Rebecca Jones Gastons is the new commissioner for the Administration for Children’s Services Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Tuesday.
Jones Gaston served as commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth and Families in President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services and before that as the child welfare director for Oregon’s Department of Human Services. She is a social worker by training.
In a statement, Mamdani said Jones Gaston “has dedicated her career to building smarter, stronger systems that keep children safe and families together.”
Jones Gaston, who is Black, has spoken publicly in the past about being placed into foster care at birth before being raised and adopted by a white family in Iowa. The website for her consulting group refers to her as having been “born into the system.”
Jones Gaston called her appointment “our opportunity to move beyond managing crisis and instead invest in prevention, trust and strengthen families, and ensure every family and child has a real pathway to stability, belonging, and opportunity.”
The new commissioner has in the past described her upbringing as an inspiration.
“I knew early on that I wanted to work with kids and families who had had similar experiences as ours,” she said in a panel discussion in 2023, four years after stepping down as executive director of Maryland’s Social Services Administration, where she reduced the number of out-of-state foster placements by 75% in less than four years.
Jones Gaston’s appointment came about a month after Mamdani’s top two choices for the agency’s top post fell through: Michelle Burrell, the project director for Legal Services NYC’s Queens office, removed herself from the shortlist. Meanwhile, Angela Burton — a law professor, advocate and self-described abolitionist dedicated to dismantling the agency she was being considered to lead — did not advance after media outlets reported concerns about her views from within ACS.
‘We’ve Got To Dismantle Major Pieces’
As commissioner, Jones Gaston will inherit a system that oversees more than 6,000 foster youths while presiding over roughly 50,000 child abuse and neglect investigations and preventative cases each year.
Those cases are eight times more likely to involve Black families than white families, and six times more likely to involve Latino families — with ACS being faulted for the racial and ethnic disparities at the same time it’s also been faulted for not doing enough to protect children.
Advocates concerned about the system’s impact on families of color have urged reforms in recent years, including establishing an equivalent to a Miranda warning for family investigations and removing penalties for mandated reporters who fail to make a call to the state’s child abuse hotline.
While Jones Gaston has not publicly addressed how she plans to respond to those calls for reform as commissioner, she said in the 2023 panel that “I absolutely understand where everyone’s coming from in the concept of abolition. The child welfare system itself wasn’t created in its structure to actually help families stay together. It was a system that was created to separate children from their families and particularly children of families who are poor and of color. So, it is a system that was built on this premise of deserving and non-deserving.”
She continued: “While I absolutely agree we’ve got to dismantle major pieces of the system, for me it’s a balance… How I see it is, ‘Let’s dismantle the pieces that we know are destructive to families and aren’t yielding the outcomes that we want and build up something different that actually helps families and children stay together and stay connected to their communities.’”
Jones Gaston will also be charged with managing the city’s youth detention system, including the Horizon Juvenile Center in The Bronx, where a federal court monitor ended its oversight in November even as advocates continue to sound alarms about overcrowded conditions there.
She will succeed interim commissioner Melissa Hester, who helmed the agency for a little over a month following the resignation and departure of former commissioner Jess Dannhauser.
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