{"id":43469,"date":"2011-07-01T13:39:49","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T17:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=43469"},"modified":"2011-08-18T15:07:08","modified_gmt":"2011-08-18T19:07:08","slug":"katz-takes-on-dcf-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/07\/katz-takes-on-dcf-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Katz Takes on DCF Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Joette<\/a>
Joette Katz, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, at her office in Hartford. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When she was a public defender, Joette Katz \u201977 JD represented a man who was charged with killing two children. The man had had a troubled childhood moving in and out of the child welfare system.<\/p>\n

\u201cI viewed him as a real failure of our system,\u201d Katz recalls. \u201cI knew by the time I represented him it was too late. Most of the time, these people fall through the cracks; so did this gentleman, but we had records so we could see where things went awry. I always carried that case with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The memory of that case helped lead Katz to a major decision in \u00a0her life\u2014to resign her position as an associate justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court after 18 years and take on what is considered one of the most difficult jobs in the state\u2014commissioner of the Department of Children and Families (DCF), an agency operating under federal oversight because of its long history of problems.<\/p>\n

Katz\u2019s appointment by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was one of his first major announcements after his election last year. At the time, it was \u00a0noted that she had no experience leading a large agency beyond her work as administrative judge for the state\u2019s appellate courts. Katz views \u00a0it as beneficial to tackling the job.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t pretend to have a magic wand, and I don\u2019t think I\u2019m any better than my predecessors,\u201d she says. \u201cI come at it with a slightly \u00a0different perspective because I\u2019m an outsider. I can approach something with a fresh perspective. When I talk to people and question them, I get a lot of \u2018Well, this is the way we\u2019ve always done it.\u2019 That is the culture, and I\u2019m not wedded to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since taking on her new role, Katz has barnstormed throughout Connecticut to meet many of the more than 3,000 DCF workers she oversees in offices and facilities throughout the state with an overall \u00a0budget of $900 million. She has started to reorganize many of the agency\u2019s functions to work more efficiently for their clients. She says she is working her way through each agency issue, and hopes to use the lesson she learned as a justice: Not every issue can be resolved to everyone\u2019s satisfaction.<\/p>\n

\u201cI take that experience to this one and realize I\u2019m not going to right every wrong and make everything perfect,\u201d Katz says. \u201cI\u2019m not going to make anything perfect. I\u2019m just going to try and make it better.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When she was a public defender, Joette Katz \u201977 JD represented a man who was charged with killing two children. The man had had a troubled childhood moving in and out of the child welfare system. \u201cI viewed him as a real failure of our system,\u201d Katz recalls. \u201cI knew by the time I represented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":43601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[55],"class_list":["post-43469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-17 19:56:08","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43469"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44696,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43469\/revisions\/44696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/43601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43469"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=43469"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=43469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}