As a result, we know very little but seem willing to accept a good deal about the agency that is supposed to be making life better for children. ACS has not been shy about trumpeting its accomplishments: Scoppetta hired an additional 1,950 caseworkers and provided them with far more training, speeding up assessments of children and families so that caseworkers, lawyers, and judges are not left trying to understand who actually plays a part in a child's life.
All this is commendable, yet these were the obvious reforms and were, politically speaking, not tough to sell in the wake of the Izquierdo murder. The agency now functions. But far more difficult will be the task of changing the culture of a bureaucracy that has for decades trudged along without any true understanding of its mission (are we supposed to be protecting children or keeping families together, and are those goals contradictory?) or the emotional and developmental needs of its clients.
Scoppetta has proceeded slowly, for instance, with decentralization, which he has characterized as key to his reform plan and which does reflect the most progressive thinking on child welfare: that an agency can be of greatest use when it operates in the neighborhoods where most of its clients live. If a child must be placed in foster care, the thinking goes, far better to keep her in her own neighborhood, close to school, friends, relatives, and, yes, parents, so long as they are not a physical threat to her.
But awarding the first batch of contracts to 35 private foster-care agencies (the city typically subcontracts such work) in the Bronx alone took almost three years; bids have finally gone out in other boroughs. So profound a change in the agency's approach to its work will not go down easy with entrenched caseworkers.
Despite his generally good grades and favorable press, Scoppetta will undoubtedly face staff members not at all eager to move, say, to an office in East New York, and critics who will charge that his agency is only embracing clutter and chaos rather than acting decisively on behalf of children. He will be accused of being soft on parents, of being too tolerant of the failures. ACS was sued in January, for instance, by parents who accuse it of too quickly removing children from questionable homes -- a charge echoed by the watchdog group Child Welfare Watch. Ironically, one persistent critic, Marcia Robinson Lowry of Children's Rights, Inc., accused the agency in July of failing to protect abused and neglected children.
These days, the press goes little beyond reporting the accusations. A well-intentioned appointee like Scoppetta might be gone in two years, but the agency, like the social ill it cannot seem to cure, will endure, confident in the belief that no one is really watching. Too often reporters ignore, or fail to pursue, any story other than the sensational murder (and seem to have given up even under those circumstances). The consequence of Elisa fatigue is that the agency vested with protecting children has come to believe -- correctly -- that the press stopped paying much attention. After all, wasn't this fixed?"By the time of Rickiana's death, child welfare was no longer a hot story, no longer part of the public conversation. . . . We seem willing to accept a great deal about the agency that is supposed to make life better."
Email
Print
The Transformation of TV Into an Art Form
The Draw of Dream Worlds in Film
Gosselin, Prince of the Professional Nobodies
A Decade of Defining Moments in Pop-Culture
The Invention of New York's Local Cuisine 
Thirty-Five Short-Lived Looks of the Decade
Two Views of a Swath of the Upper West Side
An Older Generation Moves Into Williamsburg
Ten Years That Changed Everything
A Generation of Overparenting
The Sports Rivalry of the Decade
What Is the Point of the United States Senate? 
