Update to an earlier report: This article includes new information about a story we previously covered. Read our earlier report.
Keisha Lance Bottoms’ election as Georgia governor will put the state’s child-welfare agency under a leader who has adopted four children and worked in juvenile court. She won 54% of Tuesday’s vote, defeating Republican Rick Jackson. Bottoms will become Georgia’s first Black governor and the first Black woman elected governor in the United States.
Bottoms, 56, is a Democrat and former Atlanta mayor. She previously served as a guardian ad litem and attorney representing children in Atlanta’s juvenile court. Jackson, 72, is a former foster youth who began moving through foster homes and an orphan home at age 13. Five of the foster homes he lived in are part of his childhood history; the orphan home has since closed.
As governor, Bottoms will oversee the Division of Family and Children Services, which is responsible for 11,000 children in foster care and has an annual budget of roughly $1.6 billion. The agency faced an $86 million projected shortfall last year, prompting cost-cutting measures. Agency emails indicated the division spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on surveillance equipment to locate missing foster children.
Bottoms has called for improved pay, training and recruitment for child-welfare caseworkers, as well as adoption and post-adoption support services. She has said her work in juvenile court helped her understand challenges parents face, including poverty and substance use. In her victory speech, Bottoms said she and Jackson agreed to continue supporting foster children across Georgia.
Before her run for governor, Bottoms served as Atlanta’s mayor from 2018 to 2022. Her city government work also included serving as a magistrate judge and city council member, and she later became a senior adviser in the Biden administration.
Yolonda Harris
News Now Georgia
