AUSTIN — The chief social services policy writers in both chambers of the Legislature are mad at Texas’ protective services agency.
Bills they’ve filed show it.
Proposals by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, and Rep. James Frank, R-Wichita Falls, sum up the state of play on Child Protective Services and foster care legislation this session:
GOP leaders want to put a tighter leash on CPS; make it harder to remove children from their birth families; streamline CPS’ parent agency, by offloading tasks to the already sprawling Health and Human Services Commission; and double down on foster care privatization.
And oh, yes, they’d like headlines about kids sleeping in CPS offices to go away.
However, although a bill by Kolkhorst would prohibit the practice, it’s far from clear the embarrassing, makeshift overnight arrangements will disappear if legislative budget writers don’t provide a major infusion of money to entice more care providers. So far, they haven’t.
Kolkhorst, the chairwoman of Senate Health and Human Services Committee, and Frank, chairman of House Human Services, “have strong intentions,” according to Will Francis, who heads the Texas chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.
The two chambers’ point persons on abused and neglected children are suggesting necessary but just partial fixes to persistent woes in Texas’ child welfare system, Francis explained last week.
Record numbers of children are bunking in state offices because they have grave psychological problems that create risks for foster care providers, who already complain they’re underpaid, he noted.
U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack, who has held the state in contempt of court twice in the past 18 months, is bird-dogging everything that CPS’ parent agency, the Department of Family and Protective Services, and the commission do, Francis observed.
“They both sort of ignore the elephant in the room, which is the lawsuit,” Francis said of Kolkhorst and Frank.
Jack presides over a decade-old, class-action lawsuit brought by children in long-term foster care and two New York-based child-advocacy groups. State taxpayers are on the hook for $1 million a month to pay for Jack’s two special masters who check on Texas’ compliance with her orders. Each court-appointed monitor has several employees.
Speaking of the lawmakers’ bills, Francis said:
“Neither does anything with the special masters or really focuses on, ‘What about these rotten outcomes that we’ve had for so long?’ Capacity itself, recruiting the families we need and supporting kinship [care] families, is more than just fast-tracking them into the system. You have to pay money to these homes. We need to increase the rates and make that a full-time job and increase services.”
Last month, 186 kids removed from their birth families spent at least two consecutive nights with CPS workers, either at state offices or hotels, the highest number in several years. In February 2020, only 34 children did, records obtained by The Dallas Morning News show.
“Building high-quality, appropriate capacity – particularly for older youth – has been a statewide struggle for years, but has been especially impacted in the last year by COVID-19, the winter storm and other factors,” said Patrick Crimmins, spokesman for the protective services department. “Typically, youth who lack a traditional foster care placement are older teens who have complex needs.”
In the state fiscal year that ended Aug. 31, Texas sustained a net loss of 147 foster care beds, Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters told House budget writers this month.
In the current budget year, 112 new beds have become available. But 495 were shuttered or stopped taking CPS’ kids, leaving a net reduction of 383 beds, Masters said.
Many providers have complained that Jack has ordered “heightened monitoring” of child placing agencies and residential centers where there have been allegations of maltreatment of foster children, deficiencies cited during inspections or both. Licensees on the watch list receive additional scrutiny, such as weekly visits.
Kolkhorst’s omnibus foster care bill proclaims, “The department may not allow a child to stay overnight in a department office.”
It tells the “single source continuum contractors” that the department has hired in Fort Worth, Bexar County, the Panhandle and the Abilene-Wichita Falls region to work out with the Health and Human Services Commission some ways to increase the number of beds available.
Under community-based care, the department selects a main contractor for a region. That contractor is placed in charge of all existing foster care providers in the area, and can selectively hire and fire them. It is responsible for building up the needed capacity – such as residential treatment center beds, which have been in short supply in North Texas for many years.
Lawmakers including Frank and Senate Finance Committee Chairwoman Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, want to bring community-based care to nine North Texas counties east of Interstate 35, including Dallas County, in the next two-year budget cycle. Because private social workers hired by the main contractor eventually take over the case management duties of state workers who now work with foster children – known as CPS conservatorship workers – the Texas State Employees Union and some child advocates have opposed the outsourcing.
Jack, the federal judge, has said she doubts community-based care will work. Her monitors have shown that, years into the procurement experiment, severely troubled youth have been sent from the northern Panhandle to greater Houston – something that was supposed to end with greater awareness of local needs by the main contractor.
Kolkhorst’s bill would strip from the department the tasks of managing community-based care and riding herd on child-abuse prevention programs, and give them to the commission. The department’s rollout “continues to lag behind,” she said in a written statement.
“For a large government agency, it can be very difficult to transition from a legacy system, especially when that change may involve moving longtime state employees to the nonprofit sector,” Kolkhorst said. The commission might be a better home for the outsourcing effort, she said, “because it is not wed to the former system and is not required to transfer its own employees.”
But neither of the starting point state budgets that Nelson and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood, have filed would increase reimbursements for foster care providers.
Spokesmen for providers say that if the state wants to lure more players who can recruit the kinds of therapeutic foster homes and treatment beds that are needed for the most troubled kids, it needs to increase rates.
Kolkhorst’s bill directs community-based care contractors and the commission to develop local plans to increase capacity, by contracting for temporary beds with residential treatment centers and psychiatric hospitals. Her bill also encourages development of therapeutic foster homes and more support for relatives to take in foster kids, through kinship care and permanency care assistance programs.
Asked how the capacity would spring up if there’s no additional state funding, Kolkhorst replied, “There is ample time for contingency riders to be added” to the budget bill, assuming she persuades colleagues to get behind her bill. A contingency rider permits spending if a specified bill becomes law.
Both she and Frank said last week they believe the department ought to focus on compliance with Jack’s edicts – something Gov. Greg Abbott endorsed late last year.
The transfers of tasks are designed “to streamline and refocus the DFPS mission on the safety and protection of children,” Kolkhorst wrote.
Frank, who has been a foster parent, said in a text message, “I am very concerned about the agency’s performance complying with the lawsuit orders as well as the delayed implementation of” community-based care. “I’m looking at changes that can help the agency achieve compliance with the court orders and better serve children.”
Frank is advancing a separate bill that, among other things, would redefine parental neglect as leaving a child exposed to “immediate danger” of physical or mental harm. The current standard CPS must meet before a judge is “substantial risk” of harm. As many as 75% of removals in Texas are for neglect.
“I really believe that in CPS we need to make sure that the time, energy and focus … is on the worst cases,” Frank told the House Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee as the panel took testimony on his bill this month.
Frank said there’s “inconsistency” in CPS’ child-maltreatment investigations. That leads to “unnecessary removals,” he said.
His bill reflects the growing clout of parental rights groups, such as the Texas Home School Coalition, at the Capitol. Some staunchly conservative Republican lawmakers have helped make individual families’ fights with CPS, covered by right-leaning news outlets, into causes célèbres.
The most recent federal data on child removals, though, show Texas is not more prone than most states to take children from their birth families because of suspected maltreatment. Nationwide, 3.6 youths per 1,000 children population were removed in 2018. In Texas, the rate was 2.8 kids per 1,000.
