Daycare abuse spikes in NYC and equity-driven reform is to blame

For years, New York state and local officials have made it harder to investigate child abuse, and harder to keep abusers on the registry that educational and child-care employers check before they hire.Now it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost: City daycare facilities are seeing skyrocketing cases of child abuse by employees.Anyone wondering how this happened hasn’t been paying attention.When Gov.Kathy Hochul signed a law last year forbidding hotline callers from accepting anonymous reports of child abuse, it sealed the deal on a hands-off stance that was long in the making.The city’s Administration for Children’s Services has made a concerted effort to tamp down calls about child maltreatment, actively discouraging teachers, for instance, from reporting child neglect.When calls are accepted, more and more of them are deemed “low risk,” meaning families are offered services but the cases are never actually investigated.Many such “low risk” cases are nothing of the sort: For instance, a case that ACS chalks up to poverty — such as a teacher’s report that a child showed up to school hungry, having not been fed all weekend — may actually be the result of substance abuse or mental illness on the part of a parent or caregiver.Even if no assault occurs, that child can be in real danger; most child maltreatment fatalities are the result of neglect, not abuse.And for a daycare, hiring a person suffering from untreated mental illness or addiction significant enough to impact their ability to care for their own children can be disastrous.Even leaving aside the horrifying 2023 overdose death of a toddler in a Bronx daycare that doubled as a fentanyl factory, multiple cases across the country have seen young children harmed by ingesting small amounts of drugs carelessly left around a child-care center.But let’s say a report actually is investigated.In the past, New York officials added names to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse a...