Sweeping changes proposed for Texas foster care
Officials say proposal to fix system could come with nine-figure price tag
A pair of courtappointed special masters on Friday recommends sweeping changes to the state foster care system, including cutting the number of children assigned to each caseworker in half.
AUSTIN — A pair of court-appointed special masters on Friday recommended sweeping changes to Texas’ foster care system, including a ban on housing children in state offices, new limits on group homes and cutting the number of children assigned to each caseworker in half.
In 56 recommendations filed at the request of U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack, who last December declared the scandal-plagued program unconstitutional because of continuing reports of abuse and neglect, special masters Kevin Ryan and Francis McGovern proposed a series of operational changes be imposed on the state Department of Family and Protective Services, changes state officials said could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and lead to court supervision of Texas’s child protective services program for several years.
“The state of Texas has made improving foster care a priority and will continue to do so,” said Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for DFPS, the agency that oversees foster care. “(The) report highlights many of the issues
we are working on day and night: building more capacity for high-needs children in foster care, constantly seeking ways to improve health care for our children, and making sure our caseworkers spend more time with children and families.”
While top state officials offered no immediate comment on the recommended changes, some suggested
privately that the state likely will object when the report comes up for approval in court next year.
Texas officials balked at Jack’s original ruling, saying it was too broad and unfairly condemned the entire foster care system. A state appeal of Jack’s ruling was unsuccessful.
The masters’ report includes no cost estimates for
implementing the recommendations, which cover only foster care children in so-called “permanent managing conservatorship,” a term for those who remain in state custody for 12 to 18 months. Officials have said more than 12,000 Texas children are in those foster care programs.
Stricter limits, rules
Judging from a two-year budget request by DFPS Commissioner Henry “Hank” Whitman Jr. for an additional $100 million to increase pay and staffing, legislative analysts who reviewed the report Friday said the recommendations easily could cost several times that amount.
The report calls for cutting caseworkers’ workload almost in half, from an average of nearly 30 cases — almost 40 in some areas — to 14 to 17. It also said caseworkers should spend more “quality” time with children to ensure they are doing well. Those changes could require the agency to hire hundreds of additional caseworkers, officials said.
In addition, the report recommends new limits on the number of children placed in foster group homes, after reports of children being abused in such facilities. That change along with others to place children at housing sites only near their place of birth, to limit the use of shelters, to stop allowing younger children to be housed with older youths and to mandate that younger children be placed in “family-like settings,” could strain a system now plagued by a chronic shortage of housing.
As a result, dozens of foster children have been forced to sleep in state offices and in other temporary housing.
The report calls for a prohibition on having foster children stay in state offices. State officials have said hundreds were kept there for just a few days because they had no place else to house them.
Criticizing the agency’s record-keeping, the report proposes stringent new rules for reporting and investigating sexual abuse involving foster children — including access to a 24hour abuse hotline. It also calls for the agency to digitize more records to make them more immediately accessible to caseworkers and agency officials. Beefed-up licensing and enforcement standards should be imposed on all facilities housing foster children to stop poor conditions that can lead to neglect and abuse, the masters wrote.
Plagued by problems
Additionally, the recommendations include a call for new programs to help foster children succeed in life after they “age out” of the system at 18, along with better health care plans, and improved tracking of youths’ progress while in the program. Foster care providers also should be paid based on their performance, the report states.
The masters’ report calls on the state to fully evaluate within 12 months an experimental “foster care redesign” program in which a private vendor oversees the placement of foster children in Fort Worth and six nearby counties.
In her December 2015 order declaring the state’s foster care system unconstitutional, Jack said children were continuing to suffer physical, sexual and psychological abuse after entering state custody. “Plaintiffs have a ... right (to) be free from an unreasonable risk of harm caused by the state. Texas currently violates that right,” Jack wrote.
Children’s advocacy groups applauded the masters’ recommendations, saying that major changes are needed in a system that has been plagued by many of the same staffing and abuse problems for more than two decades. Several attempts by the Legislature to fund successful reforms, more than doubling the budget in the past decade, have flopped.
“The blueprint is aimed at ending the trauma caused by the foster care homes where the state sends kids that are removed from their families,” said Kate Murphy, a child-protection policy associate at Texans Care for Children. “State leaders will have to do more to make sure that kids in foster care heal from the trauma they’ve already experienced and grow up healthy. As the state implements the steps outlined by the Special Masters to fulfill our legal obligation, there will be much more work to do to fulfill our moral obligation.”
‘Additional road map’
Added Madeline McClure, founding CEO of the Texas Association for the Protection of Children, “We now have an additional road map supplementing our long-standing recommendations to fixing foster care, and these changes will have to be implemented, regardless of whether it’s under state or federal authority — so let’s do it immediately. Texas children cannot wait for court decisions to play out, they need life-saving changes now.”
For their part, senators working on a plan to provide an estimated $88 million in additional funding immediately to hire additional caseworkers and investigators to ease a backlog in child-protection programs — not the foster care addressed in the court recommendations — said they intend to move ahead with state improvements. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, said an initial decision on the additional funding could come next week.
Senate Health and Human Services Chairman Charles Schwertner, a Georgetown Republican whose committee has been working on a fix for the problems for more than a year, said panel members “appreciate many of the recommendations ... We all acknowledge the need to make improvements in how DFPS operates, but ultimately the responsibility for solving this problem lies with the Texas Legislature, not the courts.”