Another troubling report emerged last week about the Texas foster care system. Court-appointed monitors Deborah Fowler and Kevin Ryan submitted a 363-page report to U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack that called the state’s system “disjointed and dangerous,” in which “harm to children is at critical times overlooked, ignored or forgotten.”
This is a nasty, decade-long fight, and the June 16 report is just another chapter. As far back as 2013, we were writing about troubling reports on the state’s foster care system and Judge Jack’s edicts to compel improvement. Last year, after learning that the Department of Family and Protective Services had failed to follow her order to establish 24-hour supervision in group homes, Jack fined the state $50,000 per day until it did so. She called the department “shameful” and said “I can no longer find DFPS credible.” We were not surprised that last week’s report highlighted troubling flaws in the state’s system. By now it should be clear that there are deeply ingrained malfunctions in the way Texas protects and cares for foster kids.
We also weren’t surprised that Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton didn’t respond directly to the latest report. Through a spokesperson, Paxton declined to comment. In the past, he has labeled Jack’s rulings in the class action lawsuit on behalf of Texas foster kids as judicial overreach. At a news conference about the coronavirus, Abbott, who is named in the suit, acknowledged the report only long enough to say that the Legislature allocated money to improve the system during a previous session. That’s true. In 2017, the Legislature increased funding to hire hundreds more conservatorship caseworkers. High social worker caseloads is one of the key components of the dispute.
This is not simply an issue of legal disputes and legislative budgets. This is life and death. Between February and May, three foster care children died in circumstances the monitors found concerning.
Was Judge Jack harsh in issuing high fines? Probably. Is it the job of elected officials, not appointed judges, to write budgets and oversee state programs? Yes. Has the state made progress to improve its system? Yes. But these are distractions, sideshows. What last week’s report does is to refocus our concern on the most important issue here: the safety of children. Money has been spent, but it hasn’t fixed the problem. Lawsuits have been filed, but kids are still at risk.
Tellingly, Abbott and Paxton are not defending the quality of care kids receive in DFPS programs. They’re quibbling over how to fix it. Which reminds us of something Jack said at a hearing in November when state officials were briefing her on the particulars of a software upgrade needed to track kids through the system.
“The whole thing is the safety of these children,” she said. “I don’t care about all the technical stuff.”
That pretty well sums up our attitude toward this ongoing issue. Sure the state has tried to improve, but it needs to be successful. As long as 11,000 Texas children are at risk of abuse that’s ignored by the system, the state will not have performed its duty for these children.
