ACS To Mimic Police Tactics To Track Children
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Nearly three months after a 7-year-old girl was found beaten to death in her Brooklyn home, the city’s child welfare agency is beefing up its enforcement tactics with a new program modeled after the Police Department’s crime tracking system.
The ChildStat program is one of dozens of new measures the Administration for Children’s Services unveiled yesterday, two months after Mr. Bloomberg announced a $16 million cash infusion for the agency and ordered it to review all 16,000 of its open cases and come up with a plan of action.
“Sadly, Nixzmary Brown is dead. We can’t bring her back,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “What we can do is try to continue to improve an agency that is the model for this country and make it even better.”
ACS has come under intense attack for letting the Nixzmary case and several others slip through the cracks.
In addition to ChildStat, which will track data and deploy resources to problem areas, the agency is hiring and training hundreds of new caseworkers, bringing in law enforcement experts, and deploying new field office managers.
The agency also will establish “scorecards” to monitor how each field office is stacking up and a “leadership academy” for ACS managers.
Some of the hires and new programs will be paid for with the $16 million the mayor pledged to the agency in January; others will be offset with $9 million that ACS is redirecting from its existing budget.
The commissioner of the agency, John Mattingly, said that because of a spike in the number of child abuse reports since Nixzmary’s death, some caseworkers are handling up to 20 cases, far higher than the target of 12.
“That’s too high and it’s got to be brought down and it will be brought down,” he said.
He said 275 new workers already have been hired and are being trained.
The “2006 Action Plan,” as it is called, represents the first major restructuring of the child welfare system since a little girl named Elisa Izquierdo died and became the poster child for the city’s flawed child welfare agency a decade ago.
The Police Department’s Comp-Stat program – which was established under Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton, in 1994 – is considered hugely successful.
