Rebecca Jones Gastons is the brand new commissioner for the Administration for Youngsters’s Companies Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani introduced Tuesday.
Jones Gaston served as commissioner of the Administration for Youngsters, Youth and Households in President Joe Biden’s Division of Well being and Human Companies and earlier than that because the little one welfare director for Oregon’s Division of Human Companies. She is a social employee by coaching.
In a press release, Mamdani stated Jones Gaston “has devoted her profession to constructing smarter, stronger methods that maintain kids secure and households collectively.”
Jones Gaston, who’s Black, has spoken publicly up to now about being positioned into foster care at start earlier than being raised and adopted by a white household in Iowa. The web site for her consulting group refers to her as having been “born into the system.”
Jones Gaston known as her appointment “our alternative to maneuver past managing disaster and as an alternative put money into prevention, belief and strengthen households, and guarantee each household and little one has an actual pathway to stability, belonging, and alternative.”
The brand new commissioner has up to now described her upbringing as an inspiration.
“I knew early on that I wished to work with youngsters and households who had had comparable experiences as ours,” she stated in a panel dialogue in 2023, 4 years after stepping down as government director of Maryland’s Social Companies Administration, the place she decreased the variety of out-of-state foster placements by 75% in lower than 4 years.
Jones Gaston’s appointment got here a couple of month after Mamdani’s prime two selections for the company’s prime submit fell by: Michelle Burrell, the undertaking director for Authorized Companies NYC’s Queens workplace, eliminated herself from the shortlist. In the meantime, Angela Burton — a regulation professor, advocate and self-described abolitionist devoted to dismantling the company she was being thought of to steer — didn’t advance after media retailers reported considerations about her views from inside ACS.
‘We’ve Obtained To Dismantle Main Items’
As commissioner, Jones Gaston will inherit a system that oversees greater than 6,000 foster youths whereas presiding over roughly 50,000 little one abuse and neglect investigations and preventative circumstances every year.
These circumstances are eight instances extra seemingly to contain Black households than white households, and 6 instances extra more likely to contain Latino households — with ACS being faulted for the racial and ethnic disparities on the similar time it’s additionally been faulted for not doing sufficient to guard kids.
Advocates involved in regards to the system’s influence on households of coloration have urged reforms in recent times, together with establishing an equal to a Miranda warning for household investigations and eradicating penalties for mandated reporters who fail to make a name to the state’s little one abuse hotline.
Whereas Jones Gaston has not publicly addressed how she plans to reply to these requires reform as commissioner, she stated within the 2023 panel that “I completely perceive the place everybody’s coming from within the idea of abolition. The kid welfare system itself wasn’t created in its construction to truly assist households keep collectively. It was a system that was created to separate kids from their households and significantly kids of households who’re poor and of coloration. So, it’s a system that was constructed on this premise of deserving and non-deserving.”
She continued: “Whereas I completely agree we’ve acquired to dismantle main items of the system, for me it’s a stability… How I see it’s, ‘Let’s dismantle the items that we all know are damaging to households and aren’t yielding the outcomes that we would like and construct up one thing totally different that truly helps households and youngsters keep collectively and keep linked to their communities.’”
Jones Gaston will even be charged with managing town’s youth detention system, together with the Horizon Juvenile Heart in The Bronx, the place a federal courtroom monitor ended its oversight in November at the same time as advocates proceed to sound alarms about overcrowded situations there.
She’s going to succeed interim commissioner Melissa Hester, who helmed the company for slightly over a month following the resignation and departure of former commissioner Jess Dannhauser.
