In May of last year, gut-wrenching headlines led the news for the briefest of moments — Jalayah Eason, 6, was dead. Another child in New York City victimized by horrifying family abuse.
As more details emerged, the tragedy deepened. There had been other children living in the home with Jalayah. Their school was concerned enough that it repeatedly called the NYC Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) to report signs of abuse.
But despite those reports, and horrific conditions in the home, ACS decided an investigation was “unfounded” and dismissed the case.
A year later, Jalayah’s death has officially been ruled a homicide, and her mother has been charged with murder. I’ll spare you the details of the abuse; Jalayah’s brief life has already been overshadowed by the cruelty of her death. Suffice it to say that no living thing deserved to suffer such torture. And no agency responsible for the oversight of children in New York should read her obituary without a deep sense of shame.
Yet the death of children from abuse has become routine in New York City.
In the spring of 2023, NY1’s Annika Pergament investigated a series of child fatalities with shockingly similar circumstances — each child’s family had been investigated by ACS prior to their death. And ACS had done little or nothing.
In an interview with Pergament, Jess Dannhauser, commissioner of ACS, was unable to come up with any meaningful changes the agency had made after the childrens’ deaths other than provide “coaching” for workers. Despite obvious systemic strains and overworked personnel, Dannhauser had not even made a plea for additional resources or support.
You’d think Danhauser would be moved to more dramatic action by conscience. Failing that, outrage from the city or state government might force ACS to change. Except, there hasn’t been any.
In fact, our elected leaders have studiously avoided discussing not just these tiny victims, but anything related to ACS’ failures — for years. Silence envelops the City Council, the mayor’s office, and even reaches up to Gov. Hochul in Albany. Not one call for an investigation of ACS or an overhaul of the agency, let alone replacing Dannhauser or requesting a federal monitor to oversee an obviously broken system.
This silence is shocking. It dishonors the memory of the children we’ve lost — and it’s a dereliction of government’s most important duty. We can’t expect people to be perfect, but the job of a public servant is to serve and protect the public — to see a problem, acknowledge it, own it and then actually try to fix it. Our leaders’ silence exacerbates the vulnerability of New York’s children and signals a depressing disengagement from the very essence of public service.
How did we even get here? It’s been clear for years that elected office has become more about profile-building than policy solutions. That fundamental change — the prioritization of getting attention and eyeballs over delivering actual service — doesn’t bode well for a city and state facing big challenges. There’s something very bleak about how unwilling our leaders are to even be willing to try to meet foundational responsibilities.
Protecting vulnerable children is not impossible — it’s being done much more successfully elsewhere, including a stone’s throw away in New Jersey.
Over the last 20 years New Jersey, with the assistance of a court-imposed federal monitor, has transformed its child welfare program into one of the most effective in the nation, with smaller, more manageable caseloads for workers, real assistance for struggling parents and a steep drop in children entering the foster care system — not because they’ve been ignored, forgotten or dismissed, but because their families have been given assistance and provided with resources.
Here in New York it’s not that fixing ACS is too hard, or that the policy solutions are too out of reach — it’s that here, Jalayah and others don’t — or didn’t — matter enough to our leaders to even merit a debate about what more should be done to prevent these deaths going forward.
It is past time to demand more than just shoulder shrugs from our leaders. We need sustained, committed action that addresses the root causes of these repeated tragedies. The children of New York deserve leaders who care at least as much about them as they do their own ambitions. The memory of Jalayah Eason and the countless others like her, demand no less.
Feinberg is a former Obama administration official and safety regulator and former interim president and CEO of New York City Transit.