The Nicholas Scoppetta Children’s Center is badly overcrowded these days, and the cause is a familiar one: reformers who didn’t think through all the results of their efforts to make things better.
The city foster-care facility has more-than doubled its daily population, from an average of 30 kids a day in 2013 to 75 last month. The crowding — and the overstretching of the center’s staff — has caused big problems, as NBC News reported in March, citing workers who spoke on condition of anonymity: violent fighting among the kids; babies and children with special needs being housed alongside troubled teens and adults newly released from jail; walls smeared with feces by troubled youths; weapons found hidden on the premises.
“I honestly feel in my heart that either a child’s going to be hurt seriously, or staff is going to be hurt seriously,” one worker told NBC.
How did it come to this? It’s largely a result of the drive to keep young offenders out of Rikers and other jails, a push that began informally even before New York’s Raise the Age law moved the age of criminal responsibility to 17 last year. (It’ll rise to 18 in October.)
But some kids not sent to jail have nowhere to go: Their families won’t take them back. And so to the Scoppetta Center they’ve gone: It houses newborns to 21-year-olds who can’t be placed in a foster home.
Many of the new kids are considered high-need, with behavioral or mental challenges; others have criminal records. That also makes it more likely that their stays at the center will be longer than usual.
The good news is that the city Administration for Children’s Services is rushing to clean up the mess, and the City Council just gave it more cash to do so. ACS Commissioner David Hansell is using the added funds to hire 95 more staff and add training in handling the behavioral and mental issues of the higher-needs kids. The agency is also creating 144 new “therapeutic foster care” slots for youths and opening a couple of facilities to move very high-needs kids into.
Hansel’s had to fix the center before, after taking over the agency in early 2017. Under Mayor de Blasio’s first ACS chief, Gladys Carrión, it was caught making routine use of next-door Bellevue to simply drug kids who acted out.
Hansell remains a talented leader, determined to do right by an agency tasked with helping kids who’ve been failed by their families and every other government system. We expect he’ll get this crisis under control — maybe even by January, when the state’s new no-bail-no-jail law is likely to send a whole new wave of high-risk youths into ACS’s care.
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