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Zohran Mamdani’s ACS choice puts ‘racial equity’ above keeping NYC kids safe and alive

“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.

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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.

NYC children’s-protective-services chief defends his record in the wake of Post exposés

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........

© New York Post