Foster care ‘cells’ ripped by fed judge
Hill Country facility’s director says photos taken out of context
AUSTIN — The leader of the Texas child protection agency said she was “horrified” by photos that show children in foster care staying in small, cinder-block rooms at a Hill Country facility, with virtually no furniture except for metal sink-toilet combos like those found in state prisons.
An image of one room shows a child lying on a green mat on the concrete floor with a mural of an angel cradling a child on the wall above.
U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack and the court-appointed monitors working for her were shocked by the conditions.
“It is hard to envision a less therapeutic environment — aside from jail — for youth with a history of trauma or intense psychiatric needs,” the monitors wrote in a report filed last week.
But Hill Country Youth Ranch in Kerr County has undergone 54 state inspections in the past three years that mention nothing about the eight rooms in question, state records show . Founder Gary Priour said the monitors took the photos out of context and didn’t highlight the campus’ many cot
tage homes, horse program and arts center that have earned praise from the state.
“We have to have a couple of minimalist rooms where the children can’t hurt themselves,” Priour said. “I felt hammered by the way they presented it. It’s just a shame.”
The monitors, however, reported they interviewed children who said they hate the unit so much they avoided telling anyone when they were ill because they didn’t want to be sent there.
Similar disagreements over best practices between Jack and foster care providers are bound to keep cropping up as the monitors spend the coming months visiting foster care facilities across Texas to ensure the state is carrying out the judge’s orders. Their work will provide a rare inside look at the private organizations Texas hires to house roughly 15,000 foster children on any given day. It’s not clear how many other residential treatment centers in Texas — which care for foster children with the most serious needs — have similar rooms in them.
Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services, said the agency can’t comment on the monitors’ report or its content because the matter is before the court.
Fines levied
Jack in 2015 found Texas manages its foster care system so poorly that children “almost uniformly leave state custody more damaged than when they entered.” She has ordered dozens of reforms, including requiring the state to beef up investigations and to study how many cases each worker can safely manage. The state successfully fought back against some of Jack’s reforms, getting them overturned through appeals. But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in July ordered the state follow through with other changes.
In a contentious court hearing last week, Jack said she cannot find state Department of Family and Protective Services “credible in any way” to report on their own progress and has indicated she will lean heavily on the monitors for updates. Jack found the state in contempt and said she would begin fining DFPS $50,000 a day starting Nov. 8 until the monitors confirm all children in large foster care facilities have around-the-clock supervision.
The state paid $150,000 in fines this week and certified that foster children in Texas are now receiving around-the-clock supervision at large-scale facilities.
In their most recent 36page report, the monitors found only one of 15 cottages home facilities across Texas they inspected had supervision from adults who were awake at night. The monitors identified Hill Country Youth Ranch as a particular risk to the children’s safety, citing its size and “few safeguards” for overnight supervision. The monitors also raised concern with the unit for youth with intense psychiatric needs, and included photos of the rooms that they likened to a detention facility with “cinder-block cells with a mattress on the floor.”
Jack appeared to be most troubled by the mural in a room where the monitors said children who may be suicidal are held, which depicts “an angel taking a child up to, assuming, it was heaven,” Jack said.
“What would be the message in that?” she asked Associate Commissioner of Child Protective Services Kristene Blackstone during the hearing in Dallas last week. “Did you see that picture? What did you think of that?”
“I was pretty horrified,” Blackstone said.
A DFPS spokesman didn’t respond to questions about whether the state is inspecting or ordering change at the facility. Hill Country Youth Ranch Residential Treatment Center in Ingram is licensed to care for up to 50 children between the ages of 5 and 17 years old, according to state records.
“It looks like a prison, not a home for innocent children,” said Paul Yetter, a Houston attorney working with New York-based advocacy group Children’s Rights, which filed the lawsuit in 2011 on behalf of the roughly 11,000 long-term foster children in the care of the state.
Priour said the monitors got it wrong. The mural painted by his wife represents protection and is in a time-out room, where he said children stay for an hour at most, “refocusing, or just having quiet time for an hour during the school day” with the door open.
‘Worst possible view’
Children who come to the facility with intense psychiatric needs stay in the unit’s other rooms as a “safe space while they stabilize, before moving to a cottage home,” Priour said. The room the monitors photographed, Priour said, was unoccupied at the time, which is why there aren’t pictures on the wall, a nightstand or a tub of stuffed animals.
“The fact that they didn’t show the colorful center or activity room, or one of the bedrooms with wall hangings and paintings and a tub of personal items, concerns me,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair to pick the worst possible view of the sparsest room at a time when it’s not occupied, and post it as if it’s got a kid in it.”
Dr. Steven Pliszka, chairman of the psychiatry department at UT Health San Antonio, said rooms designed for children at risk of harming themselves should be equipped with furnishings that can’t be broken and beds that can’t be thrown. The architecture should also be soothing, he said, with colors on the wall, dim lighting and even music.
“Ideally, it shouldn’t be cinder-block and should be painted in more cheerful colors,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether the unit will come up in future court hearings. The state’s Health and Human Services Commission, which inspects and licenses foster care facilities, also did not respond to a request for comment.