"Gruesome and detailed...full of the stories of foster children the state has failed."
That's how Ross Ramsey accurately described a devastating new report on Texas foster care in his Texas Tribune column this week.
The report by court-appointed monitors — which was also featured on the front page of the Dallas Morning-News — is the latest development in the longstanding lawsuit against the state's foster care system.
Remember, when the state removes children from unsafe homes and chooses a foster care home for them, their lives are supposed to get better. They should not only be safe in foster care, but should get the support and stability they need to heal from trauma, grow up healthy, succeed in school, and thrive.
Yet this heartbreaking report makes clear that for many children, their lives get worse in foster care. In the most harrowing cases, children died of abuse or neglect in the very foster homes that the state chose for them.
While problems in the foster case system put all children at risk, they particularly endanger children of color. The majority of children in long-term foster care (the subject of the report and the lawsuit) are children of color. In fact, Black children are overrepresented at every stage of the CPS system. State and local leaders need to focus on this data, address implicit bias in the way families are reported to CPS, ensure support is available for families of color, and more.
And the problems documented in the court monitors' report are compounded by the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has disrupted every aspect of the state's child protection system, putting more of a strain on families, kids, service providers, CPS caseworkers, and others.
The bottom line is that the report should be a wake-up call — and state policymakers should make foster care and child protection a priority for the next legislative session. In fact, many of our recommendations during the last legislative session would have addressed the problems identified in the new report. As legislators and other state leaders plan their next steps, they should:
Focus on moving more children out of group care, where kids tend to have worse outcomes, and into family-based settings. There are several strategies available to move in this direction. There are times when high-quality group care is appropriate for some children with complex needs, but it should be a short-term solution for those children.
Ensure group care facilities meet the new federal standards that come into force next year through the Family First Act. Meeting those standards is important for kids' safety and for continuing to receive federal funding, but the state has work to do to get providers on track to meet those standards.
Strengthen oversight of group care providers by DFPS, RCCL, and the judiciary to ensure child safety (and to ensure the facilities meet the Family First standards).
Fully fund foster care and child protection over the next two years. We were glad to see that the Governor and legislative leaders exempted CPS from the recent 5 percent budget cut order, recognizing the importance of these services during the pandemic and recession.
Work to keep more kids safely with their families and out of foster care by maximizing the child abuse prevention funding that Texas draws down from the federal government under the Family First Act.
The good news is that current DFPS leadership and staff are working very hard to address many of these longstanding problems, even as they face the extra challenges resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. And we know the Legislature and state leaders can make progress on these problems and build on the smart policy steps they have taken in the past.
Notably, in 2016 and 2017, state leaders took very positive steps to shore up CPS investigations, but those steps did less to address concerns about the foster care side of DFPS' work. Those efforts from four years ago mostly invested in reducing caseloads and wait times for the child abuse investigations side of DFPS. That was a success, and serves as an example of how state leaders can make progress on these issues when they come together and make it a priority. (In 2017, the Legislature also worked to expand and improve privatized foster care or "Community-Based Care," but we are still learning about the successes and challenges of the model as it is slowly rolled out across the state.)
We look forward to working with you to make similar progress on the host of challenges that remain in our child protection system.
In the meantime, children's lives hang in the balance.