Federal Judge Blames Texas Rulers For Foster Family Failures, Blames Bed Shortage On His Orders

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AUSTIN A federal judge tore Texas apart on Tuesday for failing to control bad foster care providers and then blaming his orders for a subsequent bed shortage after forcing the state to act.

A crisis in which around 400 children spend several nights each month in child welfare offices, hotels and other makeshift facilities is not the result of court edicts, said U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack at a hearing in a long-standing trial.

On the contrary, Texas can only blame itself for the poor planning and chronic neglect of some of society’s most unlucky children, Jack said.

Other states came under increased scrutiny and closed many more placements, and were better prepared than Texas, she said.

Oklahoma, following a similar litigation, has closed 40% of its collective care facilities for poor health and safety records and has yet to experience a capacity crisis like the one it has seen. knows Texas, she noted.

Jack demanded that attorneys for Governor Greg Abbott provide an explanation within a week of why two departments under his control have clashed in recent months over sanctions against some foster care providers.

The two agencies have different views on the safety of a placement, she said, referring to the Department of Family and Protective Services, the CPS parent agency and the Commission on health and social services. The two are defendants, along with Abbott, in the ten-year-old class action lawsuit.

Who is right? And who am I to believe, she asked Assistant Attorney General Eric Hudson, who represented Abbott at the hearing.

While more than 540 people participated in the judges’ videoconference hearing, Jack did not call the executives of the providing entities to testify, as expected. The children’s lawyers said the emergency was so dire that some sort of mediation was needed. They proposed a meeting in the near future between themselves, state officials, and Jacks’ special masters in the case.

Earlier, Jack strongly took issue with Protective Services’ recent claim in court documents that children without a placement called CWOP are not covered by an injunction she issued against placing children in foster care. long-term in environments that create an unreasonable risk of harm.

She also asked Hudson to respond with Abbotts’ position on this claim from the Protective Services Department.

This ordinance covers these children, she said. End of the story. Anyone who interferes with this order may face penalties or imprisonment.

In a lengthy report, Jacks, two court-appointed supervisors, refuted recent comments by Family Services and Welfare Commissioner Jaime Masters, which appeared to place some of the blame for the current capacity crisis on the police. reinforced bad providers, known as heightened surveillance.

As part of such oversight, a regulatory division of the Commission de la santé et des services sociaux looks back on the story of a five-year supplier. Each week, a team of government employees begins to visit the agency or child placement facility. Unlike in previous decades, when there was only a trickle of state enforcement actions, contracts are withdrawn and licenses threatened with some regularity.

i fail children

Some prominent vendors, such as Wayne Carson of Fort Worth, angered Jack by calling some of the recent quotes from the states stupid.

But a report filed Monday by forensic examiners Deborah Fowler and Kevin Ryan refuted suggestions that vendors with good records are starting to turn away CPS children over fears they will harm their own compliance records.

Between 2015 and 2020, 485 operations made it possible to place children in foster care. Of these, 358 or 74% had safety records that did not warrant increased surveillance. New admissions by non-scrutinized vendors were fairly static, Fowler and Ryan wrote on Sept. 1, Adam King, head of data and systems improvement for the department.

Heightened surveillance is not part of the problem, its part of the solution, plaintiffs attorney Paul Yetter of Houston said as he questioned Masters.

Operations that recently closed should have been closed years earlier, he said.

In a document filed on Monday, the department said: It is imperative that the court know that the DFPS does not blame the CWOP crisis on increased court watch orders. The DFPS is just as concerned as the Court about this small but extremely large population of young people in our care.

Testifying on Tuesday, Masters said I was unaware of how my words were being taken.

Masters, a former Kansas health official appointed by Abbott in December 2019, said decisions by Texas departments to stop placing children or terminate contracts with multiple providers in the past 20 months were justified.

I don’t regret any closures I’ve made, she said.

Asked by Yetter, Masters said that although she visited the CPS offices where children were kept overnight, in Dallas and Georgetown, she did not watch a 60-minute online training course that her department organized earlier this year for CPS workers forced to shoot. the cemetery moves to take care of the young people.

I feel like I’m failing the kids, Masters said.

This summer, monitors interviewed 58 SPC staff and employees as they monitored children sleeping in desks or other makeshift arrangements. Although the children are mostly older adolescents who have gone through several foster care placements and suffer from severe psychiatric conditions, 86% of the staff caring for them said they had not been. trained in the administration of psychotropic drugs, noted Jack and Yetter.

Sex trafficking, drugs

These children by the way, if you read the report, are [lured into] sex trafficking, they do drugs, they’re runaways, Jack said. They have severe psychiatric episodes. … I mean, it’s just outrageous.

Physical and sexual violence has occurred in some of the places where unplaced children are accommodated, the judge noted. But 58% of caregivers polled by monitors said they had not received advice on how to supervise sexually aggressive or sexually abused children. 60% did not receive instructions on dealing with children with high mental health needs, the monitors found.

No one knows how to administer restraints, and all they can do is call the police, Jack said of state staff providing 24/7 care.

It’s devastating for social workers, who pull CWOP shifts in addition to their regular shifts, the judge said.

Between June 22 and July 22, monitors interviewed 56 of the children without a placement and also looked at case stories of children who had just been released from the foster home, including JB, who turned 18 in April.

The girl, who said she was sexually assaulted by her stepfather from the age of seven, entered foster care in 2019 after being accused of pushing her mother down stairs. Her first placement was at the Prairie Harbor Residential Treatment Center, a Fort Bend County facility that closed for safety reasons last year following the death of a 14-year-old adopted daughter from pulmonary embolism. .

JB, who said the shed had been a pimp since he was 14 and abused drugs, quickly bounced off five other collective care providers, visited the mental hospital four times, suffered seven periods as a CWOP and ran away from care 11 times. After her last placement, at Arrow Child & Family Ministries Freedom House for Victims of Sex Trafficking in the Spring, JB cut herself and drank Windex, according to the monitors report.

In his last running away incident before he got old, a CPS employee at a hotel in March spotted JB with a man believed to be his pimp. The adopted youngster began to walk quickly in the opposite direction and the man left running through the hotel, the monitors wrote.

Some time later, JB suffered from an upset stomach and asked her lawyer ad litem for CPS to come and get her. She was taken to the Texas Children’s Hospital and found to be pregnant, treated for pelvic inflammatory disease, a complication often caused by sexually transmitted infections. She also tested positive for cocaine.

Jack asked the Masters: Did you know that there were children involved in prostitution outside of the offices of social workers?

The Masters responded, I heard that.

Jack: Did you check it out? You know? Do you know this is true?

Masters: I have not verified that children are involved in prostitution.

When the judge asked the commissioner if she had a reason to challenge the monitors’ findings in this regard, Masters said no.

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