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De Blasio Picks David Hansell to Lead New York’s Child Welfare Agency De Blasio Picks New Commissioner for Troubled Child Welfare Agency
(about 5 hours later)
Mayor Bill de Blasio, still struggling with the fallout from a series of deaths of vulnerable children, named a new child welfare commissioner on Tuesday, choosing a longtime social services official who had left government for the private sector. Under pressure to turn around the city’s embattled child welfare agency, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday appointed a new commissioner who was expected to rely more on data to assess performance and determine priorities.
The new commissioner, David Hansell, replaces Gladys Carrión, who announced in December that she would step down as head of New York’s Administration for Children’s Services amid a wave of scrutiny and criticism. The mayor’s pick, David Hansell, will take over the Administration for Children’s Services next month, inheriting one of the most challenging posts in city government at a time of renewed scrutiny of the agency.
The agency, under orders from the state, is hiring an independent monitor, after a review faulted child welfare workers in connection with the death of Zymere Perkins, a 6-year-old who was not removed from his mother’s care despite signs that the boy was in grave danger. The child welfare agency is responsible for investigating reports of child abuse and neglect and determining whether children should be removed from troubled homes. While the agency’s successes are rarely public, its most serious failures almost always are, and in recent months a series of child deaths put the agency back in the spotlight, most notably the killing of 6-year-old Zymere Perkins.
Mr. Hansell, who has been working as a senior manager at the accounting firm KPMG, was introduced by the mayor Tuesday morning at a news conference in Manhattan. In December, the child welfare commissioner, Gladys Carrión, announced her resignation after weeks of criticism. A day later, the state announced that it had ordered the agency to hire an independent monitor, after a review faulted child-welfare workers in the death of Zymere, who was not removed from his mother’s care despite signs that the boy was in grave danger.
Mr. Hansell, 63, said the mayor asked him what motivated him to take on such a challenging job. “I answered him with my own question: ‘Where is there a more important place to serve the most vulnerable individuals?’ ” Mr. Hansell said. At a news conference on Tuesday morning, Mayor de Blasio said the agency, which has about 6,000 employees, needed a fresh push for change and that Mr. Hansell would deliver that.
Entering an election year, Mr. de Blasio faces pressure to show progress in social services, which was a focus of his as a city councilman and later as a public advocate, but which has proved more difficult to manage as mayor. Homelessness has surged under Mr. de Blasio, and high-profile child deaths have led to more reviews and larger caseloads for social workers who were already overworked. “Now, we have a leader who am I convinced will move A.C.S. forward and will usher in the next wave of reform and change on behalf of our children and families,” Mr. de Blasio said
Anthony Wells, president of Social Service Employees Union Local 371, said he was hoping Mr. Hansell would decrease workloads and push for more hiring and training of workers. “He has experience in government,” Mr. Wells said. “Of course, we are optimistic that he will lead this agency and help the workers.” Mr. Hansell, 63, is a lawyer and has an extensive background in social services. He also has a reputation as a data-driven manager.
Mr. Wells said he had known Mr. Hansell for years. Mr. Hansell, who said he believed in using “evidence-based intervention,” most recently worked in the private sector as a managing director at the accounting and consulting firm KPMG, where his portfolio included working as an adviser to local governments.
Mr. Hansell began his career as an activist, working in different roles for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis before moving into government agencies as a commissioner of the State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance and as a chief of staff in the city’s Human Resources Administration. Before he began working at KPMG, he was acting assistant secretary in the federal Administration for Children and Families, which is a division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. “I think that he will bring strong operations experience to an agency that requires a strong manager in a leadership role,” said Ronald E. Richter, who headed child welfare under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “A.C.S. really needs that right now.”
Mr. Hansell, a lawyer educated at Yale, pointed to his work with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis as the inspiration to work in child welfare at such a difficult time, recalling how hundreds of New Yorkers, mostly young and of color, were dying of AIDS in the early 1980s. He said he saw what happens when government takes a “callous attitude” and the good that comes when a government cares. Mr. Richter, now chief executive of JCCA, a foster care provider, said that in his two observations he found the agency’s internal tracking system, ChildStat, heavy on discussion and short on data.
“Those were very interesting conversations, but it was not about the number of cases workers were carrying, not about the indicated cases, not about the critical trends in child protective practice,” he said.
During the hourlong news conference, Mr. de Blasio often defended the agency against reports by the state and the city Department of Investigation, which most recently described systemic problems with inadequate training and staffing.
“I don’t dwell in regret,” Mr. de Blasio said. “I say we did some of the right things,” adding that they now had to do more. Earlier, he had pointed to a significant reduction in the number of children in foster care as one of the agency’s achievements.
Herminia Palacio, deputy mayor of health and human services, said the city needed to be judicious in reviewing recommendations from other agencies based on individual cases to draw broad conclusions about the failures of A.C.S.
“In fact, one can do harm by making those extrapolations inappropriately and laying out reforms that may theoretically fix one thing but break several others,” she said.
About 55,000 reports of neglect or abuse are investigated annually by the agency, and in the 2016 fiscal year, about 46,000 children received services through the agency.
Mr. Hansell said one of his first tasks would be to conduct his own “top-to-bottom review of A.C.S.’s protective and preventive functions to strengthen what’s working and to change what isn’t.” The review will include looking at ways to improve ChildStat, and he said he planned to attend a session of the Police Department’s CompStat program, which ChildStat uses as a model.
Mr. Hansell said the mayor had asked him what motivated him to take on such a challenging job. “I answered him with my own question: ‘Where is there a more important place to serve the most vulnerable individuals?’” Mr. Hansell said.
Mr. Hansell began his career as an activist, working for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. He later moved into government, including as a commissioner of the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance and as a chief of staff in the city’s Human Resources Administration. He served as acting assistant secretary in the federal Administration for Children and Families before going to KPMG.
Mr. Hansell pointed to his work with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis as the inspiration for his decision to work in child welfare at such a difficult time, recalling how hundreds of New Yorkers, mostly young and many of them black or Hispanic, were dying of AIDS. He said he saw what happened when government took a “callous attitude” and the good that came when a government cared.
“My job will be to build on what A.C.S. is doing well, to fix what isn’t working and to move mountains to support the work of the agency’s 6,000 committed and courageous staff,” he said.“My job will be to build on what A.C.S. is doing well, to fix what isn’t working and to move mountains to support the work of the agency’s 6,000 committed and courageous staff,” he said.
Hal Moskowitz, who worked with Mr. Hansell at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said his former colleague had never backed down from a challenge.
“When he sees something, he goes for it,” Mr. Moskowitz said. “But he doesn’t just go for it willy-nilly; he does his research.”