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Letters to the Editor: ACS Should Finger Itself

Letters to the Editor
ACS Should Finger Itself


Things were looking up as an effervescent press release from the Administration for Children's Services (ACS) on Feb. 27 declared: "Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Commissioner John Mattingly today presided over the graduation of 230 new ACS Caseworkers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, bringing the total number of ACS frontline caseworkers and other child welfare investigators to 1,310. This number represents a 44-percent net increase in the number of caseworkers on staff since the death of seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown last January [2006] ... and ACS continues to hire an average of 80 new caseworkers a month."

But, things were soon nosediving to normalcy at ACS, when an enervating news story in THE CHIEF-LEADER on March 30 announced: "... 650 Caseworkers will be replaced by about 153 Clinical Social Workers, and another approximately 350 Staff Analysts and legal and technical support staff."

These successive, but inharmonious, events are symptomatic of Mayor Bloomberg's unrectified clueless appointment of John B. Mattingly as ACS Commissioner in 2004. The Mayor's press release of July 6, 2004 bubbled: "This is an exciting moment in the history of children's services both locally and nationally and I believe we can continue to set new standards and take New York City's reform effort to the next level, and I have every confidence that John [Mattingly] will meet and exceed this challenge."

Unfortunately, leaving it to "John" to take things "to the next level" enjoined a critical, though tacit, warning. By crowning his new commissioner without enunciating a comprehensible vision, goal, or timeframe to steer his administration's child welfare program, the Mayor not only renewed, but rejuvenated ACS's carte blanche to dabble in politics, patronage, reorganization, public relations, propaganda, and more reorganization.

Indeed, the foremost features of ACS's 10 years of "spinning" child welfare reform have been the abundant announcements of managerial appointments and bureaucratic switcheroos; the abundance of plans, studies, and reports; the abundance of window dressing; and the toll of countless families, children, and social service employees who have been sucked along in the trailing vacuum of the agency's lavishly funded formulations and reformulations of logistics, bureaucracy, and mediocrity.

Whatever good has been lastingly achieved as a result of the creation of ACS is probably but 10 percent of what could have been accomplished, had intelligent design prevailed over impulsive dalliance. Arguably, ACS itself was just a time-consuming and costly total reinvention of an agency that had been the time-consuming and costly total reinvention of yet another agency, and so on. The alphabet soup of superseded children's services agencies flows thick in New York City government: BCW, SSC, FACSA, CWA ...

(Incongruously, the current soup recipe ACS was whipped up and force-fed to us by a former Mayor who compromised his own children's well-being with a home atmosphere clouded by implicit turpitude and a sanguinary public divorce.)

The Organization of Staff Analysts' "OSA NewsLine" for March 26, 2007, probably summed it up best: "From Mayors Koch to Bloomberg, for 30 years straight, our city has screwed up Child Welfare by not staffing it properly and by frequent cases of mismanagement. Meanwhile, every time it goes wrong, it is always the workers who are to blame, and every time, the newspapers buy the administration's story. [OSA], and our analyst members within ACS, know the truth, that management is responsible for the sins of Child Welfare and sins they are."

MARK S. TRAVITSKY, Administrative Staff Analyst (Retired)