State gives CPS big boost

Legislature OKs millions to fund raises, hiring

AUSTIN — The state will hire more than 800 workers and give pay raises to 7,000 employees within its beleaguered Child Protective Services program as part of an emergency plan to address a manpower crisis that has impaired the state’s ability to protect hundreds of vulnerable and abused children.

The approval on Thursday of well over $100 million in emergency funding — the exact cost has not been made public — came on the day Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Henry “Hank” Whitman Jr. had set to start correcting skyrocketing turnover rates and chronic staffing shortages that have made headlines for months and infuriated lawmakers.

Included will be $12,000 raises for about 6,000 front-line workers and pay hikes of up to 20 percent for an additional 1,110 managers and special investigators, according to legislative leaders. The agency also got permission to immediately start hiring as many as 829 new workers to supplement

the existing staff.

Thursday’s decision came after weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations between the House that earlier had agreed to support Whitman’s entire emergency funding request, and the Senate, which wanted to hire just a few hundred workers to bolster the agency’s troubled operations until a detailed review of a permanent fix could be completed by the time the Legislature convenes for its biennial meeting in January.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus announced a deal had been reached Thursday but provided few specifics. Agency officials and aides to Gov. Greg Abbott, who had supported the pay raises and the hiring of additional workers, said the changes would start immediately, just as soon as paperwork approving the funds could be approved by the Legislative Budget Board that Patrick and Straus chair.

“This is a meaningful step toward stabilizing the CPS workforce,” Straus said, promising that the House “will build on these efforts so that we can continue improving child protection and foster care.”

Patrick said the Senate agreed to fund the additional caseworkers and salary increases to begin repairing a system that members of the budget-writing Senate Finance Committee at an October public hearing had characterized as broken. Whitman was harshly criticized during that meeting following revelations that hundreds of Texas children reported to have been abused or neglected went weeks, and sometimes months, without being contacted by CPS caseworkers.

State police were dispatched to help locate those children. By last week, 30 still had not been found, senators said.

‘Work is far from over’

Along with the emergency funding, Patrick said lawmakers “have agreed to add teeth to ensure that the resources invested into this agency are producing results, assuring the safety of our children.

“The most important action we can take to protect our children is resolving our caseworker retention issue — and that has been the primary focus of the Senate,” he said. “Our work is far from over and, rest assured, CPS will remain under a microscope as these funds are expended.”

The state’s child-protection programs have been the focus of harsh criticism for some time, amid reports that children taken into state custody have had to spend nights sleeping in state offices because of a shortage of places to house them, that caseworkers are so overworked in the Houston, Dallas and Austin offices that complaints of abuse and neglect cannot be quickly followed up and that children are housed in improper locations because the state is so short of beds.

Compounding the crisis is a ruling a year ago by a federal court judge in Corpus Christi declaring a portion of the state’s foster-care system unconstitutional because of alleged continuing abuse. While the state has appealed that ruling, officials have estimated it could take hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the court-identified deficiencies in a case that could put the state foster-care system under court supervision for some time.

A House working group on the CPS crisis last week had agreed to fund Whitman’s request for more than 800 additional staff and the pay raises, but Senate negotiators expressed reluctance to grow the size of the agency that significantly without safeguards to ensure that the chronic operational problems would be resolved. Weeks ago, the Senate had agreed to a stop-gap funding package of about $75 million that included fewer new workers but included the $12,000 pay hikes for frontline workers.

Advocates cheer move

Politically, Thursday’s deal means the Legislature will have to come up with tens of millions of additional dollars to fund the emergency appropriation before it even starts to consider funding for a long-term fix at a time the state faces a budget pinch that likely will mean $5 billion less to spend than two years ago.

“We all agree we want to see some focus on this issue as quickly as possible,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound.

Children’s advocacy groups that had urged full funding of Whitman’s plan cheered the Thursday agreement, in what they called the first significant increase in caseworker pay in years.

“This brings those brave souls taking on this difficult, dangerous and thankless job to a level competitive with comparable professions,” said Madeline McClure, founder of TexProtects, an advocacy group. “Child Protective Services caseworker turnover will drop starting today. The approval of additional workers will also help with managing caseloads and stress. The end result will be safer children and stronger families.”

Even with Thursday’s approval of the new caseworkers, officials said it will take perhaps as much as a year to get the new employees recruited, hired and trained. The pay hikes can take effect immediately, sparking hope that high employee turnover rates will drop quickly enough to allow the agency to stabilize its operations and better account for and supervise the thousands of children under its care.