Texas disability workers seeking pay raise
Rochelle Rojas contemplates leaving her job as a personal care worker for Texans with disabilities to get a higher-paying job, maybe somewhere like McDonald’s or in retail.
But then she thinks about how one of her clients, a woman in her 20s with Down syndrome, cried for days the last time Rojas couldn’t show up to work because she had COVID-19.
“I had to video chat her on my good days because she was distraught,” said Rojas, 45, who is the home supervisor of a group home in Amarillo. “That’s the quality of care we give. … We’re family.”
Last month, a newly formed coalition of Texas disability advocates made an emergency request for about $66 million in state funds to immediately boost the wages of care workers in group homes like Rojas.
The nonprofit, Time to Care: Save Texas Caregivers Now, is asking state lawmakers to raise their pay from $10.60 to $15 an hour, on average.
They say the increase is necessary to recruit and maintain caregivers for Texans with intellectual and developmental disabilities so that they can live independently, rather than at large institutions, which are ofSometimes ten more state.
The budget request focuses specifically on group home care workers because that is where there is the most need, coalition leaders said.
“The reimbursement rates really have not kept up with inflation,” said Sandy Batton, executive director of the Providers Alliance for Community Services of Texas. “And certainly once we hit the pandemic, it really created a very real strain as far as recruiting and retaining staff.”
The workforce costly to the strain comes as more than 311,500 Texans are on a waitlist for home- and community-based services the care workers help provide, according to the most recent 2023 survey data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. A 2022 Hearst investigation found that some Texans had been waiting for nearly 20 years to receive help.
The funding decision ultimately will be up to the governor and the Legislative Budget Board, a panel of state officials and lawmakers who help shape state spending, making budget decisions when the Legislature is not in session. The next regular session will not begin until January 2025. Advocates say the allocation would get care workers through until then.
A spokesman for Texas Health and Human Services did not respond to a question about whether the agency supports the interim budget request made by advocates. The governor did not respond to a request for comment, and a Legislative Budget Board spokesman declined to comment.
Many care workers left the industry during the pandemic, wooed by higher-wage jobs in retail or fast food that didn’t come with the responsibility of caring for another person, Batton said. Others
stayed longer than perhaps was financially prudent for their families because of the strong personal connection they built with their clients, she said.
While there were some short-term solutions during the pandemic, such as stimulus funds, that provided temporary relief, Batton said these care workers need a long-term solution or they will continue to seek out other work.
The current wages are “not enough to recruit and retain staff for the responsibility we’re expecting people to take on,” she said.
In many group homes, she said, a single care worker helps three to four and sometimes as many as eight people.
The care workers are responsible for providing residents with their treatments, helping them with day-to-day tasks such as eating and going to the restroom, and in some cases teaching residents life skills such as how to do laundry.
The care workers’ hourly rate of $10.60 was approved last session as part of the current twoyear state budget. It was an increase over the previous $8.11 rate but still well below what care workers had requested. They’d been asking for an increase to $15 per hour in 2024 and then $17 an hour in 2025 amid a multibillion-dollar state budget surplus at the time.
The advocates point out that while care workers in community-based settings have seen a rate increase of less than 9% in the past 13 years, lawmakers over the same period have more than doubled starting wages for similar workers at state-supported living centers, who make at least $17.50 an hour.
Advocates noted that it’s much cheaper for the state to pay care workers to help people live independently than to house them at a state-supported living center — a cost comparison estimated to be about $20,316 annually compared with $244,848 a year — according to a 2023 report from the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities.
“We believe state-operated facilities needed the funding,” Batton said. “We would just like to see similar investment by the state.”
Batton added that some group homes have had to put caps on the number of people they accept because of the workforce crisis. Others have had to close entirely, she said.
Rojas, who has worked in the same home for eight years, said she stays because she loves her residents, her company and the rewarding work she does. Still, she wonders how long she can tolerate the low wages, overtime hours and high turnover.
Some weeks, she said, she’ll go to work on a Friday and not go home until Monday. The job often keeps her away from her family.
It troubles Rojas that she has a colleague who requires government assistance, even with a fulltime care worker job.
“I’ve seen people literally come do a training and after one day not come back. Or after lunch, they’ll say, ‘They don’t pay me enough for this,’ ” she said.
“A lot of people miss out on such an amazing opportunity to make a difference in someone’s life.”
“The reimbursement rates really have not kept up with inflation.”
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