‘“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.