Casey Family Programs Report Finds NYC ACS Leader in Child Safety Practices
This March, former Obama administration official David Hansell took the helm of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), an agency that had found itself again in turmoil after two high-profile child deaths last year.
In one of the deaths, case workers had searched for two days for a 3-year-old Brooklyn boy, Jaden Jordan, who’d been the subject of an anonymous child abuse report, but whose address they couldn’t find. By the time they located him, it was too late: the child was unconscious and died a short time later. In the second, 6-year-old Harlem boy Zymere Perkins was fatally beaten, although ACS staff had repeatedly visited the child’s home.
Jordan’s death, which the NYC Department of Investigation attributed to inadequate staffing and technology training, wasn’t the only controversy facing the agency in December. During the same month, the state government ordered the city to hire an independent monitor to review ACS’s practices and then-ACS Commissioner Gladys Carrión abruptly resigned...