Faced with foster care woes, Oklahoma made fixes as Texas fell further behind
The foster care systems of Oklahoma and Texas have a lot in common: Both states faced court monitoring over unsafe conditions in some foster homes, and each had high percentages of facilities with records of maltreatment and abuse.
In both states, cleanups spurred by lawsuits led to the closure of a number of those facilities — about 25 percent were shut down in Texas and nearly 40 percent in Oklahoma were closed.
But while Texas now has a lack of beds that has left hundreds of kids sleeping in office buildings and motels, supervised by unlicensed caretakers, Oklahoma has avoided those problems.
Oklahoma more than doubled its funding for the foster care system from 2008 to 2018, and it is now thriving, making progress in all 30 metrics identified by court-appointed monitors for the first time since the state settled the lawsuit against it in 2012.
Meanwhile, Texas launched a decade-long legal battle to defend itself, and to oppose court-ordered reforms. As a result, the state’s foster care system — charged with caring for about 30,000 children — has faced the capacity crisis for nearly a year.
“One of the big differences that I’ve observed being involved in both cases is that as the facilities started to close, the (Oklahoma) administration realized what was happening and tried to figure out solutions,” said Marcia Lowry, executive director of A Better Childhood, which is involved in both the Oklahoma and Texas lawsuits. “I don’t know that Texas has really tried to figure out the solutions.”
A report from court-appointed monitors this fall found that more than 100 Texas children were placed in unlicensed facilities each day throughout much of the summer, often in state offices or motels, with 65 percent staying longer than seven days. About half stayed longer than two weeks.
Children in these facilities aren’t required to go to school, but can instead stay all day, watched by workers who don’t have the authority to discipline them in most cases, or to stop them from leaving when they want.
The court-appointed monitors have raised alarms over fights, hazards, neglect and
crime at the temporary lodgings. The report said court monitors learned of multiple cases of teenagers leaving the unlicensed facilities to enter into sex trafficking, of children fighting with each other or with CPS staff, and widespread drug use.
In June, a foster care teenager in Houston who walked out of his temporary placement was shot in the head in the process of carjacking someone.
1,500 placements lost
U.S. District Judge Janis Jack, who presides over the long-running class-action lawsuit filed by two dozen former Texas foster children, is among those who have asked why Texas failed to learn from Oklahoma’s success.
“I want to tell you that in Oklahoma when there was a remedial order for heightened monitoring, 40 percent of the (facilities) were closed, 40 percent,” Jack said in a September hearing. “If anybody in the state of Texas had looked around at the other states, we could have anticipated this.”
In Texas, 26 group homes were closed as a result of the heightened monitoring as well as two agencies that placed children in homes. The system lost a total of about 1,500 child placements, per the court monitors’ report. Those closures included the Whataburger Center in San Antonio, which housed dozens of troubled kids who otherwise had no placements.
“A well-run system at that point would have said, ‘Well, I know we have unsafe facilities, dangerous placements for these children and we’re going to weed them out and make sure they don’t exist in our system anymore, and as a result we’re going to need new facilities that are safe to replace them,’” said Paul Yetter, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Texas class-action case.
Blistered by Jack at the hearing in September, the head of Texas’ Department of Family Protective Services, Jaime Masters, acknowledged: “I do feel like I am failing children.” Masters was appointed in 2019.
Soon after that hearing, Gov. Greg Abbott agreed to cooperate with the judge
and the lawyers pushing the state for foster care change, and last month agreed to convene an expert panel with the plaintiffs to find solutions.
The state has agreed to cooperate with the panel, and the three experts who serve on it will take until mid-december to evaluate the crisis and generate new policies to fix it, although Abbott is not bound to act on any of the suggestions.
Nevertheless, Yetter said he’s hopeful.
“They’ve embraced the need to fix the system. Now, that came 10 years after we filed our lawsuit, and a year and a half after heightened monitoring and all the remedies kicked in, and it’s left us with this crisis over children without safe placements. But at least today, the agencies are committed, based on what we’re seeing, to change. We now just need to see the results,” Yetter said.
State fought ruling
While the two states faced similar capacity crises, was Oklahoma ever forced to house children for weeks in unlicensed offices and motels while they awaited placement?
“No. Absolutely not,” said Dr. Deborah Shropshire, the head of the state’s Child Welfare Services. “No way. Absolutely not. Multiple nights or we just don’t have any place to go for days or weeks at a time? Absolutely not. I haven’t heard of a single situation like that.”
Texas never reached a settlement with the lawyers suing the state on behalf of the children.
Instead, the state fought Jack’s ruling that its foster care system violated their rights, then continued appealing for four years after the initial ruling. The state refused to take up Jack’s suggested fixes to the foster care system, and even after the appeals ran out, Texas continued to resist — until ultimately Jack held the state in contempt of court last year for the second time, threatening daily $75,000 fines.
While the class-action case churned through the courts, the Legislature tried to privatize its foster care system, a model known as community-based care, and allowed the traditional foster care system to “wither on the vine,” said Myko Gedutis, with the Texas State Employees Union.
“We got here because of actions the state took and inaction on the state’s part, by putting all their eggs in the basket of community-based care as the solution to the systemic problems of foster care. They created the mess we’re in today, and it goes back awhile,” he said.
This summer, when Democratic Texas House members walked out of the Texas Capitol to prevent passage of the Gop-pushed elecsame tions bill, Abbott and others blamed Democrats for stalling fixes to the foster care system “crisis.” When the Democrats returned and the Legislature reconvened later in the summer, it appropriated $90 million to address the capacity shortage, but those funds are expected to fall short of fixing the problem.
Bigger investment
In Oklahoma, the Legislature increased its funding for the foster care system by 122 percent from 2008 to 2018, a report from a child welfare research group shows. And the state asked for more help from the federal government, increasing funding 60 percent over the period.
The money went to hire more staff to reduce caseloads, it went to place children in smaller group homes or foster families, and it provided help to struggling families on the front end so the children could stay with their parents. Data show that rates of abuse while in foster care decreased across the board.
Key to the effort, Shropshire said, was “having enough staff who have a low enough caseload that they can actually be thoughtful about the decisions they are making with regards to kids and families.”
Oklahoma also invested in more therapeutic care and recruiting more foster families to host the children. Last year, 350 traditional family foster care homes were added into the system. This meant better overall care for kids, Shropshire said, particularly for those with behavioral or mental health issues who need extra attention. This year, 92 percent of Oklahoma children in foster care were placed directly with families, rather than in shelters or group homes.
Oklahoma also decreased the number of kids in foster care in recent years, Shropshire said, which was helpful when the pandemic placed an increased strain on the system. In 2014, the state removed more than 6,000 children from their families; so far this year it has removed 3,461. Shropshire attributed this in part to the new program that aims to solve problems before Child Protective Services needs to get involved.
The number of children in the system has dropped — now there are about 7,500 kids in CPS custody, down from almost 12,000 before the lawsuit.
Shropshire said part of Oklahoma’s success has been the latitude and support that the governor’s office provides to Child Welfare Services.
“If you’re always having to worry about who thinks what, then it’s harder, I think. So that support has been super liberating for me to just go and run,” Shropshire said. “For child welfare to focus on child welfare, and not be focused on all the other things that are going on out there.”