AUSTIN — Abused and neglected children again are being forced to sleep in Child Protective Services offices in troublingly high numbers after the coronavirus pandemic and a lawsuit-inspired enforcement crackdown on foster-care providers have plunged Texas into another shortage of foster care beds.
Last month, 126 kids removed from their birth families spent at least two consecutive nights or more with CPS workers, either at state offices or hotels, the highest number in several years. In December 2019, only 10 children did, records obtained by The Dallas Morning News show.
Higher costs because of COVID-19, comparatively low reimbursements and “heightened monitoring” forced by the class-action federal lawsuit over long-term foster care have combined to drive 10 providers offering more than 500 beds out of doing further business with the state during the past 12 months.
Once again, Texas has a capacity crisis, officials and experts say. The state faces a bed shortage for foster children, especially older youngsters with complex problems who need berths in therapeutic foster homes and residential treatment facilities.
“I’m worried, it’s the holidays and these kids don’t need to be in offices,” said Katie Olse, chief executive of the Texas Alliance of Child and Family Services, which represents 150 providers who provide care for the vast majority of the state’s foster children. “They need to be with families -- caseworkers, too.”
She referred to how CPS “conservatorship caseworkers,” who are supposed to nurture children in state custody and make recommendations to family court judges who decide their fates, must pull all-nighters to watch over and safeguard the children.
Houston lawyer Paul Yetter, who represents more than 10,000 children in a nearly decade-old lawsuit against the state, though, defended U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack’s 2019 requirement of heightened monitoring of providers. Jack made the state give closer scrutiny to child placing agencies and congregate-care facilities that have had maltreatment incidents or safety infractions.
“Texas children should not be sleeping in offices nor in unsafe placements with rampant violations and abuse and neglect findings. They need safe homes,” Yetter said.
“Many agencies under heightened monitoring have shockingly high rates of child abuse and neglect, contract violations and standards violations,” said Yetter, who said Gov. Greg Abbott should “fix the system.”
“The problems have been ignored for too long by a state more interested in placating providers than ensuring child safety,” he said.
On the rise
Patrick Crimmins, spokesman for the Department for Family and Protective Services, CPS’ parent agency, acknowledged that the frequency with which caseworkers have no foster homes or institutions in which to place children is on the rise again -- distressingly.
In the first six months of the year, the monthly number of children in state custody who spent at least two consecutive nights in a CPS office or other temporary arrangement -- such as a hotel or community center -- was 41.5. But between July and November, that more than doubled to a monthly average of 88 youngsters.
October’s 119 “children without placements” and last month’s 126 were the highest monthly totals since May 2016. The previous high was 106 in May 2019.
For the decade before May 2016, the department counted in the monthly tabulation all kids who spent at least one night in a CPS office or at a hotel under supervision of CPS caseworker.
The children in CPS care who currently lack a regular foster-care placement are typically between the ages of 15 to 17 and have “service levels” -- a measure of their emotional, psychological and medical well-being and needs -- of “specialized” or “intense,” Crimmins stressed.
Olse, a former assistant commissioner of the department who now heads the providers’ group, recently wrote Jack’s two court-appointed monitors to warn of a crunch caused by COVID-19 and tightened regulation.
The pandemic has sent providers’ costs soaring and made it hard to recruit foster parents, Olse said in an interview. Then there are low state reimbursements, which don’t cover providers’ costs, and the state’s recent hiring of 100 heightened monitoring specialists who pay weekly visits to certain providers, as Jack ordered. The risk of tougher state sanctions has made many providers “reconsider serving children with complex, therapeutic needs,” Olse said.
“It really is kind of a perfect storm,” she said. “You’ve got kids staying longer [because court proceedings have been delayed] and more kids coming as [child] removals start to go up again and far fewer beds -- largely because of the environment right now. That is leading to a capacity crisis.”
Placement upgrade
Crimmins said a new, automated placement system that’s being developed, and expected to begin next summer, should help.
It “will more quickly identify capacity and vacancies with current contracted providers as well as providing detailed placement information in order to assist DFPS in matching children to the least restrictive and most appropriate placement. It will be a gigantic boost to our placement efforts, and help keep kids out of CPS offices.
Also, last month, the department completed a “temporary spaces memorandum of understanding,” designed to use a greater range of community organizations’ space, such as at churches and community shelters, to make the overnight settings more home-like.
Still, kids sleeping in CPS offices is a problem dating from at least 2007 that won’t go away.
In 2007, the state and providers were at loggerheads. The department blamed private child-placing agencies for declining to take in deeply troubled children, while agencies pointed to newly tightened standards and bureaucratic incompetence as their reasons for rejecting “risky” children. Such youngsters could precipitate incidents that marred an agency or residential treatment center’s record of contract and safety compliance, agency executives explained.
CPS workers ran out of placements, especially for “bouncers,” children who had had as many as a dozen or more different placements in foster homes and facilities.
State workers have to stay with the children when they’re kept overnight in makeshift bedrooms, created in CPS regional offices.
That further soured already low morale among caseworkers -- and grew dangerous. In May 2007, a melee broke out at CPS’ main Dallas office where children were bunking. It took seven police officers to restore order. Three teens were arrested. Only weeks earlier, a CPS worker in Tarrant County was injured during a similar altercation among two foster teens who were spending the night at a state office.
$345 a night
At one point, the state was spending $345 a night per child - at least double the cost of the most expensive therapeutic foster care - to house abused children in state offices.
After about 500 children statewide spent at least a night in an office or a hotel with a CPS worker in the first half of 2007, 10 state district judges in Travis County signed an order barring the practice in their jurisdiction. By early 2008, though, the problem eased. State officials couldn’t offer an explanation why.
The problem recurred in 2015-2016, not long after Abbott took office. Poor pay to providers exacerbated the bed shortage, as did an intervention by Abbott shortly after he took office. He discouraged use of an alternative to child removal, called “parental child safety placements,” which eliminated some relative caregivers, worsening the capacity crunch, experts and foster care vendors said at the time.
The crisis deepened in early 2016, when CPS decided it had no choice but to remove kids from residential treatment centers run by the same nonprofit, Children’s Hope, in Lubbock and Levelland, 30 minutes west of Lubbock. The state suddenly needed spots for 86 high-needs children — many of them with autism or intellectual and developmental delays.
In the winter of 2016-2017, the number of foster children sleeping in state offices at least two consecutive nights per month tripled. The potential dangers of such arrangements had been witnessed the previous summer, when a 16-year-old foster girl stole an Austin CPS worker’s personal car keys and went on a joyride, wrecking the vehicle. In April 2017, Houston-area 15-year-old foster girl escaped from caseworkers tending her at a state office overnight. She was hit and killed by a car.
In mid-2017, Abbott’s office scrounged for funds for a new stopgap effort. It prohibited participating foster care providers from rejecting children. Each of the 22 beds in the program, in Houston, Abilene, San Antonio and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, cost the state $400 per night, and the problem again drifted out of the glare of publicity.
Olse, of the providers’ group, said she was disappointed that together, the department and the Health and Human Services Commission, which has the inspectors who oversee foster-care contractors’ compliance with state minimum standards, asked for $72.5 million more in the next two years for costs related to the federal lawsuit
“The state is asking for $72, almost $73 million for lawsuit-related court fees, [heightened monitoring employees], lawyers, and not anything to invest in growing services for kids in foster care,” she said.
Writing Jack’s monitors last week, Olse said she wanted to raise red flags about the capacity crunch.
“No one disputes that this lawsuit has brought about some needed reforms and put a spotlight on the absolute importance of providing a safe environment for every child,” she said. “However, we feel the responsibility to acknowledge issues we see in the system which may ultimately impact the ability to offer the best, most innovative care available for every child who needs it.”
