AUSTIN — State leaders and the judge presiding in a Texas foster care lawsuit said Tuesday they’re distressed by a new report in which court-appointed monitors said they found chaos, self-harm and child-on-child sexual activity running rampant in recent months at a private treatment facility in Galveston County.
A residential treatment center operated by Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health Care in League City has experienced two riots by teenage residents in the past five months – and 99 arrests of children in the past five years, according to the report filed Monday in federal court in Corpus Christi by court monitors Deborah Fowler and Kevin Ryan.
Devereux, the nation’s leading behavioral health nonprofit for youth, though, said in a written statement late Tuesday that the monitors’ report is “dangerously inaccurate” and “riddled with careless errors.”
The Villanova, Pa.-based mental health provider, which at the League City campus serves not just Texas foster children but other psychologically troubled and special-needs youngsters from as far away as California, depicted itself as being unfairly “used as a pawn” in a decade-old legal battle between child advocates and the state.
At a status conference in the suit Tuesday held via Zoom before U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack, state Health and Human Services Commission chief Cecile Young and state protective services commissioner Jaime Masters said they had read the monitors’ report about Devereux-League City on Monday. They found it distressing.
“I don’t think I can say on camera what I thought when I read it,” said Masters, whose department includes Child Protective Services.
“What was cited in the report was very disturbing,” said Young, whose sprawling agency includes Residential Child Care Regulation, which oversees foster-care providers.
The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services was paying Devereux nearly $460 a day to care for 15 of the 25 foster children who were at the League City facility when a riot broke out on the night of Oct. 2, noted Jack, the judge in the case.
“I’m just trying to get my head around what you all are paying Devereux to have these children raped and restrained – and abused and not educated,” she said.
Twice in the past 18 months, Jack has held the state in contempt for violating her orders to improve conditions for more than 10,000 children in long-term foster care.
Though so far she’s levied only $150,000 in fines on Texas, Jack warned the state Tuesday there could be bigger penalties if things such as a continuing backlog of tardy investigations into foster kids’ outcries aren’t fixed fast. She briefly discussed the hundreds of such abuse and neglect investigations that have been left open for more than 30 days, in violation of one of her orders. A compliance hearing is set for early May.
“If they’re big sanctions that I’m thinking about, I want to tell you that you may be entitled to a jury trial,” Jack said.
The report on Devereux-League City (the provider also operates a residential treatment center in Victoria) offered the judge and her state-paid monitors an opportunity to keep voicing doubts about a scheme for further privatization of foster care that is being promoted by Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees and key GOP state lawmakers.
In four of some 20 regions and subregions, the protective-services department has hired “single source continuum contractors” who are supposed to recruit and supervise all the private child placing agencies that recruit foster parents and other congregate care providers. For a decade or more, a major selling point of “foster care redesign,” now called “community based care,” was that a prime vendor in an area would know what quantities of beds it needs and make sure to secure enough treatment beds so kids no longer are shipped halfway across the state.
But the monitors’ report, primarily written by Fowler, who runs the Austin-based child advocacy group Texas Appleseed, recounts in horrifying detail the experience of a sexually and physically abused 13-year-old girl, identified as “BB,” who was sent by single source continuum contractor St. Francis to Devereux-League City last July 30.
After 11 years in foster care and 38 placements, BB in just two or three months at Devereux had 55 “major behavior” incidents and 14 instances in which staff members there restrained her or put her in a concrete-walled seclusion room. In the Oct. 2 riot, she was arrested. In a previous riot on Sept. 18, she was handcuffed by police and taken to the police station until she calmed down, the report says.
“B.B.’s home county [in the northern Panhandle] is approximately 646 miles from League City, Texas,” says a footnote in the monitors’ report. “B.B.’s home county is significantly closer to Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, New Mexico, than it is to League City.”
Of CPS’ 25 kids who lived at Devereux last fall, 24 were sent by Community Based Care continuum contractors in Abilene-Wichita Falls and San Antonio. All were at least 200 miles away from their home counties, the report said. (In the protective-services department’s budget request, there is money to bring Community Based Care to nine North Texas counties east of I-35, including Dallas County, in 2022-2023.)
According to the monitors’ report, Devereux-League City staff members misused physical restraints, and at least one employee was physically abusive.
One male employee was caught on video going in and out of a girl’s bedroom and closing the door, it said. Though state investigators later ruled out sexual abuse, the male staffer “was also observed hugging her and brushing his fingers down her face,” the report says. It says state Residential Child Care Investigations investigators substantiated reports by four girls, including “AA,” 13, from San Antonio, that a male staff member sexually abused them. AA said he digitally penetrated her and pressured her for oral sex.
Residents routinely pried open bathroom locks, the report says. Several reportedly had sex with one another or engaged in sexual games, undetected by staff members, it says. Last fall, one boy transferred in from the national nonprofit’s California facilities continuously reinjured an open wound on his calf, requiring four surgeries at League City.
Though traumatized by earlier mistreatment and needing advanced care, “children [at the facility] are instead met with an environment marked by violence and chaos, with frequent riots, police calls, arrests, restraints, seclusions, suicide attempts and sexual abuse,” it concludes.
In Devereux’s statement, though, the nonprofit said “many of the inaccuracies presented in this report could have been easily corrected if the authors had simply asked. The health care system is based on careful record keeping, with demonstrable facts.”
For instance, while monitors said the only adjustment to AA’s therapeutic care was to adjust her psychotropic medications, Devereux said that’s untrue.
“There are more than 200 individual clinical and therapeutic interventions documented in AA’s electronic medical record,” it said.
Devereux also disputed the report’s account of how many times League City police were summoned to its campus. Between Jan. 1, 2019, and last Oct. 30, there were 359 calls for service at Devereux and police officials said they went to the facility “every single time,” the monitors reported.
However, Devereux said, “Police came to campus to support our staff and children 104 times during the cited period.”
CORRECTION, 7:30 p.m., Feb. 10, 2021: An earlier version incorrectly said that when a riot occurred at the League City facility on Oct. 2 , some of the foster children residing there had been sent by a Community Based Care contractor in Fort Worth. By that time, though, Fort Worth-based Our Community Our Kids had transferred its children out of the Devereux-League City facility -- a process completed in February 2020.
