, from 8.7 percent to 13 percent in 2003; and the number of children and families receiving services to prevent children from entering care has steadily grown and currently exceeds the number of children in foster care.

This success provides us with an historic opportunity to enhance our ability to protect children and strengthen families, the primary aims of any effort we undertake. Central to our plan to realign the City’s child welfare system is a shift from out-of-home care as the primary response to abuse and neglect to a system that builds on neighborhood-centered family support services. We will reconfigure financial incentives to advance this objective and reinvest millions of dollars spent on foster care into services that will keep children safely at home. Ultimately, the implementation of the Realignment Plan will create a system where best practice is standard practice.

The three components of the plan—Rightsizing, Reinvestment and Realignment—are each designed to maximize the use of preventive solutions to make the system more responsive to the needs of children and families.

Rightsizing, Reinvestment and Realignment

As we “Rightsize” the child welfare system, we will continue to promote quality services for children and families in need. As part of this component of the plan, we will be reassigning an estimated 2,200 children from low-performing agencies to high-performing agencies. Implementation of the Rightsizing component of the plan also includes transferring more children out of group homes into less restrictive, family-based settings when appropriate, reinforcing our commitment to finding homes and long term relationships with committed adults for every child, no matter her age.

As we “Reinvest” in the system, we will recycle millions of dollars a year from foster care savings into services that will support families and prevent abuse before it happens. Families will also be supported through the provision of enhanced services to reduce the occurrence of repeat maltreatment. Redirecting savings will help us to establish neighborhood-centered family support services that will enhance our ability to protect children in family-based settings, generating savings that are re-allocated to additional preventive and aftercare services, and to high performing foster care providers. We are also going to expand programs to help children and families leaving the foster care system, paying special attention to support for teens. These programs will aid and follow children wherever they go, whether they are reunified with their families, adopted or enter other permanency situations.

As we “Realign” the system, we intend to build community collaboratives led by our private partners that are increasingly responsive to the specific needs of children and families in their neighborhoods. As such, we established a new robust quality assurance division to monitor and support our provider agencies. We are also working in partnership with several minority-led agencies to enhance their programs and capacity to provide higher quality services.

Starting on the Front Lines

Much of the work necessary to reach our goals will begin on the front lines. As Commissioner of Children’s Services, it is my job to support the workers who work directly with children and families in need. Our social workers have been supplied with the tools they need to support the children and families who depend on them for help navigating the child welfare system. Such support includes intensive training at our Satterwhite Academy and financial support for child protective workers interested in pursuing Masters of Social Work degrees in addition to long-term fieldwork.

We now have a dedicated force of social workers who are skilled and committed to serving children and families; our social workers are also more connected to the community, and stay in constant communication with our contract agency partners and family-based programs. As we move forward with the Realignment Plan, we intend to look to our social workers as experts and call on them to contribute on an even greater level to the implementation of our plans to improve our ability to protect children and strengthen families.

Enhancement and Expansion of Community Resources

The Realignment Plan is our blueprint to build on nearly ten years of successful child welfare policy and do even better by children and families. We believe that the results for children and families in New York City will be profound. Children and families will be supported in their communities; their needs will be addressed before they become involved in the system, community resources will be enhanced and expanded; and services will be responsive to families’ needs and strengths to better protect the children of New York City.

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