Children’s Services has made a focused commitment this past year to strengthen all aspects of New York City’s child protection system. This focus on lowering caseloads, improving safety assessments, deepening investigations and enhancing case management has occurred while the Agency has responded to a period of unprecedented growth in abuse and neglect reports – an increase of 30% over 2005. These reforms have resulted in agency-wide changes designed to improve the delivery of services we provide throughout the child welfare system in order to benefit all of the children and families we serve.
These initiatives include:
- Hiring 540 additional child protective caseworkers since January 2006. As of December, 2006, ACS has 987 child protective caseworkers on staff carrying cases, and caseload averages have declined to approximately 15 cases per specialist, down from an average of 21 in March 2006.
- The opening of the Safety First Office, implemented by ACS to handle calls from employees of City agencies and foster care and preventive services agencies, to quickly convey critical safety concerns to child protective caseworkers. Since March 2006, the Safety First Office has received more than 1,600 calls.
- Increasing our collaboration with other City agencies such as the Department of Education and the New York City Police Department.
- Launching ChildStat, the new ACS assessment system for strengthening case practice.
- Completion of the preparation for a two-week federal review of 79 delegate agencies and the central administration of New York City’s Head Start program, which serves more than 20,000 children. The preparation and review emphasized compliance with national Head Start health and safety standards.
- Integration of 120 new staff who joined ACS from the Human Resources Administration to launch a new childcare model in which ACS is responsible for providing child care to families transitioning from public assistance to employment.
- Nearly doubling the number of cars available for Child Protective Specialists’ use on the frontlines, aided by the Mayor's Office of Operations and other oversight agencies.
- Distributing cell phones, Blackberrys and laptop computers to Child Protective Specialists, Managers and non child protective staff assigned to field operations throughout the city.
- Implementation of the new Permanency Law to obtain more expedient and better outcomes for children. This included ACS attorneys conducting trainings on the new law at more than 40 sites throughout the City and the metropolitan area.
- Filing nearly 300% more legal actions in Family Court this year than in the same period the year prior.
- Hiring 58 attorneys this calendar year to handle the increased workload. We also brought on two additional attorney trainers, doubling the number of trainers available to our attorneys and our borough trial offices.
- Development of the Juvenile Justice Initiative (JJI) to provide evidence-based programs in New York City’s communities, such as Multi-Systemic Therapy and Functional Family Therapy, to otherwise placement-bound juvenile delinquents and their families.
We at Children’s Services are committed to doing all that we can to critically assess and evaluate our work in order to continue these improvements. The protection and well-being of children is our top priority, and we strongly believe that our work, and the impact it has on the lives of children, needs to reflect that commitment.
Special thanks to all of our ACS staff who take this work so personally and so seriously. Our work in 2007 will continue to be very demanding, but with your help we will be a much stronger agency in both protecting New York City's children and in strengthening its families.
Thanks also to all of New York City’s children and families for your support, your constructive criticism and most of all, for your prayers. As your public Head Start, childcare, and child welfare agency, we will do our best to live up to your trust.
John B. Mattingly
Commissioner
