“It’s really hard to think about anything other than dismantling [the child welfare system] entirely and creating something different.”
This is according to Rebecca Jones Gaston, New York City’s newly appointed Commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).
Jones Gaston previously served as the leader of child welfare agencies in Oregon and Maryland, as well as the head of the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families during the Biden administration.
Though she is not a self-proclaimed abolitionist (as one of the finalists in the last search for an ACS leader was) she has a lot of sympathy for the folks who want to end government involvement in child protection.
If New Yorkers want a commissioner who actually cares about child safety, the Mamdani administration has made the wrong choice.
The reason to dismantle the child welfare system, according to Jones Gaston, is that “white supremacy and systemic racism” are deeply embedded in it. She cites “historic evidence” that child welfare was “built on a premise of deserving and non-deserving,” children and workers discriminating by race and class.
She insists that child maltreatment “actually isn’t more likely to happen by racial or ethnic groups.” But how does she explain that black children are dying of maltreatment at three times the rate of white children?
Of course, she is not alone in the view that any racial disparities in the child welfare system are the result of systemic bias. But the policies that she has implemented at the state and federal levels have consistently placed ideology over child safety.
In 2023, as ACYF Commissioner, Jones Gaston changed a federal rule to allow states to create alternative licensing processes for relatives to become foster parents without having to meet the same standards required for non-relatives.
The idea was that children would be able to stay with their extended family members rather than going to a foster parent they don’t know, if only we changed some small bureaucratic hurdle.
She explained: “The hope and intention is that we’re creating some equity around how we’re supporting family members caring for children that are in foster care.”
What has that meant in practice? In Illinois, thanks to this rule, relatives don’t have to go through the same background check process as nonrelatives. Instead, they are “subject to a personal analysis assessing their criminal record and its potential impact on the child.”
DCFS can “consider, for example, the overrepresentation of minorities in the prison system, especially for minor drug felonies.” But why do we care about the overrepresentation of minorities in the prison system in determining whether a family member’s home provides safe and appropriate placement for a child?
And what, exactly, are “minor drug felonies”? If the crime is minor, it’s a misdemeanor, not a felony.
Jones Gaston’s record as head of Oregon’s child welfare agency from 2019 to 2023 also suggests she prioritized equity over safety. She dismantled the predictive risk modeling tool that was designed to help hotline workers prioritize reports of abuse and neglect for investigation by caseworkers.
Despite the fact that the PRM tool has been shown to improve child safety outcomes in Pennsylvania and, more recently, in Los Angeles — one reason that New York City has been considering it — Jones Gaston scrapped it after an AP report found it flagged a disproportionate number of black children for investigations.
Jones Gaston has also been one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Family First Prevention Services Act, which made it more difficult for states to fund residential care for foster kids. She championed the legislation during her tenure in Maryland.
In her “Vision for Transformation” in Oregon, she wrote that when kids need “higher level physical or mental health services,” they should receive treatment at home with families, rather than in residential care.
It’s a great theory, but across the country, it has turned out to be a disaster as families do not have the ability to give 24-hour supervision to kids who may be a danger to themselves or others.
Indeed, Jones Gaston ran headlong into this reality. Oregon settled a class action lawsuit in 2018 over the number of kids it was placing in residential care. Rather than find homes for those kids when she took over, Jones Gaston oversaw the state as “it spent more than $25 million housing 462 kids in foster care in hotels.”
When you restrict residential care, kids often end up in a setting that is less safe and less therapeutic — hotels, shelters, and even juvenile detention. Despite these results, Jones Gaston has expressed no regrets or concern about the move to eliminate residential care.
Problems in Oregon piled up during her tenure. Wait times at the state’s child abuse hotline had been a challenge before Jones Gaston arrived, but they may have gotten worse while she was in charge. Child welfare case workers (who had to report abuse to the same hotline as everyone else) experienced wait times of more than two hours and were sometimes getting up in the middle of the night to make reports because the hold time was shorter.
Once a caller got through, they may have been ignored anyway. I interviewed a homeless outreach worker in Portland who described finding a naked three-year-old girl, standing alone in the woods near discarded hypodermic needles, with her parents “nodding out a half-mile away.” The operator refused to send anyone to investigate, telling him, he says, “Poverty is not a crime.”
Gaston Jones has often repeated the myth that families who are being reported for neglect are just experiencing poverty. Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, she explained: “A significant portion of those cases are not about willful neglect, but about the challenges of poverty, such as unstable housing, food insecurity, unmet health needs.”
In fact, poverty is usually just one symptom of neglect, and data suggest that most neglect reports also involve signs of drug abuse, mental illness, and/or domestic violence.
Fourteen-year-old Fallon Murdock died in Klamath County, Oregon, in 2023 after family members made multiple calls to child welfare officials over the course of four years about Fallon and her siblings — the years when Jones Gaston was overseeing the system.
When police officers went to investigate her death, according to court records, “the home had a significant amount of urine, feces, garbage, and was generally unsafe for any aged child.” There was also evidence of methamphetamine use. Were Fallon’s family members also ignored by ODHS because “poverty is not a crime”?
Finally, Jones Gaston also oversaw child welfare in Oregon as the agency tried to restrict public access to records of abuse for children who are placed in care outside of their homes. The Department of Human Services originally tried to get the state legislature to change the law about what it was required to turn over. When that didn’t fly, it tried to change the standard through agency rules.
Sadly, none of these ideas is unique to Rebecca Jones Gaston. Indeed, prioritizing racial equity, characterizing neglect as “just poverty,” underestimating the risks to children whose parents are drug addicts, keeping kids with significant behavioral health problems out of residential care, and hiding information from the public are all problems New York City’s ACS has had for years.
Rebecca Jones Gaston is only likely to exacerbate them. Maybe it’s too much to ask that Mayor Mamdani hire someone for the job who actually places child protection above progressive ideology.
This is the second search the mayor has done for this job. Third time’s a charm?
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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