Testimony to the New York City Council Committee on Children and Youth, "Oversight - Examining Racial Disparities in New York City's Child Welfare System; Int. 424-2026; Int. 449-2026; Int. 466-2026"
February 26, 2026
Good afternoon. My name is Jess Dannhauser and I am honored and privileged to be the Commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). I am joined today by Winette Saunders, the First Deputy Commissioner; Elvita Dominique, the Executive Director of Equity Strategies at ACS; and Ina Mendez, the Deputy Commissioner for Family Permanency Services. Thank you Chair Stevens and members of the Children and Youth Committee for holding today’s oversight hearing, “Examining Racial Disparities in the Child Welfare System.” This is a critically important topic and one that I, as well as my team at ACS, have been focused on throughout my four years as ACS Commissioner.
ACS’s mission is to protect the children of New York City, a mission we take with the utmost seriousness. Over the last several years, having listened to youth and families with lived experience and learned a great deal from the pandemic, we have expanded our perspective on what this means. ACS is responsible for both ensuring children are safe in their homes and safe from harms that can come from unnecessary system involvement. In our effort to achieve both of these vital goals, we have carried out a comprehensive set of initiatives. As always, there is much more to do.
I think it is important to start by sharing the data with you. I will walk you through some of the data and we are also including data slides at the end of the testimony.
As you know, if someone suspects a child is being abused or maltreated they should make a report to the New York Statewide Central Register (SCR). When the state accepts a report about a New York City child, ACS responds to assess the safety of that child.
In 2024, a Black child was eight times more likely to be in an SCR report and investigation than a White child. A Hispanic child was six times more likely to be in an SCR report and investigation than a White child. More than 82% of the families experiencing an ACS child protection response were Black or Hispanic in 2024. In 2024, a Black child in an investigation was 1.18 times more likely to be in an indicated investigation than a White child. A Hispanic child was 1.26 times more likely to be in an indicated investigation than a White child.
These ratios have been stubbornly similar over many years. This is similar at every stage of involvement, including court involvement and placement in foster care. However, what has changed is that today, far fewer families are involved in a child protection response to an SCR report. The number declined 16% from 2017 to 2024, from 50,864 to 42,778.
For Hispanic families this was a 3% decrease (20,683 to 20,154); for Black families this was a 19% decrease (18,880 to 15,217); for White families this was a 25% decrease (from 3,692 to 2,779); and for Asian families this was a 4% decrease (from 2,244 to 2,145).
Even more dramatically, the total number of families experiencing an indicated investigation fell 46% between 2017 and 2024, from 19,361 to 10,420 families. For Hispanic families this was a 36% decrease (8,247 to 5,343); for Black families this was a 51% decrease (from 7,650 to 3,719); for White families this was a 56% decrease (from 1,260 to 550); and for Asian families this was a 41% decrease (751 to 440). This reduction in half is significant for families, as having an indicated case can have long-standing ramifications, including when seeking employment.
Similarly, in that same time period, the number of families experiencing court ordered supervision declined 63%, from 5,160 to 1,908 families. For Hispanic families this was a 55% decrease; for Black families this was a 68% decrease; for White families this was a 77% decrease and for Asian families this was a 68% decrease. And the number of court filings seeking foster care because of abuse or neglect declined 37% from 2017 to 2024 (from 1,959 to 1,227). For Black families this was a 38% decrease (921 to 573); for Hispanic families it was a 32% decrease (731 to 495); for White families it was a 60% decrease (147 to 59); and for Asian families it was a 44% decrease (45 to 25).
In sum, we have significantly reduced the likelihood of unnecessary system involvement; yet, serious disparities remain, which require continued urgent attention. Throughout my time as Commissioner, we have been intentional about working to reduce unnecessary reports to the SCR (thus reducing unnecessary child protection responses) while increasing family access to community-based supports without the need for an SCR report.
For the past three years, ACS has been working closely with other city agencies and systems to make better use of the state’s child abuse and neglect hotline and to provide earlier, more effective support for families without the need for an SCR report or child protection response. Since January 2023, we have collaborated with NYC Public Schools (NYCPS), Health+Hospitals (H+H), Department of Homeless Services (DHS), Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), the Mayor's Office to End Gender-Based Violence (ENDGBV), and dozens of private hospitals and social services organizations to educate mandated reporters on how to help families get the help they might need without calling the child abuse hotline, except when children are truly not safe. In total, the ACS team has conducted over 435 presentations reaching over 27,000 mandated reporters.
Entitled “The Evolving Focus of Child Welfare: Addressing Over-Reporting and Providing Family-Centered Supports”, the sessions provide guidance on when a report to the SCR is necessary, and when it is not. We explain the shift underway in New York State, which has moved its messaging to mandated reporters from “when in doubt, call the SCR” to “you can support a family without having to report a family” when maltreatment is not suspected. Our sessions provide detailed information on ACS-funded and other supports and services available for families in New York City and ways to build towards a culture shift from reporting to supporting families with successful engagement, relationship-building and access to services. Many sessions include presentations by local ACS-funded community-based organizations.
As a result, we have seen a reduction in reports and an increase in supports accessed without the SCR. For example:
- In the past two years (2025 compared to 2023), SCR reports from schools have decreased by 16%, social service agencies by 16%, and health and mental health personnel by 7%.
- In 2025, ACS received approximately 5,000 fewer reports from these three sectors than it did in 2023.
- The ACS Support Line now receives more than 4,000 calls per year from families themselves, and from schools and others who are working directly with families.
Formally created in November 2023, the ACS Support Line has the sole purpose of supporting the community through engagement and connections to resources (prevention services and/or concrete). The Support Line now receives an average of more than 300 inquiries per month (in the last 12 months), up from about 30 monthly in early 2023. This increase is attributed to the ongoing work to ensure our community partners and families are made aware of how to access prevention services and other resources in NYC.
With regard to family support services, we have also been very intentional about efforts to ensure families and colleagues are accessing these services through community referrals, and not just after a child protection investigation. These efforts are working: community referrals have increased from 12% of prevention referrals in January 2023 to 25% in December 2025.
These past four years, we have also focused on efforts to provide services and supports to families as upstream as possible—so that they never need to come into contact with the child protection system. This includes the launch of the school-based early support program, the expansion of low income child care vouchers, the expansion of Family Enrichment Centers from 3 to 30 citywide; and our ongoing child safety campaigns, each of which I will briefly summarize.
Launched in 2024, the school-based early support prevention program model is aimed at providing families with services and supports as upstream as possible, preventing involvement with child protection while keeping children safe. Each of the 16 new programs are required to partner with at least three elementary and/or middle schools to help families address stressors that may impact child well-being, help families in need of concrete items and strengthen social connections within the school communities. The model also includes a community pathway track that does not require opening a formal prevention case.
Starting in 2022, ACS rapidly expanded child care assistance for low-income families, providing vouchers that cover most or all of the cost of child care. This initiative has made child care affordable for thousands more families across NYC. Between the Summer of 2022 and the Summer of 2025, the number of children enrolled in care with the support of an ACS-issued low-income voucher climbed by 900% from 7,400 to more than 75,000. During this period, ACS also focused on expanding access in communities historically underserved by the program– namely the 17 community districts with the highest poverty and unemployment rates that have faced inadequate access to child care. The number of children from these neighborhoods enrolled in care with a low-income voucher increased from 1,500 to nearly 22,000, a 1300% increase.
We also increased supports for families and communities by expanding Family Enrichment Centers (FECs) from 3 to 30. In fact, the contract for the 30th FEC just started this past January. FECs are welcoming, family centered spaces co-designed with parents, caregivers and community members to be places where families with children come together. No two FECs are alike as they each reflect the culture, strengths and identity of its neighborhood.
The ACS Office of Child Safety and Injury Prevention focuses on reducing unintentional child injuries among young children, such as safe sleep; medication safety; and window guards. The Office is often out in communities, sharing information and building awareness among caregivers and child-serving professionals.
ACS does this work with an understanding that there can be fear associated with our involvement. In addition to significant efforts to make our services more accessible, ACS is supportive of efforts to create solutions outside of ACS that obviate the need for child protection involvement. In fact, earlier today, along with Deputy Mayor Arteaga and our colleagues at DOHMH, we announced Strong Foundations, a new partnership where ACS is providing DOHMH with $20 million over three years so they can expand and enhance clinical infrastructure and the continuum of perinatal, newborn and early childhood services, without the need for ACS involvement with the family. The funding will enable DOHMH to expand eligibility for Nurse-Family Partnership (called NFPx) to pregnant people in their third trimester and up until the birth of the child and for those with more than one child. The new partnership also expands capacity in their perinatal and early childhood mental health clinics and expands DOHMH training and technical assistance in perinatal mental health to build the capacity of the workforce.
At the same time that we have been carrying out these efforts to reduce unnecessary system involvement, we have also been strengthening our child protective work in the vital effort to protect children from maltreatment and abuse. It is critical that our child protective staff have the tools and skills needed to identify those children truly in danger and to connect families to services and supports, and foster care if necessary, so children can be safe.
We have significantly reduced child protective caseloads to 7.6, which is well below national standards and enables CPS to have the time to provide each family with the attention they need and deserve. In the summer of 2024, we added staff and units to the Family Preservation Program (FPP), which is an intensive child protection and prevention model that enables children to remain safely at home, while ACS works with the families to address immediate child safety concerns. FPP helps families by accompanying them to appointments, helping them navigate systems such as housing and school, and arranging for services such as homemaking or heavy duty cleaning.
We have also made sure that our CPS have access to those with the expertise, so they have the tools they need to best assess safety. For example, in the highest risk cases, CPS have coaches and access to Investigative Consultants (ICs) who are former NYPD, as well as Child Advocacy Centers to help assess for abuse. In January, we launched our new Clinical Support Program, where licensed professionals support frontline child protective staff with their expertise in mental health, substance abuse and intimate partner violence. Through the newly enhanced program, this team of experts now engages directly with families and offers hands-on support and connections to services specific to each family’s needs.
We also have a number of quality assurance mechanisms in place to help us continuously assess our practice and make enhancements when we see they are warranted. ChildStat is a weekly meeting focused on safety practice in child protection by looking at both data and a randomly-selected active case from a different child protection borough office each week. The Panel includes myself and other leadership from across the agency, typically with 700+ staff in attendance, and is broadcast across the agency, promoting a culture of continuous learning and shared accountability.
In 2025, we launched a new Multidisciplinary Review Panel to bring experts external to ACS into our fatality review process to help identify systemic solutions to enhance ACS’s ability to protect children and deliver high quality services. This Panel gives us a formal pathway to incorporate the expertise of members, such as those with lived experience and experts in mental health, substance abuse, homelessness, law enforcement, etc. into our policies and practice. The Panel also aims to help New Yorkers better understand our work as we promote transparency and system accountability. We will be incorporating the Panels’ recommendations into our annual fatality reports released each June.
Another area where we see disparity is in the length of time children spend in foster care. Black and Hispanic children placed in foster care are significantly more likely than White children in care to return home within their first year of placement. But once they have been in care for a full year or more, Black and Hispanic children are about 25% less likely to go home during the second or later year.
ACS is working closely with its foster care providers and attorneys to reduce the length of time to permanency for all children, and we are seeing the number of long-stayers in care drop steadily—From 2017 to 2025, we’ve had a 38% reduction in the number of children in foster care for two years or more, down from 6,124 to 3,777.
We have been intentional about our efforts to promote family reunification and safely end ACS involvement as quickly as possible. ACS launched a new technical assistance framework focused on permanency. The framework examines and utilizes agency-specific and macro level data to identify best practices and inform business process improvements. These efforts are designed to support case practices to increase the likelihood children and youth can achieve safe and timely permanency.
The Parents Empowering Parents (PEP) program is where foster care agencies hire Parent Advocates with lived experience to be a member of their case planning teams.
The Parent Advocates have a unique ability to build relationships with parents, offer guidance on how to navigate child welfare processes, and elevate parents’ voices in the case planning process, all with the goal of supporting timely reunification.
Truly listening to the voices of those with lived experiences who have been directly impacted by the child welfare system has guided our work for the past four years. The Parent Advocacy Council (PAC) helped inform our new Discharge Grant policy to better support families when children return home, both by increasing the amount of the grant to $2,000 per child, simplifying the application and reimbursement process, and expanding the items eligible for reimbursement. Voices of youth in care helped us develop and expand Fair Futures coaching and tutoring, the College Choice program now serving 460 youth, and our brand-new Career Choice program for youth choosing vocational training or job readiness training.
I will use this moment to say thank you—to all the parents and youth with lived experience who took the time and effort to open themselves up to me and the ACS team. I have learned so much from all those who opened up and shared their stories about the impact ACS’s interventions had on their lives.
Proposed Legislation
Int. 424-2026 (Sanchez)
Int. 424-2026 would require the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) to establish and operate a pilot program to provide mental health services for up to one year to children who have returned home from foster care, and then report to the Council on the pilot.
ACS strongly agrees that when children and youth return to their families after foster care, that they should have immediate access to mental health services without charge. Currently, when a child/youth is discharged from foster care, there are provisions to enable continuity of care for services initiated while the child/youth was in foster care. Specifically, they would be able to access all Medicaid services they were receiving while in care, for up to a year, so long as the foster care agency notifies the managed care plan of the discharge. Young adults ages 18 and older at discharge are eligible for Medicaid up to age 26. In addition, older youth exiting foster care have Fair Futures coaches who can connect them to support services up to age 26, and all families in need can access ACS-funded family support (prevention) services. That all said, we do appreciate that there are often challenges, for all children and youth, in accessing mental health services. ACS looks forward to discussing this bill with the Council.
Int. 446-2026 (Ung) and Int. 449-2026 (Stevens)
Int. 466-2026 and Int. 449-2026 require ACS to provide written (Int. 466-2026) and oral (Int. 449-2026) information to parents about a number of items including their rights, at the start of a child protective investigation. ACS strongly supports providing parents with information about their rights, at the start of a child protective investigation. While no State or City legislation has passed on this yet, for the past two years we have been proactively providing parents upfront with information about their rights (that we need their permission to enter or a family court’s; that they can deny that; and that they have a right to call an attorney) at the initial point of contact.
Int. 466-2026 would require ACS to provide a “multi-lingual disclosure form” to parents/caretakers at the start of a CPS investigation, which would include information regarding parent’s rights, resources available to parents including legal services, and contact information for the office of advocacy. ACS is supportive of this legislation.
ACS currently provides parents with information about their rights (included at the end of this testimony), as well as an information package with information about resources in their community, including contact information for legal representation.
Int. 449-2026 lays out a proposal of information for child protection specialists to say verbally at the initial point of contact. While ACS strongly supports sharing information with parents about their rights, we have concerns about the specific language in the previously proposed legislation, which would equate the initial stages of a CPS investigation with an arrest and custodial interrogation (e.g. telling parents they have a right to remain silent). We worry this would both overly inhibit investigations into the safety of children and create fear that a conclusion has been reached before the investigation begins.
We look forward to discussing these bills with the Council so that we can agree on language that would ensure parents understand their rights, while enabling ACS to assess child safety.
Conclusion
As you can see from all of this work, the team at ACS works hard each and every day to get it right for every single child and family who comes to our attention. Our job is to promote safety as holistically as possible so children are safe and families have what they need—often from community supports outside of ACS- so that they can thrive. I am grateful to the team at ACS for the compassion and conviction they bring to this work and I remain deeply inspired by all that they do.
I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to publicly thank Tyler James, ACS’s Director of Race Equity Strategies, who was a remarkable leader, thought partner, and the force behind so much of this work. Tyler passed away this past January and while his contributions to ACS and beyond remain with us, we miss him every day.
And finally, a special thank you to the Council, the Children and Families Committee and you Chair Stevens, who successfully advocated for the creation of this Committee. Your partnership, collaboration, and tough questions and oversight, have made a tremendous difference for the children, youth and families of New York City.