Foster care fix to be expensive

Growing state crisis topic of hearing today

AUSTIN — As Texas faces a foster care scandal with thousands of children locked in a system already declared unconstitutional by a federal judge, Senate budget writers on Wednesday are expected to grill officials in charge of the troubled system over skyrocketing costs and questions over how many additional children are being victimized.

With the state budget already facing a multibillion-dollar shortfall over growing needs, the spiraling costs of a foster care fix are expected to come front and center. Current estimates show more than a half-billion dollars may be needed to get Texas’ foster care system back on track.

For his part, Henry “Hank” Whitman Jr., commissioner of the Department of Family and Protective Services that runs the state’s embattled foster care system, has been clear. “Texas children remain at risk,” he said in a letter last week to top state officials. “This is unacceptable.”

Adding to the pressure to resolve the current

crisis of having too few places to house foster care children, or to investigate claims of abuse and neglect in a timely manner, special masters appointed by a federal court in Corpus Christi are slated next week to issue a report on the entire system, an action that some state officials fear could be a prelude to a federal court mandate to fix the problems.

U.S. District Judge Janis Jack last December issued a blistering 360-page opinion that said the state for years had ignored internal failures in the system, leaving children in its care exposed to physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

‘The court does not understand, nor tolerate, the systemic willingness to put children in moral harm’s way,” Jack wrote in her opinion, which found deliberate indifference to the roughly 12,000 children placed in the Permanent Managing Conservatorship Program and essentially held in state custody until they were released on their own when they turned 18, many into more tragic circumstances.

Willing to act

Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus already have signaled their willingness to find extra state funding quickly to address increasing caseworker turnover, a shortage of staff to quickly investigate abuse and neglect, and an ongoing shortage of places to house scores of foster kids who instead have been forced to sleep in motels and state offices.

“We need to better understand what investments are working and what improvements are needed,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jane Nelson, a Flower Mound Republican who previously has been critical of state privatization of foster care services that failed to solve problems, said in a statement. “We need an action plan that will keep children safe.”

Last week, to address the continuing placement crisis that legislative leaders insist is victimizing foster care children after they were removed from their families and making their lives worse, Whitman sought permission to hire more than 800 new employees — including 550 front-line investigators. That is on top of nearly $500 million in additional funding the agency has requested in the new state budget to correct decades-old problems.

Advocacy groups support the call for additional funding, but also have urged the agency to increase caseworker pay as a way to reduce turnover rates that have reached 30 percent in Dallas and Houston.

In addition, they have cautioned that hiring hundreds of new workers and properly training them could take up to a year. As an alternative, agency officials have been urged to hire former caseworkers on emergency contracts to help alleviate the paperwork overload on initial investigations, much as the federal Veterans Administration did to solve a pending claims crisis.

“Competitive salaries are an important part of this, but we also have to have some long-term fixes for this system,” said Lee Nichols, a spokesman for TexProtects/The Texas Association for the Protection of Children, a statewide advocacy group.

Seeking permanent fix

In their letter to Whitman earlier this month, Abbott, Patrick and Straus made it clear they are impatient for a permanent cure, not just a Band-Aid.

“We also will not tolerate inferior residential foster care operations,” the state leaders wrote in the letter. “The state’s residential providers must be held to the highest standards while caring for our most vulnerable or no longer operate in our system.”

Officials said that as a result of that order, and limitations placed on the agency by Jack, the federal judge, the agency has lost some beds. In addition, it has lost several hundred more residential-treatment beds in recent weeks “due to facility closures or poor performance,” Whitman told state officials in a letter.

The result is even few places for foster care children to stay.