Cecely A. Reardon is the Commissioner for the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services (DYS). She joined DYS in 2014 as its General Counsel and was appointed Acting Commissioner in January of 2022 and Commissioner in July of 2023.
Prior to joining DYS, Ms. Reardon worked for seventeen years as a public defender with the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS), first as a staff public defender in Brockton and later as the attorney-in-charge of the Roxbury office of the Youth Advocacy Department. Ms. Reardon has served as the vice chair of the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee and serves on the executive board of the national Coalition for Juvenile Justice. She is also a past Massachusetts delegate to the Federal Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice.
In 2007, Ms. Reardon was the recipient of the Boston Bar Association’s John Brooks Award for Outstanding Public Service, and in 2017 she received the Manuel Carballo Award for Excellence in Public Service from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for her work as part of the Administration and Finance Regulatory Review Team. In 2019, she was the recipient of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice’s A.L. Carlisle Child Advocacy Award. Ms. Reardon is a graduate of Boston College (B.A.), Boston College School of Social Work (M.S.W.), and Boston College Law School (J.D.).