Bunkering of Texas foster children in CPS offices may be over, but bed shortages persist

Austin. There is still a shortage of foster care beds in Texas – ones that are licensed and don’t put children and child protection workers at risk of harm or even death.

According to the Department of Family and Protective Services, on any given January night, an average of four dozen children were “unsettled children.”

During 31 days of the month, 171 children spent at least two consecutive nights in temporary accommodation without a license. This is 59% less than the 416 homeless children, or CWOPs, registered in July 2021, which is a record.

“Now that we’ve improved, we’re back to where we were when we first started talking about the bandwidth crisis around kids sleeping in offices,” said Kate Murphy, director of child protection policy at the group. protecting Texans caring for children.

Since the late 2000s, child rights advocates have criticized Texas for systematically locking abused and neglected children in public institutions. For almost as long, a federal judge has called the state stubbornly cruel for allowing it to be done.

Public money to find caregivers in his heavily privatized foster care system to take in the most difficult and traumatized young people. And two years ago, a powerful Republican senator convinced the legislature to ban overnight stays at CPS offices.

In 2021, lawmakers added $124 million to the department’s budget to pay for foster parents, Murphy said, helping to alleviate bed shortages. However, the “eternal problem” of matching supply with demand remains.

“Children do not sleep in offices, but sleep in unregulated rentals, on church floors, in some gratuitous spaces such as [Dallas-based] Buckner International, like the SAFE Alliance shelter here in Austin, has donated some space — or in hotel rooms,” she said.

Despite the weakening of the once sky-high “daily CWOP census”, disturbing incidents still occur.

Mostly older children, many of whom have been in foster care for years, young people are the hardest to place in the system: unattractive adoption candidates, many of whom are still reeling from the horrendous abuse and often act up. Each of the unsettled boys is assigned two social workers of the Union of Right Forces. The workers were attacked.

Sad budget

In recent months, the sad consequences for homeless children have become more frequent.

Among them is the apparent death of a girl from an overdose who escaped from a hotel room in Houston in late December; the alleged sexual abuse of two girls who left a religious group facility in Marble Falls in October; and the gunshot death of “AW”, identified by federal judge monitors as a 17-year-old boy who, while at the CPS office in Killeen last March, escaped and died about a week later.

Jadon Jeter Robinson, who turned 18 and “aged” from a foster home last April, died Feb. 2 from stab wounds inflicted by attackers on the streets of downtown El Paso, police said.

The Department of Protective Services has not confirmed that Jadon was a CWOP. His mother, Heather Robinson, confirmed Dallas Morning News who spent “a month or two” at the CPS office at 501 Hawkins Boulevard in El Paso in late 2021/early 2022.

This came just months after Republican Senator Brenham Lois Colkhorst’s law went into effect. Among other things, the new law stated: “The department cannot allow a child to stay overnight in the department’s office.”

According to Heather Robinson, Jadon, who was in and out of foster care, suffered trauma and serious bodily harm, as well as a serious mental illness that was not treated.

“They completely abandoned Jadon,” he said of CPS. “This agency puts these kids in danger all the time.”

Department spokesman Patrick Crimmins declined to comment on Robinson’s claims.

Colkhorst, the Senate’s leading child protection policymaker, said in a written statement last week: “No child should sleep in a public office all night.”

Colkhorst said he wrote the law “to encourage prompt and proper placement”. While legislator capacity building grants have helped reduce the number of CWOPs, “further progress is needed to create additional sustainable employment opportunities.”

House Human Services Committee Chairman James Frank R-Wichita Falls said CWOP children “are a huge problem for anyone who should serve under normal conditions and it’s becoming increasingly impossible to serve under heightened supervision.”

He cited orders from U.S. District Judge Janice Graham Jack in a 12-year federal lawsuit against the state that included strict oversight of foster care providers whose records regulators deemed worthy of further scrutiny.

In addition to the new grants, the Department of Protective Services has leaned towards greater use of costly “child focused contracts”.

They have been used for years to pressure providers, some of whom are out of state, to accept hard-to-find Texas foster children.

Internal financial documents received from News show that between September 2020 and January of this year, the department spent $120.2 million on child contracts.

“There was at least one little boy that the court ordered to be placed, and the DFPS was ordered to pay $2,000 a day for that placement,” said Murphy, the child’s attorney. “You know, it adds up very quickly.

These specialized admissions contracts far exceeded the $74.3 million spent on CWOP in the same time period. The latter included $26.6 million for overtime pay for CPS workers, $24.1 million for security, $10.4 million for travel, $4.5 million for housing, $2.8 million for temporary staff, $2 million for “additional guardians” and almost $800,000 in rent for the premises.

Is a hotel ban coming?

State Representative Jin Woo, a Houston Democrat who has closely followed CPS and foster care in recent years, said hotels are a “depressing environment” for children without shelter.

Several lawmakers, including Lubbock Republican Senator Charles Perry and San Antonio Democrat Liz Campos, have introduced bills to prevent children’s hotels from being used by the state’s “trusteeship department.” Perry’s bill would charge counties for hotel and staffing costs for that county’s children who are kept in a similar location by CPS. The Campos measure will completely ban the use of the hotel.

Freshman Rep. Josie Garcia, a Democrat from San Antonio who was in and out of foster care growing up in Florida, said she would co-sponsor the Campos Act after she saw photos of the hotel sent to her by Bexar County CPS workers.

“The condition of some of these hotels is simply deplorable,” Garcia said. “Our children who are going through these emergencies deserve better care.”

Colkhorst said lawmakers “need to consider” one factor that exacerbates the CWOP problem: when a child refuses an offered seat.

“A child in state care should not stay in the office overnight,” he said. “But for the same reason, we now have some CWOP kids who choose to stay in hotels because they can opt out of being placed under appropriate conditions when available.”

It took the Department of Protective Services nearly a year to enforce Colkhorst’s ban on office sleepers.

In early 2021, Buckner Children and Family Services of Dallas offered available cottages on its campuses in five cities across the state. The department used CPS staff to house and supervise more than 270 children in cottages for 24 months.

“I believe the reduction in the number of street children is the result of legislators, government agencies, nonprofits like Buckner, and all Texans working together to find realistic solutions to keep our children safe,” said Debbie Sceroler, Senior Director of Guardianship and adoption. Buckner.

Wu, a Houston state spokesman, said the end of the COVID-19 pandemic may have eased the crisis somewhat. According to him, now children are much more likely to receive the necessary psychiatric help.

The key to permanently addressing CWOP will be to reduce the number of children entering foster care, said child rights advocates Wu and Murphy. This means taking a proactive approach to providing more services to at-risk families so they don’t just give up and let the state take their children, Wu added.

Dallas will have a new residential care model based on a “no denial or deportation” policy designed to force a regional supercontractor to provide adequate accommodation for all children.

While residential care depends on the absence of unsettled children, Wu is skeptical that this could ever be the case.

Young people in need of emergency care have to wait for a high quality foster home or facility in the residential care centre, which is often unavailable.

“They will get into the CWOP,” he said. “There is no other place.”

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