In 2011, Joette Katz stepped off the Connecticut Supreme Court to take a far more difficult job: running the state Department of Children and Families, Connecticut’s equivalent of the New York City Administration for Children’s Services.
Within months, the death of a child “known-to-the-system” made headlines. As happened at least twice previously, there were calls to tear apart more families, and enormous pressure on Katz to tell her workers to do just that. In past years, her predecessors had caved. Katz did not.
“I think in the past that’s been exactly the mistake, frankly,” Katz said at the time. “A child dies and the next thing you know workers are getting thrown under the bus and 500 children get removed [from their homes] the next day because it’s a reaction to a tragedy. I think that’s the exact wrong way to behave.” That’s why, at the time, I called Katz the gutsiest leader in child welfare.
Now ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser will face the same pressure. Will he have the same kind of guts? Children’s lives may depend on it — literally. We may get a clue tomorrow morning when the City Council’s Committee on Children and Youth holds an oversight hearing on ACS.
In the wake of the horrific deaths of Jahmeik Modlin and Joseph Heben Jr., there will be efforts to scapegoat efforts to keep families together. There’ll be calls to expose more overwhelmingly poor, nonwhite families to surveillance and investigation and throw more children into foster care. After all, in most recent years entries into foster care decreased so that must be why these children died, right?
The data tell a different story.
- In city Fiscal Year 2024, ACS took 3,075 children from their homes. But a few months later Jahmeik Modlin and Joseph Heben Jr. still died.
- In city Fiscal Year 2016, ACS took 3,657 children from their homes. But Zymere Perkins still died.
- In city Fiscal Year 2006, ACS took 6,213 children from their homes. But Nixzmary Brown still died.
- In city Fiscal Year 1996, ACS took 8,912 children from their homes. But Elisa Izquierdo still died.
In at least two of those three prior cases, the next few years saw huge increases in children taken from their homes, reaching a peak of 12,000 in 1998 — nearly four times the number in 2024. But both times deaths of children known-to-the-system increased — perhaps because workers had even less time to find children in real danger.
A foster-care panic, a sharp sudden increase in removals of children after high-profile tragedies, also subjects thousands more children to the enormous trauma of a needless child abuse investigation — the late-night knock on the door, the interrogation of small children by big strangers, the strip-searches looking for bruises.
A foster-care panic will subject some of them to the even worse trauma of being torn needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to foster care, where independent studies find astoundingly high rates of abuse. Indeed, there is so much abuse in New York foster care that the agencies providing it want a taxpayer bailout just to cover the cost of payments to those suing after being abused on their watch.
No system can prevent every death. But most cases are nothing like the horror stories. Child abuse deaths are needles in a haystack. New York’s experience shows you can’t find the needles by making the haystack four times bigger.
Instead, we can reduce fatalities by making sure workers are not flooded by false reports and panic-induced removals. We can curb false reports to the state child abuse hotline, curb and ideally abolish mandatory reporting of alleged child maltreatment, which research shows backfires, and curb needless investigations when poverty is confused with “neglect.” That will give workers more opportunity to investigate legitimate cases with the time and care they need.
Joette Katz understood this. After refusing to cave in to foster-care panic she went on to reduce needless foster care, reduce the worst form of care, group homes and institutions, and increase use of the least harmful form of care: placing children with relatives instead of strangers. She did so well the state finally was able to exit from a lawsuit consent decree that had dragged on for decades.
Jess Dannhauser understands all this too. But does he have the guts to act on what he knows?
Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (nccpr.org)
