Ad hoc NYC Child Welfare Group
c/o Child Welfare Watch
Center for New York City Affairs
The New School
72 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011


January 20, 2006

Mayor Michael Bloomberg
and
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn
City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Quinn:

Ten years ago, New York City's child protection system was in severe disarray. Investigators were overwhelmed and demoralized, carrying 30 or more cases at a time and frequently not finishing their investigations on schedule. Management and accountability systems were weak. The need for a thoroughgoing reconstruction and renewal of the agency was evident even before the very public review of the death of Elisa Izquierdo.

Today, in the wake of the deaths of Nixzmary Brown, Sierra Roberts and Dahquay Gillians, the city's child protection system is once again the focus of intense public criticism and internal scrutiny. The signers of this letter spend much of our lives engaged with this system and with the Administration for Children's Services, either as practitioners, parents, advocates, attorneys, analysts or otherwise. And we state emphatically that the problems illuminated by these recent deaths are very different from the wholesale dysfunction of the early-to-mid 1990s. They demand a very different kind of response.

The city's response to these deaths and the crisis of public trust will have to build upon the reform efforts of the last several years. Any other approach would threaten to scuttle what is surely one of the most successful, influential system reform projects in urban governmentand one that all concerned recognize as far from completed.

We support the Administration for Children's Services attention in recent years to implementing rigorous accountability systems and performance reviews internally and with its contractors; pursuing low investigative caseloads and adequate pay for frontline workers; providing investigators easier access to clinical expertise on mental health, domestic violence and substance abuse issues; strengthening and expanding essential community-based family support services; steering the foster care system toward better and more permanent homes for children; emphasizing greater respect for and responsiveness to parents, youth and foster parents; and much more.

And we all agree that Administration for Children's Services Commissioner John Mattingly and his executive staff, along with Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs, are the best management team we could hope for in learning valuable lessons from these recent, terrible events and using those lessons to further strengthen the reform effort.

In child welfare policy, there is too often an overly politicized, whipsaw effect that results from the intense public scrutiny that follows a child's death. This can force administrators into extreme shifts in direction based on simplistic or ill-informed analysis. Instead, changes in child welfare policies and services must be based on evidence and experience in the field.

There is much work to be done. Oversight and support of investigations will have to be reinforced, as will education and skill development for caseworkers. At least as important will be energizing more effective collaboration between front-line child protection staff and workers at community organizations and institutions that serve families and children (including public schools). The city must redouble recent efforts to improve Family Court so that it effectively addresses the needs of children and parents and eliminates long and routine case delays. And community-based, preventive family support and foster care services must be strengthened further, including lower caseloads.

Finally, New York must intensify its efforts to develop a more meaningful and effective strategy for reducing family violence, not only violence against children but against women as well. Even as major crime rates have fallen steeply, family homicides and assaults remain as common as they ever were.

With sincere commitment for a steadily improving system for safer children and stronger families, we are:

Richard Altman, CEO, Jewish Child Care Association
Michael Arsham, Executive Director, Child Welfare Organizing Project*
Bill Baccaglini, Executive Director, New York Foundling
Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, President and CEO, Safe Space
Ellen Baxter, Executive Director, Broadway Housing Communities
Rolando Bini, Executive Director, Parents in Action
Bernadette Blount, Parent Organizer, Child Welfare Organizing Project
Andy Breslau, Executive Director, City Futures Inc.*
Eric Brettschneider, Executive Director, Agenda for Children Tomorrow
Linda Lausell Bryant, Executive Director, Inwood House
Folasade Campbell, Executive Director, Concerned Citizens for Family Preservation
Gordon Campbell, CEO, Safe Horizon
Gladys Carrion, Senior Vice President, United Way of New York City*
John Courtney, Co-Director, Partnership for Family Supports and Justice*
Alisa Del Tufo, Co-Executive Director, Connect*
Mario Drummonds, Executive Director/CEO Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership, Inc.
Ralph Dumont, Executive Director, Lower East Side Family Union
Ilze Earner, Director, Immigrants and Child Welfare Project, Hunter College School of Social Work
Laurel Eisner, Executive Director, Sanctuary for Families
Aubrey Featherstone, Executive Director for Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families
John J. Frein, Executive Director, Catholic Guardian Society
Michael Garber, child welfare consultant*
Sister Judith Garson, Executive Director, Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service
Maria Elena Girone, President and CEO, Puerto Rican Family Institute
Martin Guggenheim, Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law, New York University Law School*
Robert H. Gutheil, Executive Director, Episcopal Social Services
Tony Hannigan, Executive Director, Center for Urban Community Services
Roseanne Haggerty, President, Common Ground
Susan Halpern, President, The Sirus Fund
Rev. Msgr. Robert M. Harris, President & CEO, St. Vincent's Services, Inc.
Keith Hefner, Publisher/Executive Director, Youth Communications
Dianne Heggie, Associate Executive Director, Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies
Sue Jacobs, Executive Director, Center for Family Representation
Poul Jensen, President/CEO, Graham-Winham
Jeremy Kohomban, President and CEO, Children's Village*
Jack Krauskopf, Distinguished Lecturer, Baruch College School of Public Affairs*
Madeleine Kurtz, attorney*
Susan Lob, Director, Voices of Women Organizing Project
Sister Paulette LoMonaco, Executive Director, Good Shepherd Services
Rev. Alfred Lo Pinto, Vicar for Human Services, Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens
Gerald P. Mallon, Professor, Hunter College School of Social Work*
Gerard McCaffery, President/CEO, Seamen's Society for Children and Families
Nora McCarthy, Editor, Represent!*
Carolyn McLaughlin, Executive Director, Citizens Advice Bureau
Robert J. McMahon, Executive Director, SCO Family of Services
Claude B. Meyers, Executive Director, Abbott House
Lawrence Murray, CASA Fellow, National Center on Addiction & Substance Abuse at Columbia University*
Beth Navon, Executive Director, Friends of the Island Academy
Sharwline Nicholson, President, Child Welfare Organizing Project*
Steven Parker, Executive Director, Rosalie Hall
Jim Purcell, Executive Director, Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies
Brother Philip Rofrano, FSC, Executive Director/President, Martin de Porres Group Homes
Sharonne Salaam, Executive Director, People United for Children*
Donna A. Santarsiero, Executive Director, Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service
Natasha Santos, Reporter, Represent!
Andrew Scherer, Executive Director, Legal Services for New York City (LSNY)
Alan Siskind, Executive Vice President, Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services
Herbert W. Stupp, CEO, Little Flower Children & Family Services
David Tobis, Executive Director, Child Welfare Fund*
Richard Wexler, Executive Director, National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
Andrew White, Director, Center for New York City Affairs, The New School*
Fred Wulczyn, Research Fellow, Chapin Hall Center for Children, University of Chicago*
Michelle Yanche, Executive Director, Neighborhood Family Services Coalition
Jill Zuccardy, Director, Child Protection Project, Sanctuary for Families