NCCPR in the New York Daily News: How the Daily News changed NYC’s child welfare

A half century ago today, child welfare reform began when the Daily News stunned the city with the first installment of a six-part series about the system by reporters William Heffernan and Stewart Ain, headlined “Big Money, Little Victims.”

Then as now, New York City has a harmful child welfare system. While foster care has declined, children still are taken needlessly. And a massive child-welfare surveillance state remains, with children still tormented by needless investigations and stripsearches, often when family poverty is confused with neglect. The time wasted on these cases is stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger. 

But the New York City system also does far less harm than its counterparts almost everywhere else, and it is far less harmful than it used to be. ACS now tears apart families at half the rate of Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Phoenix. 

Many organizations and visionary leaders contributed to this transformation, and continue to fight the system’s ongoing harm. But a good case can be made that the progress began 50 years ago this week with a stunning work of journalism. …

Read the full commentary in the Daily News

NCCPR in the New York Daily News: Don’t bail out agencies that didn’t stop abuse

It was 49 years today when a groundbreaking investigative series in the Daily News told a story that had been hidden for a century or more: Cloaked in a veneer of benevolence, New York’s private foster care agencies were deliberately prolonging the time children languished in foster care because their huge, mostly taxpayer-funded budgets were based on payments for each day they kept the children in their “care.” The series also exposed horrific abuse in the group homes, institutions and family foster homes run by these agencies.

The six-day series was called “Big Money, Little Victims.”

All these years later, the little victims are grown up. Some of them are suing. But instead of begging for forgiveness, the agencies are begging for a taxpayer bailout …

Read the full column in the New York Daily News

Foster care in New York: John Mattingly’s broken promise, and the children hurt by it

The New York Daily News ran an excellent story Monday about schools using “educational neglect” charges to harass families, or simply to protect themselves, not the children.   The story documents case after case of children needlessly harmed by trumped-up charges. One school practically admits that the people reporting these families know that a lot of the reports aren’t really necessary:

"If we don't make a call when a student has been absent an excessive amount and something happens to the student when they should have been at school, then it will come back to us," said Achievement First [school] spokesman Mel Ochoa.

Then comes the usual boilerplate from the city child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services:

 “ACS is appropriately required to investigate concerns of educational neglect when a parent is not making sure that a child is going to school, particularly when the concerns involve younger children."  

The best that can be said about this is that the flak who said it, Elysia Carnevale Murphy, is too new to the job to know better.  At least I hope that’s the explanation. Because she is flat wrong.

 ACS has to do something. While half the states are wise enough not to include “educational neglect” in the mandate of their child welfare agencies at all, New York State is not one of them. 

But New York City and the county agencies that handle child abuse allegations in the rest of the state no longer have to launch full-scale investigations.  They have the option of using an approach called “differential response.”

As I’ve noted in previous posts to this blog, more than a year ago ACS Commissioner John Mattingly promised to try “differential response” in some “educational neglect” cases  – as recommended in a report from the Vera Institute of Justice.  Then, Mattingly reneged. 

The Daily News story gives some idea of the suffering Mattingly’s broken promise has caused for New York City children.

ON MONDAY: How much has child welfare really changed in 84 years?