Hiring crisis plagues agency
Child welfare service ex-staffer raises alarm
After a 21-year career at Texas’ beleaguered child welfare agency, Monica Knighton decided in August that she’d had enough.
She’d watched more than 1,800 of her colleagues quit the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services in the past seven months. She’d read the agency’s pledges to ramp up recruitment.
But Knighton knew the retention crisis was so profound that even the people in charge of fixing it were at a breaking point. Eleven of her 13 co-workers, all hiring specialists for the agency, had quit in the past year, fed up with a misguided management strategy that they believed could compromise child safety.
She was about to join them — and she wasn’t going to go quietly.
Sitting at her desk in her home in Pflugerville, Knighton typed out the resignation letter she’d been drafting in her head for months. Then she sent it to her supervisor and co-work
ers; the agency’s commissioner, Jaime Masters; about a dozen state lawmakers; the federal judge overseeing a long-running class-action lawsuit over the state’s foster care system; and Hearst Newspapers.
“In my over 21 years employed here, I’ve never seen it this bad,” Knighton wrote in her five-page letter. “And it’s this bad because … management will not institute solutions that work . ... This will result in children being removed from their families, maybe unnecessarily, or left in unsafe situations.”
Knighton’s account — backed up by interviews with half a dozen of her colleagues, along with hundreds of pages of emails, resignation letters and personnel files — provides a rare window into internal dysfunction at a vital state agency that has struggled for years to find safe placements for highrisk children and weed out bad actors.
High turnover
The turnover in the department, the worst since the state began keeping such data in 2017, is part of a nationwide shift in the job market known as the Great Resignation that is hitting local governments especially hard. But Knighton and her former colleagues say their own agency leaders are making it worse by failing to address the low salaries, dangerous working conditions and lack of managerial support that cause good employees to leave.
Instead, they say top agency official Chris Evaro bullied them into meeting a hiring quota that forced them to choose between quality and quantity — a compromise they were not willing to make. So they left, taking with them more than 50 years of experience hiring for positions such as child abuse investigators, case managers and abuse hotline responders.
“We cannot protect children if we are not able to hire the right people,” Knighton said in an interview. “That’s the bottom line.”
Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the department, said most state government agencies are experiencing a worker retention crisis, and hiring quotas are appropriate to address it. No one was pressured to hire unqualified workers, he said, calling that “a serious accusation that we deny in the strongest terms.”
Crimmins said the agency partners with dozens of local universities and professional associations to recruit new workers, and Masters has been on a “listening tour” of the state to seek additional feedback from frustrated employees. The agency has requested an additional $100 million from the Texas Legislature to boost salaries across the department next year.
A September report from the agency notes that turnover has worsened in the past year, though it highlights initiatives like mentorship programs, peer support groups and specialized training to retain workers. The departure rate is highest — 42 percent — among workers in the division that handles child abuse investigations.
During the most recent fiscal year, which stretched from September 2021 to August 2022, Evaro’s division hired a record 3,100 new employees across the state. But Knighton and her colleagues say many of those new hires were not prepared for the job and have since left. They couldn’t hire fast enough to keep up with the departures — 1,589 child abuse investigators were hired in the same period, but 1,240 left, according to state data.
For more than a year, documents and interviews show, Knighton, her colleagues and multiple supervisors appealed unsuccessfully to the agency’s top brass. Eventually, many wrote detailed resignation letters describing a toxic workplace and condemning the unreasonable hiring quota.
Only after Knighton’s letter was released publicly as part of the federal lawsuit against the agency did it launch an investigation into her complaints.
Evaro retired two days later, emails show. He declined to comment, and Crimmins did not respond to specific questions about what prompted the investigation or Evaro’s retirement.
“We are talking to former employees to help gain a better understanding of the day-to-day operation of (the hiring division),” Crimmins said. “Continual hiring to replace lost employees is vital to our operation, and if we can improve, we will.”
Risking children’s lives
Before the pandemic, Knighton rarely had trouble finding people who wanted to work as child welfare investigators and caseworkers in the Austin region.
But by the end of 2020, a single job posting that used to easily draw 400 to 500 applicants suddenly was attracting only about 100 during the pandemic. Of the candidates who were actually qualified, many didn’t respond to subsequent interview requests.
The working conditions were also increasingly taxing and even dangerous for caseworkers, who were required to supervise a growing number of children without placement — the high-risk, high-needs foster kids without a home or residential facility to stay in. Caseworkers receive no specific training for those shifts and cannot discipline the children. Many employees have been assaulted or threatened on the job.
Stephanie Atkins, a hiring specialist who worked with Knighton, said some people withdrew their applications in the middle of an interview when she explained that they would have to supervise children without placement.
“You could see their faces, the fear,” Atkins said. “They would say, ‘OK, I’m just going to stop you right there. This is not something that I’m willing to do.’”
The situation was especially dire in the Austin region, where the cost of living was skyrocketing but entry-level salaries for new caseworkers have remained at $46,000 per year since 2016. Evaro gave raises to all the hiring specialists when he took charge in 2019, but the same benefits didn’t trickle down to the people they were onboarding.
Still, as hiring conditions became more difficult, Evaro instituted a new rule — starting in January 2021, all hiring specialists in his division were required to hire eight people a month. Sometimes, that was doable. But other times, the ex-hiring specialists said, some of them weren’t even responsible for eight open positions per month, while their colleagues drowned in open posts and couldn’t balance their schedules.
None of that seemed to matter to Evaro.
“We’re not talking about flipping burgers at McDonald’s,” said Dora Montoya, a former hiring specialist who previously spent 17 years as a caseworker for the agency. “I don’t care how much pressure you’re going to put on me — I am not going to hire someone that’s going to endanger themselves or leave a child in danger because I need to meet my quota of eight.”
Instead of providing support to help her meet the quota, Montoya said, Evaro made it more difficult. In late 2020, he eliminated a contract with a company that evaluated bilingual candidates — putting much of that work on Montoya, the only Spanish-speaking employee in the Central Texas unit. But she didn’t get a pay bump for the extra work and wasn’t exempted from her own quota.
Crimmins, the agency spokesperson, disputed Montoya’s account, saying the elimination of the contract “was a management decision that has not increased the workload” of any employees within the hiring division.
By August 2021, the agency was facing some of its most troubling times yet. More than 400 children were sleeping in state offices or hotels each night because there was no other placement for them, and hundreds of caseworkers were leaving. (The number of children without placement has since fallen to about 70 per night).
The same month, Evaro sent numerous emails explicitly threatening disciplinary action against anyone who didn’t make the quota. That included Atkins, who’d made the quota in July but hired only seven people in August.
Atkins said she could see no way to meet the quota without hiring substandard caseworkers or investigators, so she resigned in September.
“If there’s going to be a child death, I don’t want to be responsible for that, directly or indirectly,” she said. Two of her colleagues left soon afterward.
Crimmins said no hiring specialists were disciplined solely for failure to meet the quota, and managers also consider attendance and workplace conduct. He added that none of them ever filed formal complaints with the agency.
‘A toxic environment’
But Atkins said she filled out an online exit survey detailing her concerns — and made sure her responses were sent directly to Masters, the agency commissioner — but no one ever reached out to follow up.
Another manager who oversaw a team of hiring specialists in the Houston region said he questioned the hiring quota but got nowhere. Because the quality of the applicant pool had declined so significantly, he and others said, many new hires were failing their background checks. An increasing number were also declining job offers. Evaro was not willing to make exceptions for those cases, the manager said.
“It was just a toxic environment,” said the manager, a military veteran who asked to remain anonymous because he still works in government. “I’ve been around a lot of people in my military career. He was by far the worst.”
He decided to resign in January after Evaro ordered him to put one of his employees on a “plan of action” for failing to meet the quota.
At the end of March, Montoya was also placed on a disciplinary action plan that consisted of a weekly meeting with her manager. But that manager resigned about three weeks later, before the first meeting was even scheduled.
Montoya was next. “I feel like I am being set up for failure,” she wrote in an April 22 email that announced her intent to retire.
Another manager was brought in to replace Montoya’s supervisor. Three months later, that person also quit and called Knighton to break the news.
“Since Day 1 ... this has been a nightmare,” the supervisor told Knighton, according to an audio recording of their conversation that Knighton provided. “Anybody that’s going to be stepping into my role here is not going to last — I can tell you that much.”
“None of these people would have left if it wouldn’t have been for our management,” Knighton answered, referring to the string of recent departures. “None of them.”
“Right,” the supervisor responded, then laughed. “Add me to that list.”
Hearst Newspapers is not naming the supervisor, who did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls requesting comment.
Crimmins acknowledged that five managers in Evaro’s division left under his leadership but said the departures were not concerning “as they were all within the scope of normal business.”
Despite the complaints, Evaro received a pay raise in April 2022, bringing his annual salary to $116,000. The agency’s director of human resources identified the 5-percent increase as a merit raise, documents show, but there are no additional records, though departmental policy requires a detailed explanation for those rewards.
It was the second merit raise Evaro received in 11 months, according to internal agency data reviewed by Hearst Newspapers.
Every agency employee is also supposed to receive an annual performance review, but Evaro did not receive one in 2020 or 2021.
“Chris Evaro supports his staff and they respond in kind,” his 2019 performance review reads. “Well done, Chris!”
The last straw
By August 2022, only two of Knighton’s original colleagues on her team of hiring specialists remained. At that point, she said Evaro was also threatening her with disciplinary action over the quota, even though she’d just received a positive performance review that spring.
Hiring had become even harder. In February, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the agency to investigate families for child abuse if they are suspected of providing their transgender children with gender-affirming care, such as puberty blockers. Over the next few months, a slew of outraged workers quit.
To fill the open positions, Knighton was making compromises she’d never imagined, such as chasing after job applicants even after they’d failed to show up for interviews.
Sometimes that approach succeeded, but it had consequences down the line. Many new hires didn’t show up for their second day of work. Some didn’t even make it past their first lunch break.
Yet Knighton felt that leadership was trying to speed up the hiring process even more. In mid-August, internal emails show, a manager told Knighton’s team to stop sharing information about job candidates’ references with the program directors who were to supervise them.
“The caseworker job is a job of trust,” Knighton said. How could the directors properly vet candidates without fully evaluating their references?
Crimmins said the manager who sent the directive was incorrect: “Any potential concerns from any references are always shared with the program leadership because the programs … make hiring decisions.”
But the order seemed clear to Knighton, and she was ready to go public. She mailed a copy of her resignation letter to all of the lawmakers on the Texas House Human Services Committee, along with several other public officials. She also emailed it to some colleagues and posted it on her private Facebook page.
None of the lawmakers responded.
State Rep. James Frank, the Wichita Falls Republican who heads the Human Services Committee, didn’t recall reading Knighton’s letter when she sent it initially, but he said it had “great points” after reviewing it in October.
“I think there are some excellent managers within the ranks of (DFPS),” he said. “There are some absolutely terrible managers as well. This appears to be a very clear example of the latter.”
Still, he said, Knighton’s experience is not representative of the entire department. News stories and public hearings tend to focus exclusively on its failures, he said, rather than the thousands of dedicated and capable people it employs.
“Would you want to work at DFPS when the only thing you’re ever going to hear about is if somebody screws up?” he said.
Knighton did get a call from the office of U.S. District Judge Janis Jack, who oversees the class-action lawsuit over the state’s foster care system. Jack’s office asked if she would be willing to enter her letter as an exhibit in the public court file, and she agreed.
Hours later, she received a call from a top agency official asking to speak with her for an investigation into her complaints.