Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers Names Nadya Pérez-Reyes Acting DCF Secretary as Jeff Pertl Departs

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers announced a major executive cabinet transition on Friday, confirming that Department of Children and Families Secretary Jeff Pertl will depart the administration after more than seven years of leading state child welfare, early childhood education, and family assistance initiatives.

Governor Evers concurrently designated Deputy Secretary Nadya Pérez-Reyes to step into the executive role as acting secretary, ensuring administrative continuity at the head of an agency that manages Wisconsin’s foster care system, subsidized child care networks, child support enforcement, and juvenile justice rehabilitative programs.

Pertl’s departure marks the transition of one of Governor Evers’s closest and longest-serving policy advisors. Pertl first collaborated with Evers in 2009 when Evers served as Wisconsin’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, working as a senior policy advisor at the Department of Public Instruction on school financing reforms, early childhood education alignment, and initiatives to narrow statewide academic achievement gaps. Following Evers’s election as governor, Pertl joined the Department of Children and Families in 2019 as deputy secretary before later elevating to the cabinet secretary post.

During his tenure at the helm of the department, Pertl navigated complex statewide challenges, notably stewarding the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency federal and state child care stabilization grants under the Child Care Counts program during and after the pandemic. The initiative became a central legislative battleground between Governor Evers and Republican majorities in the Wisconsin Legislature, with the governor repeatedly pressing lawmakers to permanently fund child care subsidies to prevent widespread rural daycare closures and support workforce retention.

Jeff Pertl has been an extraordinarily dedicated public servant whose leadership has touched the lives of countless children and working families across Wisconsin, Governor Evers stated in a release praising Pertl’s service. From our early days working together at the Department of Public Instruction to his tireless work strengthening our child welfare system and advocating for our early childhood educators, Jeff’s compassion and policy expertise have been invaluable to our administration. I know the department will remain in exceptional hands under Nadya’s leadership.

Pertl, who also previously served as a Dane County supervisor and worked as a licensed foster parent in Wisconsin, expressed gratitude to agency staff, noting that the department’s frontline social workers, youth counselors, and family case managers have built lasting reforms that prioritize family preservation over institutional placements.

Acting Secretary Nadya Pérez-Reyes brings deep statutory and courtroom experience in child advocacy to the agency’s top post. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School who has served in the Evers administration since 2019, Pérez-Reyes previously served as an attorney with the Wisconsin State Public Defender in the Milwaukee Juvenile and Mental Health Office. In that role, she represented children and parents in child protection hearings, youth justice proceedings, and contested termination of parental rights cases, alongside legal advocacy work with Legal Action of Wisconsin.

Pérez-Reyes assumes leadership of the department as Wisconsin prepares for the upcoming biennial legislative budget deliberations, where funding formulas for county child welfare allocations, juvenile corrections facilities, and statewide early education subsidies are expected to feature prominently in statehouse debates.