Court orders Texas to improve foster care

State is ‘deliberately indifferent’ to threat that poor monitoring poses on children, ruling finds

AUSTIN — A federal appeals court on Thursday ordered Texas to improve investigations of child abuse in its foster care system and address long-standing problems with the caseloads of workers tasked with checking in on the children.

What’s more, state officials have been “deliberately indifferent” to the threat to children’s welfare caused by high caseloads and insufficient monitoring, a threejudge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.

"This is a huge victory for Texas children," said Houston attorney Paul Yetter, who is working with New York-based advocacy group Children’s Rights, which filed a class action suit in 2011 on behalf of the roughly 11,000 long-term foster children in the care of the state.

The order, however, invalidated costly reforms ordered by a lower court judge that would have likely required a dramatic increase in the number of foster homes.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Ken Paxton didn’t say whether he plans to appeal.

“The Fifth Circuit’s decision affirmed many of the significant changes the state has made to our foster care system,” Kayleigh Lovvorn said. “While the program still faces challenges, the Fifth Circuit upheld significant parts of the program as constitutional while finding that the district court engaged in judicial overreach in entering an overbroad and impractical injunction.”

The Department of Family and Protective Services is reviewing the order and had no immediate statement.

The class action suit alleged youth were bounced between homes, had too little contact with overworked caseworkers and were not sufficiently protected

from abuse.

In 2015, U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack of Corpus Christi ruled the state’s foster care system was unconstitutional, finding that foster children in Texas “almost uniformly leave state custody more damaged than when they entered.” In January, Jack ordered the state make dozens of sweeping changes. Paxton appealed.

The panel of appellate judges upheld some of Jack’s remedies, including reforms to shore up abuse investigations by ensuring timely contact with alleged victims and setting deadlines for closing cases. The 103-page order also called for new workers to have different caseloads than more experienced staff.

But it invalidated dozens of others such as a requirement the state to set caseload caps at 17 children per worker, saying that move could exacerbate a staffing crisis and destabilize children in care. Instead, the family and protective services department must determine how many cases workers can safely carry and set internal standards.

"The evidence in the record establishes that the State is deliberately indifferent to the risks posed by its policies and practices toward caseload management,” the order said. “The State is wellaware that caseworkers have unmanageable workloads. It also knows that high caseloads — which are a direct cause of high turnover rates — have a negative impact on (foster) children’s welfare.”