Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Sen. Jane Nelson

AUSTIN – Lawmakers have responded to brutal beating deaths of foster children with tentative decisions to hire hundreds more state workers and ease off on a big push for privatization at Child Protective Services.

A CPS overhaul bill the Senate is expected to take up today would partially repeal a massive privatization edict approved two years ago but not yet in effect. The measure also would require annual inspections of foster homes. Now, only about one-third are inspected each year.

"We're doing what we have to do ... in protecting our children," said Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Lewisville, who authored both the 2005 measure and the new one.

Separately, the House and Senate are still skirmishing behind the scenes over whether to keep – and even speed up – a mandate to completely hand over two duties to private entities: recruiting foster homes and arranging adoptions.

Recent news reports about the horrific deaths of three foster children in North Texas have revealed spotty state oversight of foster care contractors and state officials' alarming lack of information about Texas' nearly 10,000 foster homes.

The homes often are not licensed directly by the state but by about 100 private child-placing agencies, which the state pays to take care of abused and neglected children.

Critics say that pushing forward on privatization would worsen Texas' shortage of loving, competent foster parents. Advocates counter that CPS should not be a foster-care provider but instead focus on child-abuse investigations and being a better regulator of its vendors.

Second reform session

Shoring up the state's protection of foster children – who are, after all, youngsters who already know a thing or two about mistreatment – is a major focus of both the Senate bill and, separately, the budgets that both chambers have passed.

Last session's bill and an infusion of $200 million at CPS sought to improve child-abuse investigations. Gov. Rick Perry had said they were "broken" after as many as a dozen highly publicized deaths of youngsters who had been visited by state workers but left in their homes to endure fatal assaults or starve to death.

Now, CPS leaders and lawmakers have focused on improving care of children who already have been removed from their homes.

Both the House and Senate have passed two-year budgets injecting about $100 million into CPS and some of its sister agencies that are involved in foster-care regulation.

Of the nearly 1,100 new positions to be created at the Department of Family and Protective Services – about a 12 percent increase in the umbrella agency's payroll – 133 would be workers in the Child Care Licensing and contracts divisions. They would conduct more inspections of foster homes and keep closer tabs on the private agencies.

Carey Cockerell, the department's commissioner, has said that 80 percent of the new hires are necessary to help "keep families together" and "reduce the length of time children remain in state care."

CPS would hire 160 Family Based Safety Services employees so that caseloads – now 21 families per social worker – can be reduced, Mr. Cockerell testified to a House panel this week. National groups say such workers, who try to stabilize a troubled family before removals are necessary, shouldn't have more than a dozen cases each.

Eighty-four new CPS employees would expand "family group conferencing," which occurs when removals are imminent or have just happened. The state workers look for relatives who can care for the youngsters and work with biological parents to get help so they can regain custody of their children.

The plan would hire 126 new employees to get rid of backlogs in legal processing of adoptions and work with family friends who are asked to care for abused and neglected children.

Almost half of the new hires are required to meet standards set by the federal government, which pays most of the tab for child protection in Texas.

By June 30, 2008, Texas must complete a plan – agreed to by federal officials – for ensuring that 90 percent of children in foster care are visited by their caseworkers once a month by Oct. 1, 2011.

According to state CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins, the plan must include target percentages to be reached each year. Texas would lose some federal money if it falls short of 90 percent, he said.

Mr. Cockerell said the House and Senate budgets would allow him to add 501 "conservatorship" employees – three quarters of whom would be the caseworkers who make the visits, with the rest bosses and clerical aides.

Last month, he told a Senate panel that the 501 new employees would be the "bare minimum" needed to prevent more child tragedies.

Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, seized on the statement a few weeks later to offer an amendment to Ms. Nelson's bill. It called for budget writers to provide $18 million more in the next two years so that all foster children are seen monthly by Sept. 1, 2009.

The Shapleigh plan, which would have required 261 additional conservatorship employees, was rejected on a party-line vote.

"You can't make the claim this is the 'year of the child' when all you're doing is the bare minimum to keep federal money," said Mr. Shapleigh, who says the state is flush with a $14.3 billion surplus.

Ms. Nelson responded: "We have to draw a line between what would we like and what do we need to do. And we're doing what we need to do."

Mr. Shapleigh warned, "You're going to have the kinds of headlines we've seen the last three years."

Privatization fight

On privatization, the big fight is about whether to eliminate the jobs of 250 CPS workers who recruit foster homes and arrange adoptions. Over the next two years, Ms. Nelson's bill would hand off those tasks to private agencies, which now do about three-quarters of the home recruiting and one-third of the adoptions.

But House Human Services Committee Chairman Patrick Rose, D-Dripping Springs, who will sponsor Ms. Nelson's bill in the House, has vowed to strip the provision and appears to have GOP colleagues' backing. He said state-run foster homes "do very good work."

Former state District Judge Scott McCown of Austin, a privatization critic, called Ms. Nelson's plan "a disaster. It's going to drive us into a capacity and adoption crisis, while we're sleeping kids in hotels."

Mr. Crimmins has said that because the state can't find enough foster homes for infants and deeply troubled teens, about 40 youngsters each month sleep in CPS offices. Some caseworkers have accompanied the children to motels.

Ms. Nelson, though, says that the state "has a conflict of interest" because it both regulates and competes with foster care agencies.

"It distracts [from] the agency's core functions of investigating," she said last month. "That's what their job should be."

CHANGES AT CPS

An update on big Child Protective Services issues in the Legislature:

Privatization: The session's major CPS bills would eliminate a 2005 law's call for private contractors to manage each region's supply of foster homes and mandate that all CPS "case management" duties be outsourced by 2011. The bills instead call for a pilot program. It would let private workers serve as case managers for at least 3,000 of the 30,000 children who on any given day are in the state's care. The Senate bill also would take CPS out of the business of directly recruiting foster homes and arranging adoptions by September 2009.

Lower caseloads: Both chambers passed budgets increasing by more than 40 percent the agency's cadre of "conservatorship workers," who try to reunify families or, if that fails, speed the movement of abused children to adoption. Each now supervises 42 children on any given day. Other bills attempted to lower caseloads further, to 24, but those provisions have been dropped because of their cost.

Better education: The main Senate CPS bill would require CPS caseworkers to have college degrees in related fields, such as social work and counseling. Some could use work experiences to waive the requirement. A companion bill is awaiting action in a House committee.

Child-abuse prevention: Bills have passed in each chamber that would create local programs in which nurses work with at-risk families to prevent abuse and juvenile delinquency. Also, the two-year budgets in both chambers would give CPS $9 million to financially assist families whose poverty is seen as a big factor in child neglect, if the aid can prevent removal.

Screening foster parents: The budgets would hire 31 new state workers to speed background checks of people who want to be foster parents. However, bills to require a look at whether police have been dispatched to those residences have been watered down because of the cost of that requirement.

SOURCES: TexProtects (the Texas Association for the Protection of Children); Dallas Morning News research