The Texas Legislature needs to move on bills that would improve worker vetting and boost kinship caregiver rates.
Our state legislators have spent a great deal of time lately on campaigns to remove certain books from school libraries and to criminalize drag shows, all in the name of protecting kids.
We wish they would channel that energy toward fixing the mess that is the Texas foster care system, charged with protecting about 50,000 children who have suffered abuse and neglect.
The problems with the foster care system — the focus of an ongoing federal lawsuit — are too many to list here, yet some of those issues could be solved or improved with swift legislative action.
We are glad to see that a bill that would close loopholes in the vetting process for foster care workers is on its way to the governor’s desk, even as other legislation affecting caregivers languishes in Austin.
Allegations of sexual exploitation at a foster care facility in Central Texas called The Refuge did not lead to any criminal charges, but they caused a scandal that revealed a host of problems with the way foster care workers in this state are hired.
A state agency performs a criminal background check on prospective foster care employees, who are also checked against a state child abuse registry. The registry includes people with abuse allegations substantiated by the Department of Family and Protective Services, the state’s child welfare agency. But there are other state departments that investigate allegations of wrongdoing against children, and yet these critical findings are not shared among agencies.
In the case of The Refuge, an overnight caregiver who allegedly gave two teen girls her phone so they could take nude photos had been previously fired from a job at a state juvenile lockup, the Texas Tribune first reported. The Refuge, a nonprofit, did not check references, and the woman’s personnel file, which included substantiated allegations that she had flirted with boys in her care, didn’t surface during the state’s vetting process.
The woman should have never been hired at The Refuge. A DFPS investigation found reason to believe that the woman had abused and neglected two girls in her care by allowing the girls, who had previous sexual trauma, to use her cellphone to take sexually suggestive photos that the girls then shared online, according to a court document in the federal foster care lawsuit.
Senate Bill 1849 by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, might have prevented this. The proposed legislation would create a search engine of people with a demonstrated history of misconduct that has been reported to DFPS, the Health and Human Services Commission, the Texas Juvenile Justice Department or the Texas Education Agency. This interagency information exchange is so critical that it’s hard to believe it’s not happening already.
Both the House and the Senate have approved SB 1849, and now it’s up to Gov. Greg Abbott to make it law.
More safeguards have been put in place by Health and Human Services, the state agency that licenses foster care facilities. The agency this spring proposed new rules that would require foster care facilities to verify job candidates’ employment history during the past five years and check their references. A spokeswoman for Health and Human Services told us the agency expects the rules to go into effect in August.
This is a success, but the foster care system needs many more of them.
Research shows that children do better when they stay with family than when they live in foster care with people who are often strangers. But Texas still pays children’s relatives about half the rate of what it pays unrelated people to care for them. Often, the relatives who step up to care for children are grandparents living on low incomes. But as the Texas Tribune recently reported, several bills that would boost payments to these relatives have gotten no traction this session, even though lawmakers last adjusted this rate in 2017.
While culture-war bills get all the fanfare, it’s the hard work of reforming the foster care system that will actually save kids.
