A Message to the Social Work Community from the ACS Commissioner

Are We Better Off Now than Five Years Ago?...Yes.

It has been said that in order to reform a failing government bureaucracy there are two essential components: political will and substantive expertise. To these two clearly essential components I would add a third - time. Time to plan and implement meaningful reform. The Giuliani administration has been the first administration in the history of the city to make a political commitment to the reform of child welfare. The Mayor gave us the resources to develop and attract the necessary substantive expertise and by giving us the time to deliberately plan and implement reform, he gave ACS something no child welfare administrator in New York City before me has ever had: continuity. By the end of this year I will have been Commissioner of ACS for six years. That is more than three times the average longevity of any of my predecessors and twice the longest tenure of one of them. Without that continuity of leadership, we could not have developed the critically important computerized information systems we rely on; the new civil services titles that have professionalized staff; the new contracts for agencies which now set much more demanding conditions for the delivery of children's services, and many more time consuming but vitally important initiatives.

Let me say a little more about political will because it has been the key to our reform. Genuine political commitment is a rare commodity in any governmental reform and it has been particularly lacking in child welfare. Historically, political leaders have uniformly endorsed the importance of "protecting our most vulnerable citizens" proclaiming that "the children are our future". But in the past change has been largely cosmetic. That is because the reform of a large child welfare system is so challenging and so fraught with the potential for political liability, that it is an undertaking that few governors or mayors have been willing to assume. However, without real political will, substantive reform is impossible.

The foundation for the reforms at ACS was built when the Mayor removed the Child Welfare Administration from the Human Resources Administration in 1996. When he added Head Start, Daycare, and the Office of Child Support Enforcement to ACS, he created the first agency solely devoted to children's services. When he directed that the Commissioner of ACS report directly to him, he took responsibility for the success or failure of the reform of the system.

These actions created an environment that authorized and encouraged reform. It allowed us to bring real management and accountability to a system that had historically relied heavily on nobility of intentions. Today, because of a sophisticated and comprehensive evaluation system, using carefully arrived at performance standards and outcome measures, we are able to measure the performance of the many agencies we contract with and the thousands of ACS employee who are engaged in delivering and monitoring those services. With the aid of this system we have recently published reports on the performance of our contract agencies and ACS. We are certain that this public accountability will bring even greater improvements to a system that is already striving to achieve the highest levels of performance.

ACS has had a lot of help during these past five years. Our partners in the agencies we contract with, the Family Court and the New York State Office of Children and Family Services have all worked to move the system towards reform. The Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel, funded by the always helpful Annie E. Casey Foundation, has informed our policies and critiqued our efforts so as to increase our effectiveness and add to our credibility in ways that have been invaluable.

Today there are fewer children in foster care, fewer children removed from their families, better use of preventive services and more long-term foster children being adopted. We've come out from under judicial oversight for the first time in a decade and reduced the number of children in foster care from 43,000 in 1997 to 29,806 in 2001. Child protective worker caseloads have been reduced from an average of 27 per caseworker to an average of 13. We have enhanced the qualifications for caseworkers and supervisors, increased their salaries and significantly expanded training, resulting in better investigations of complaints of abuse and neglect. Supervisors are now required to have completed at least half the credits towards a Master of Social Work degree. To support them in acquiring those credits, ACS has created an MSW scholarship program granting full scholarships for two hundred caseworkers and supervisors a year. We've also made MSW funds available to contract agencies for their own staff. These efforts have rapidly professionalized these key positions in the delivery of services to children and families.

Of course none of this could have been accomplished, no matter how talented our team of managers, or how much help from our partners, if it were not for thousands of dedicated caseworkers, attorneys and support staff at ACS and the agencies we contract with. It is their efforts that have taken us this far and it will be their efforts that will bring us the rest of the way. Continuing our investments in their professional growth and development, and attracting highly qualified individuals to our challenging work, must remain at the heart of our continuous efforts of reform.