Council To Propose Adding $11.6M for Children’s Services
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The City Council will propose an additional $11.66 million for children’s services as part of their annual response to the mayor’s preliminary budget, officials said last night.
The money would fund a three-part initiative designed to bolster the city’s efforts to prevent and respond to cases of child abuse following the January beating death of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown.
Nixzmary’s mother and stepfather are facing charges of second-degree murder, and her brutal death has spurred outrage among city officials after they found that the city’s Administration for Children’s Services had been handling her case. Mayor Bloomberg has already launched a series of changes and initiatives involving children’s services in the two-and-a-half months since Nixzmary’s death, including an additional $16 million for ACS.
The council’s proposals would boost services and interagency coordination at the city’s Child Advocacy Centers, add personnel focusing on child abuse at the District Attorney’s offices, and put child welfare workers at an additional 21 of the city’s 80 Beacon school sites that provide after-school programming.
The council’s legislative director, Lucy Mayo, said the mayor had made a good start in his efforts to reform ACS, but the council wanted to go further.
“It’s building on what the mayor has already done,” Ms. Mayo said.
The council speaker, Christine Quinn, will announce the children’s services initiatives in a City Hall speech today in which she will unveil the council’s official response to the mayor’s $52.2 billion budget. The response is expected to include several other proposals, but council officials would not say what they were last night.
The council has already announced a proposed $9 million for bulletproof vests for police officers.
The mayor offered his budget in February, proposing to use most of a $3.3 billion surplus to pay down debt and focus on long-term costs, like creating a $2 billion healthcare trust fund for city employees. By law, the budget must be passed by June 30.
Yesterday the council approved a series of budget “modifications,” including the first $1 billion for the employee trust fund and $575 million in funding for the Health and Hospitals Corporation. The “modifications” also included $6.4 million for libraries and cultural institutions.
