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How New York’s Child Welfare Chief Is Trying to Fix His Agency’s Image

David A. Hansell, center, took over the city’s Administration for Children’s Services after the high-profile deaths of two children. In the year since, he has worked to repair his agency’s image.Credit...Edu Bayer for The New York Times

New York City’s commissioner of child welfare could not say no.

On a recent visit to a new family services center in the Bronx, employees urged the commissioner, David A. Hansell, to take a seat in the “selfie chair.” The new center is for struggling families looking for guidance and support, and the selfie chair is a way for parents and their children to show themselves some love as they enter the building.

Mr. Hansell, 64, pulled his cellphone from his suit jacket pocket, extended his arm, smiled and took his portrait.

For a year now since he was appointed to lead the Administration for Children’s Services, he has thrust himself into a spotlight. He has met frequently with employees and elected officials, and he has sat down with parents whose children have been removed from their family homes and placed in foster care.

Mr. Hansell has set out to improve the agency by hiring hundreds of additional employees and updating technology within the agency. But just as important to Mr. Hansell has been repairing the agency’s image.

With 7,200 employees and a $3.2 billion budget, the agency is a key part of the city’s social safety net. But the nature of its work means much of what it does happens outside the public eye. When the child welfare agency does end up in the news, it is almost always because a child has died and the agency is found to have come up short in its mission.

Contending with the reputation that flows from such failures, and from the role the agency plays in removing at-risk children from their homes, often compounds the challenges the agency faces. Families can be less inclined to trust the agency’s workers, and politicians can be less forthcoming with the funding the agency may need.

Mr. Hansell knows the agency has scant room for error, and that it is often perceived as intimidating, incompetent, or both. “I think a lot about what incredible power the agency has, the power to separate a family and to take a child away, and how you have to make sure you’re using that power for good and not for ill,” Mr. Hansell said.

Under Mr. Hansell the agency has increased training, and it has added 600 new child protective workers since September, with another 400 set to come on board by the end of June. The agency has also expanded the duties of investigators, retired police detectives who generally research the backgrounds of families and go out on high-risk cases that involve domestic violence and children under 7.

Mr. Hansell already has drawn criticism from outside child-welfare experts who fault him for a 13 percent rise in children removed from their homes and placed in foster care. He said that increase corresponded with an increase in reports following a succession of children’s deaths in 2016.

And he has to manage an ethics conflict stemming from his last job, as a managing director at the consulting firm KPMG, where he was in charge of the social services arm. KPMG has $2 million in contracts with the Administration for Children’s Services, to work on some of the agency’s juvenile justice efforts. When he joined the agency, he sent a letter to the chief contracting officer recusing himself from any financial decisions dealings with KPMG.

The child welfare job has long been one of the hotter seats in city government, and that ended up being true for Mr. Hansell’s predecessor, Gladys Carrión. Facing fierce criticism, she announced her retirement in December 2016 after the deaths of two children that illuminated understaffing, poor training of workers and lapses in child protection investigations.

Mr. Hansell said he drew lessons from her tenure, and concluded that she kept too low a profile. “So when things got bad, she had no public image and there was nothing else to give any context to what was happening,” he said. “That also sort of framed for me the importance of being out there as a visible symbol of the agency.”

Ms. Carrión doubted that high visibility could insulate an agency that inevitably comes under fire. “The question is, what does that buy you at the end?” she asked. “There will always be champions that will work with you. There will always be people who, when anything goes wrong, are going to be the naysayers that will go after you.”

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Gladys Carrión retired as head of the child welfare agency in December 2016, after two children died in the span of a few months.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The agency has a contract with Rise, a nonprofit that advocates for parents, to train some of the agency’s employees on how to better engage with families.

Jeanette Vega, a training director at Rise and a mother whose children were once removed by city child welfare, recalled how Mr. Hansell attended a picnic that celebrated parents and children reuniting. The event did not receive the same promotion as an adoption fair, but Ms. Vega said she appreciated Mr. Hansell’s presence. “He was in shorts and T-shirt,” she said.

Mr. Hansell grew up in Cleveland. His mother was a social worker and psychologist, and his father was a lawyer who served as a legal adviser in the State Department and was involved in human and civil rights.

Mr. Hansell initially followed in his mother’s footsteps by working as a sixth-grade teacher with an eye on becoming a child psychologist. But he switched gears, went to law school and began a career in Washington as an aide in the Senate.

Concerned about the issues of gay men like himself, Mr. Hansell left government and became legal director and a deputy executive director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York. He returned to government, first locally and then with the Department of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama.

Mr. Hansell has said he wants to see a day when parents view the city’s child welfare agency as a resource.

The selfie chair was at the entrance of O.U.R. Place, a community center made possible with $450,000 from the agency. There were no plans to publicize the financial affiliation with the agency, for fear of dissuading families from seeking help there.

Within the agency, Mr. Hansell’s frequent face time with employees is as much about increasing morale as it is about listening to concerns.

Before Mr. Hansell visited O.U.R. Place, his first stop in a packed schedule was the agency’s Harlem office, the center of the 2016 tragedy that helped fuel his predecessor’s departure.

Three employees were fired, four were demoted and two were suspended after the death of 6-year-old Zymere Perkins in September 2016. Zymere’s mother and her boyfriend were charged in the boy’s fatal beating, but state and city reviews showed that employees failed to talk to doctors, relatives and other people who came into contact with Zymere’s family. An independent monitor, ordered by the state, reviewed operations in the wake of Zymere’s death. Kroll Associates, hired as the monitor, issued a report in December that concluded that inconsistent compliance with policies, poor access to technology and understaffing had led to failures.

Mr. Hansell has visited all 17 of the agency’s field offices but has more frequently visited the Harlem office. A conference room was so packed during his recent visit that employees sat on filing cabinets and dragged in chairs from their desks. They raised concerns about everything from the bureaucracy and paperwork involved in distributing MetroCards to indigent families to proposed state budget cuts.

The commissioner has been meeting with state legislators to try to prevent what could add up to $129 million in cuts in 2019 in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s budget proposal. The agency cannot afford reductions, he said. Retention has long been a problem: About 40 percent of child welfare workers leave within the first two years of hiring.

The agency is putting a special focus on new hires, but it is also trying to make the jobs of all employees easier. The agency has spent about $6 million to get tablets that have talk-to-text capability to 2,425 employees so they can do work in the field instead of having to return to an office.

Showing up has endeared Mr. Hansell to many employees, said Anthony Wells, president of Social Service Employees Union Local 371. “He’s reachable. He’s accessible. You can have a conversation with him. He understands government,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: How New York’s Child Welfare Chief Is Trying to Fix His Agency’s Image. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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