Q&A: Is this an extremist website? Does it go too far against Child Protective Services?

Q- Aren't you just a disgruntled ex employee?
A- I worked for Administration for Children's Services for more than ten years, eight of those years as a child protective investigator in their Emergency Children's Services. Because my work was thorough and I was a dedicated employee I was among the minority granted a merit pay raise. I was a worker who could be called upon to go into the field in order to correct the blunders of others, and I did that several times.

I had myself convinced that I could do some good from "inside the system" and in a sense sometimes I did help individuals in my casework, more often though, the system was going to do what it does best- mess things up - with me or without me. The system is designed to do what it does.

I was assigned as a one worker "Instant Response Team" unit and worked as such for around two years, going to the most difficult cases, working along with detectives of the Special victims and Sex Abuse squads of the NYPD. Ultimately I decided that I should be in a "regular unit" and so I went to work under Mr. Adegbola. He is not a good supervisor, though he is a nice guy. I reached a point where I simply was not going to harm other people just because Adegbola couldn't understand what was going on in some cases. Also I was at loggerheads with Mr. Vargas especially after he idiotically ordered me to transport sex abuse and domestic violence victims in one case back to the man who had them terrorized from a shelter where I had brought them. I refused an offer to be put aside once again and be given autonomy in my work. I felt that I was not the problem, and I wasn't! ultimately the management had the Department of investigations take the hard drive from my workstation and lo and behold, they say they found unauthorized emails and Internet contacts. (As virtually the entire municipal workforce that has access to computers would have.) Out of disgust after ACS Commissioner John Mattingly (not to be confused with Don Mattingly who posted from a blog of mine some very damaging information about ACS) emailed me to my home and told me that he did not want me to take advantage of his "open door" policyI resigned and took my pension, since I had signed up for an early retirement package upon my entry into ACS. I left them on my 60th birthday and presently I am happily a yellow taxicab driver on the night shift in NYC (see my blog TAXI NIGHTS).

Q- It's very extreme of you Mr. Weixel to tell people not to call reports against parents to ACS, isn't it?
A- It isn't extreme at all. After all our city and nation survived for many years without anything that looked like Administration for Children's Services. The fact is the only thing ACS ultimately does to "protect" "maltreated" children is to destroy their families, traumatize them and prepare them for a life of institutionalization.
God Is Love. We need to love each other and take care of each other, and not turn to moronic government programs that are proven to to work. (For the record- fire departments work, they put out fires and save lives, homes and workplaces from destruction, public housing works, it provides decent housing to millions of people, food stamps work, they provide food to millions of people including rookie NYPD officers by the way.) - I'm talking about idiotic interventions into the lives of free and autonomous human beings, typified by what is called Child Welfare or Child Protective Services, and includes foster care and subzidized adoption.

ACS functions on a level of incompetency, disregard for human and civil rights and impunity that are hard to match. This blog focuses on one manager in their Emergency Children's Services department, but the truth is, he might not even be the worse that they have, he's just the worse that I had occasion to work with. Did you know that after the Nixzmary fiasco (read my blog ACS MUST BE STOPPED to be filled in about Nixzmary) they fired or demoted to civil service rank ten managers? (The managers at ACS are not civil service employees and they are not unionized. They have their jobs at the pleasure of Mayor Bloomberg.)

Now if these managers were worse than Vargas that would be something! It would be quite an indictment of the system in which they had become managers and functioned as managers to begin with. I suspect however that they were not particularly worse than Vargas, but that once word came down from John Mattingly that some managers needed to be purged they got rid of ten who aren't sociable, or are the wrong ethnicity, for their particular office, or who are too serious, or who authorized "too much overtime." Whether they were worse than Vargas or not it's a sign of just how terribly run the agency is. When you make a child maltreatment report you are handing a family over to these kinds of people. Can your conscience allow that?

Q- But what about the abused children. Child Abuse is real, Weixel.
A- Yes, it is real. It is found everywhere, isn't it, including and especially in foster homes and group homes. Most ACS cases are not "abuse" cases. Most ACS cases (the majority of which have no supporting evidence according to ACS) are called "maltreatment" cases. These can be matters of "dirty homes" or old fashioned discipline, the kind that has existed for thousands of years in Judeo/Christian/Islamic cultures and that I suspect a vast majority of readers of this blog themselves know of first hand. Personally I don't agree with "physical discipline" but I do not see a legitimate government function to be destroying families and locking up parents who believe in what the majority believes in.

Q- Did you say Locking up parents?

A- Yes, good parents, you bet I did. Non white inner city parents get locked up for hitting their children with belts, for the kinds of things that do not result in incarceration in New York City's predominantly white neighboring counties.

Q- But what about abuse cases? Real abuse.
A- First of all even these cases are often blown out of proportion and the majority of them are found to have no supporting evidence. I remember vividly a case of a girl who had definitely been violated according to an emergency room doctor. Police went into action and brought all her siblings into a hospital to be examined. The child was taken out of her home. The next day the hospital's child abuse expert ruled that there had been no abuse. This sort of thing happens, and happens often. But yes, there is abuse. When someone actually abuses another person that criminal should be prosecuted, no? If the criminal is removed from the home the children involved do not have to be removed.

Communities are important. A corrupt and idiotic government agency cannot replace a community. Frankly during a time when I was coming to realize that God is real I was moved to see a church pastor, and congregants come down to a police station house to volunteer themselves and their homes to keep some children out of the horrendous foster care system. It occurred to me that most if not all of the single mothers caught up in the system and their children being violated by The State, need to be in a church, a mosque or a synagogue or community organization (formal or informal) that can function this way. - In this case a police Sergeant decided (not me or my boss) that the child in question had to go to a juvenile detention facility "pending investigation" (imagine that in a country where we claim to uphold rule of law and presumption of innocence!) This child- a boy, a black child, was a barely articulate, most likely mentally delayed and not "tough" non "streetwise" and he was going to Spofford because a police sergeant wouldn't allow his community to handle or even participate in handling a family problem, which this case really was! In this case a retarded boy might have been molesting another child in his home. Instead of bringing help, the system brought charges that their poor overwhelmed overburdened guardian was negletcful! All the children were traumatized rather than helped. Congregants offered to take each child or any child into their homes and they were refused and rebuffed by the order of a police sergeant!

Don Mattingly Is Not John Mattingly
Click here to see how New York Yankee baseball great Don Mattingly made that clear.

I'd like to spend less time driving a taxi and more time fighting the evils that CPS inflicts in the name of protecting children. Help by buying posters from this site.

Why I say Ramon Vargas is a symbol of a system beyond repair.

Child Protective Manager Ramon Vargas makes decisions five days a week that can spell the difference between life and death. He is probably not the worse manager they have at Administration for Children's Services in New York, but he does symbolize what's irreparibly wrong with their system.

Vargas is a poster boy for two waves of so - called "reform" of ACS. The first "reform" wave he represents came in 1996 under the cowboys Rudolph Giliuliani and Nichola Scopetta, his sidekick. After announcing bold new strict and impressive requirements for the position of supervisor at ACS Giuliani and Scopetta went on to promote a whole cohort of unqualified supervisors- people who now run the agency.

Like many, Vargas neither passed a test nor won an advanced degree to become a supervisor. Like very few, Vargas got a direct appointment to Supervisor II (senior supervisor) with no experience whatever as a supervisor I (remember this guy never passed a test). He was given a position as an "Instant Response Team " coordinator and spent a few weeks supervising a unit of veterans who were scheduled for the quietest time of night at Emergency Children's Services and then - bingo! the man is a manager and IRT heavyweight.

To recall the Nixzmary Brown case is to learn a lot about the "Instant Response Team".

Then there is the Whittick case.

Then the cases I personally experienced working with Vargas.

Vargas is a protected species under the latest "reform" Commissioner John Mattingly, under whose watch child fatalities of children on the ACS caseloads has skyrocketed. Mattingly is a complete captive of the media and the go along get along paperpushers in his agency.

Because it deals with poor and minority and immigrant children and their families there is no consistent interest by the informed public about this agency, nor by the political establishment. Comes a slow news day, an all too common incident of a child being violently killed is splashed across the media, and the entire agency is sent into a tailspin, being ordered around by ignorant media moguls whose bottom line is not children, but media sales.

It is under this environment that someone like Vargas not only makes decisions that impact other people's lives, he blunders and is protected, because in truth high quality individuals with real qualifications do not want Vargas' job. He and those like him have this power by default.

It would be better to close down this monument to corruption and incompetence called Division of Child protection, Administration for Children's Services, have the police investigate real crimes, have a small unit assigned to placing the very few real victims of child abuse who have no friends or relatives to care for them and calling it a day.

You want to read about governmental idiocy? Read this blog.

The difference between how NYPD and ACS function in child abuse cases.

The NYPD is of course interested in finding crime and if they find it, commencing the process of justice. They also are interested in securing the safety of children and all others. I'm the last one to say that they do these things perfectly - I've seen them mess up on child protective situations, but I feel that they can do no worse and probably can do much better than can ACS in these acute situations. Frankly the investigating of child abuse should belong to them. Some of their errors are due to lack of training, while ACS staff is trained, trained and trained again, but ignores the training in practice.

In all of my cases that involved police I was alone, on the telephone to bosses trying to get their decisions as to what I should do, while there would be several cops, detectives, and when decision time came there would be a Sergeant, a Lt. or even a captain on the scene signing off.No ACS supervisor or manager ever came out to the ground level to see the situation first hand before issuing an order as to how to resolve a case. Cops just don't work like that.

When you read about the sex abuse case at Elmhurst Hospital you can imagine a phalanx of police, including a sergeant, as well as numerous medical staff and me, the sole ACS representative trying to get the undivided attention of an Adegbola over the telephone.

That just can't work well.

What's The Big Deal? (and thanks to the great ER staff at Elmhurst Hospital)

Q- Okay, so Vargas was the manager on duty and also the Instant Response Team coordinator when the Whitick case came in to ECS, so he didn't send a case worker to the kids, he did have someone make a phone call, didn't he?
A- Yes, well someone did, and Vargas was in charge under two different hats, that of manager on duty and of IRT coordinator. Question- were the kids beaten to a pulp before, during or after the brilliant telephone call?

Q- Okay, so Vargas sent a teenaged sex abuse victim out of the shelter system with her mom back to where the guy that the kid and mother had run to the precinct away from thirteen hours earlier. You hadn't done a home assessment, Weixel. (Ask Vargas, he said you needed to do a home assessment). Also Adegbola wrote into the case record that that you only provided second hand information on this case. Not to mention that veteran supervisor George Baird was the "night administrator" that night and he thought it was fine to send the kid back, right?

A- This is where it is hard to say that Adegbola is not an idiot, but truth is he is not an idiot. He has a Master's Degree. Even if his lie were true, and I had only got information from cops, detectives, social workers, nurses and doctors of Elmhurst Hospital (who were very helpful in this case by the way, - thanks) that night and not one word from the mom or kid (a bald faced lie by Adegbola and he can take me to court if he wants to) the information was clear that the kids and mom needed to get away from that step father. That's why next day Zeinab Chahine, number two at Administration for Children's Services, (skipped over twice, now that's not nice) and her buddies were at ECS trying to fix Vargas' blunder. Don't forget, this was not even a removal. The mother agreed to bring her children to the shelter system as domestic violence victims, which all of them were. I wonder who Vargas' rabbi is. Do you?

Q- What's this thing about the four month old? What did Adegbola and Vargas do in that one?

A- A young mom and her seventeen year old baby daddy had a fight at paternal grandmother's Bronx apartment, cops came and they decided that the mom had attacked the dad, and that the house looked fine and so they locked up the mother and left the baby at the grandma's apartment not calling ACS to see if there was any child abuse record and definitely not checking to see if grandma was a criminal herself.

As they often do (when they bother themselves to do it at all) the cops called CPS hours after they had taken their own action regarding a child's well being.

When mom got released from jail with charges dismissed, she called in a CPS report that I was assigned to. I found in the record that baby's daddy was a child himself who had been removed and ordered by a judge not to return to grandma's house because she had brought baby daddy and her other kids upstate to a prison and tried to smuggle some heroin to her man and got caught. So baby daddy was not allowed to be where he was, let alone the baby. A Bronx ACS worker had come there, looked around, liked the furniture and left. So I told Adegbola that I needed to go there and get that baby out of there, and if possible baby daddy too. I told him it would be good to go there with cops as there had been violence and grandma is a felon and I would be there to take her kid and grandkid. Adegbola blew his stack, got defensive of his turf as boss and well, I went to Vargas who backed Adegbola up. Only by writing my opinion into the case record and by emailing the honchos was this assinine decision reversed.

I have a question. Okay a lot of people know about the Whitick case but the two other ones. They just involved me alone. How many other caseworkers have stories they feel too afraid to tell anyone about idiotic decisions by Vargas and Adegbola? Probably quite a few.

The public needs to consider the caliber of people in charge at ACS before they make a mistake and put a family into their hands by making that phone call. Think about it. If it's an emergency call the cops, they won't do any worse at least than ACS does, and maybe they'll do better. If it's not an emergency leave the family alone. For God's sake we all have problems and not every problem has a neat clean solution. Foster care by God surely isn't one.

PS to the people at Elmhurst Hospital. This sex abuse/domestic violence case was an ACS case on the night of 2/10/05 into the morning of 2/11/05. You can see how I tried to get the attention of the higher ups at ACS to take action about the irresponsibility of Vargas and Adegbola and how I tried to get ACS to repair the damage they had done HERE.