12-hour shifts out at juvenile detention centers

The Administration for Children’s Services must stop scheduling 12-hour shifts for youth development specialists working in the city’s two juvenile detention facilities and must restore their contractual eight-hour tours, an arbitrator ruled last week.

In April 2020, ACS began temporarily changing scheduling patterns for the development specialists so that they worked 12-hour, 15-minute shifts three days one week and four days the following week because of staffing shortages exacerbated by the pandemic. Even before workers started becoming sick with coronavirus, Crossroads and Horizon juvenile centers already faced high turnover rates and a staggering number of YDS out on Workers’ Compensation because of injuries they sustained on the job.