Texas CPS Privatization Pilot Moving Ahead Despite Concerns
OLDER NEWS
July 6, 2016
Rising number of Texas foster kids left without homes
Is the rising number because more people are abusive and neglectful or is it because our state does not spend enough money on prevention programs that would help people before their lives escalated to child services interventions? Are we taking too many kids? Could kids be served better in their homes when it is safe to do so? Texas needs to spend more money on the front-end helping families in need rather than punishing them and putting their children in costly foster care.
February 23, 2016
Scot, Wexler: Court offers wrong solution for foster kids
Parent Guidance Center submitted this op-ed (along with Richard Wexler) concerning the Children’s Rights lawsuit decision handed down by a federal judge against CPS.
February 17, 2016
Fixing Texas Foster Care Requires Radical Change In Direction
Parent Guidance Center co-wrote this op-ed with Richard Wexler, executive director, National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
February 16, 2016
There’s little outrage for 12,000 kids suffering in the Texas foster care system
The victim in this story tells you what she wants – to go home – but did anyone help her drug-addicted mother so this girl could get her wish? No, instead they terminated her mother’s parental rights. The rest of the story is a sordid tale of how the victim is further victimized in the foster care system – the very system that is supposed to protect her from her supposed abusers.
NEWS FROM 2014
February 10, 2014
New Harris County CPS court looks to ease backlog
While we agree that something needs to be done about the growing backlog of CPS cases in Harris County, the “cluster court” system, as it’s sometimes called, has done NOTHING to protect children and get them home to their families quicker. Clustering CPS cases to one judge – which has been done for years around the state – has NOT made judges see kids in their courtrooms more, has NOT ensured that caseworkers visit their children more, has NOT ensured timely delivery of services to parents so that they can safely be reunited with their children more often, and has definitely NOT protected children from abuse and neglect or even death in their foster homes.
December 19, 2013
State punishes foster agency in death of 11-month-old Orion Hamilton
When foster agencies do not follow CPS policies, children die. When CPS does not monitor foster agencies, children die. It’s about time PEOPLE are held accountable for their actions or in this case LACK of actions. We cannot continue to blame “the system” for its failure to protect children. At the end of the day, it is PEOPLE, not systems, failing these children. And when PEOPLE fail to follow the system rules with no accountability, children die.
October 25, 2013
Increase in foster child deaths prompts safety plan
While CPS should shoulder much of the blame for this foster child death (afterall they are charged with keeping children safe), let’s not forget that many other eyes were supposed to be looking in on this foster child. It’s time the entire foster care system is held accountable – not just CPS – including court-appointed attorneys, judges, foster agencies, CASA advocates, therapists, and any others involved in foster care cases.
October 22, 2013
Child’s death reveals concerns in foster placement
It seems that serving children in their own homes may be safer after all.
October 4, 2013
Lubbock adoptive parents indicted on felony child abuse charges
Is there a limit on how many children can be adopted out of the CPS system? Were no red flags raised when these parents kept wanting to adopt more children? Who is checking on the adopted children AFTER they are adopted? How much money were these adoptive parents making in adoption subsidies each month?
September 25, 2013
Texas CPS caseworkers charged with tampering with evidence
Two were also indicted on multiple counts of official oppression in connection with alleged improper searches and seizures of some CPS clients.
September 13, 2013
Texas seeks more scrutiny of foster parents as number of children’s death rise
Why do caseworkers stop asking all the right questions of children in foster care and why don’t they believe it when children tell them about abuse or neglect in foster care? Sometimes children are “removed” to a worse environment than they came from and are “protected to death.”
September 5, 2013
Foster parents, Austin area child-placing agency are sued
Question: What is worse than a child being abused? Answer: CPS taking children away to supposedly protect them from further abuse and then a child placing agency covering up sexual abuse of the children by its licensed foster parents while in foster care in order to get the children adopted.
Click here to read the court document.
August 5, 2013
Texas toddler dies in CPS custody at hands of foster mother
August 1, 2013
Grandparent loses grandkids to the system
Biological mom speaks out about the adoptive parents that murdered her children
Biological aunt fought to keep children but Texas CPS took them from her – her lawyer speaks out
“Free-range parenting debate continues”
Editorial on forensic pathologist who was prosecuted after debunking Shaken Baby Syndrome
OLDER NEWS
June 16, 2016
STOP TANF from being the child welfare slush fund
Nationally known child welfare expert, Richard Wexler, takes on the funding establishment.
May 9, 2016
Couple accused of holding adoptive children captive, abusing them pleads guilty to some charges
Does adoption really work? The truth is, we don’t have any idea. After adoptions are complete, there is no mechanism to keep checking on the children to make sure they are safe.
March 30, 2016
Tax payer dollars are used to fund adoption stipends and subsidies yet these homes are not being checked on after the adoptions are complete. Shouldn’t adoptive parents be continuously checked on if they are to keep receiving these federal dollars? If not, the system is set up for easy fraud with no protections.
February 4, 2014
Mass. Gov defends policy allowing criminals to qualify as prospective foster parents
Boston, we have a problem! A governor who defends people with dangerous criminal records being allowed to become foster parents. But it looks like Mass. is not the only state allowing this. Texas has its share of criminals being cleared to foster vulnerable children as well as no backgrounds checks at all.
February 4, 2014
DCF handbook shocker: Criminal past does NOT disqualify foster parents
It appears that lack of accountability and lack of oversight for future foster parents is written right into the Mass. CPS handbook! A 14-year-old stealing candy who is all grown up now is quite different from allowing armed assault, drug trafficking, or sex with a minor on a prospective foster parent’s record!
January 23, 2014
DCF Commissioner: We have not lost anymore children
MA state representative David Linsky asks some tough questions in a public hearing about CPS failures in his state and said “there has got to be some accountability.” PGC couldn’t agree more and we think it applies to Texas CPS problems as well. During the hearing, MA DCF Commissioner Roche stated when referring to her caseworkers skipping required visits of children in foster care: “This was a gross disregard of policies and procedures of the department.” Sounds eerily like the recent foster care deaths in Texas – gross lack of accountability leads to gross disregard of policies and procedures which leads to more child deaths.
January 23, 2014
State report: DCF skipping almost 20% of visits to kids’ homes
What kind of caseworker just decides she will skip visiting a vulnerable child in their home and not make sure the child is safe and protected? The caseworker that was fired for this admitted her “professional gaze drifted.” What does that even mean? There’s no excuse for ignoring policies and procedures your job requires and caseworkers need to start being held accountable.
January 23, 2014
We agree with Texas’ own Irene Clements in her quote: “State governments are putting a lot of trust into the contracting process and putting a lot of reliance on how well the state can monitor those contracts,” said Irene Clements, president of the National Foster Parent Association. “So when they try to blame it all on the contractor, the buck doesn’t stop there. They can’t say, ‘We didn’t know.’ They maybe didn’t know about a particular situation, but they know the history of performance on that agency.”
Since 80% of Texas foster care is already contracted to private companies and Texas is currently piloting Foster Care Redesign to expand privatization of foster care and related services, it is IMPERATIVE that we get it right when it comes to ACCOUNTABILITY and CONTRACT MANAGEMENT or children will be further victimized by the system and its failure to protect. This management needs to heavily apply to the actual PEOPLE doing the work. Children are not check boxes on a form. They need time and attention from people in order to be properly protected.
December 18, 2013
Private foster care system, intended to save children, endangers some
California’s privatized foster care system FAILS children. This article could be written about almost any state in our nation! The money works the same in every state because it is from federal Title IV-E funding. Privatization of foster care has proven time and time again to cost more and fail children. When will states learn from this and decide to do something different???
December 10, 2013
North Carolina CPS supervisor and partner indicted for abusing foster child
Shocking abuse details are still emerging from this case that originally discovered an 11-year-old foster child cuffed to a porch with a chicken around his neck. The couple’s other adoptive children were also taken into CPS custody – but can CPS be trusted to protect these children (or the other children under that CPS supervisor) when their own employee was abusing her own foster and adoptive children???
November 20, 2013
Former foster mother indicted for child abuse, endangerment
Another unnecessary child death caused by a foster parent not following CPS procedure in order to get around childcare rules by allowing an unapproved person to babysit.
November 1, 2013
Adoption group calls for U.S. laws to stop online child trading
It is interesting to note how supporters of adoption are quick to excuse “re-homing” as an act by innocent people who are desperate and need help and refer to it as “online child trading.” They give adoptive parents the benefit of the doubt and ask for more resources to help them, such as education and training. HOWEVER, if a biological parent were to try to “re-home” a child they were having trouble with, it would be called “child trafficking” and they would be put in jail – no offer of training, education, or resources for them – and of course CPS would become involved.
October 23, 2013
Foster youth at risk for sex trafficking
Another more obvious “fix” for the broken foster care system might be to spend money on services for biological parents to help them resolve their issues and return more children to their homes or serve them safely in their homes. Foster children are speaking out about the horrible atrocities that the current foster care system seems to cause and the fact that “nothing-but-a-paycheck” foster parents are not a good alternative if they are only fostering for a paycheck. Note: the reason the article keeps referring to money paid for “children from needy families” is that the federal government only reimburses states for taking children from families that meet federal low-income guidelines.
October 22, 2013
Legislators object to Kansas CPS withholding foster care findings
This is what privatization of foster care can do to a state.
Kansas University receives $2.5 million grant to improve foster care
While we agree that trauma-informed care is very important, any programs developed to help children with trauma while in foster care need to keep in mind that REMOVAL is a trauma as well and it is not fair (or even truly evidence-based) to blame all trauma on supposed previous abuse and/or neglect without a baseline before removal for the child’s trauma. To evaluate a child for trauma without including the trauma of removal does not serve children in a meaningful or honest way. It sure would be nice if researchers could receive million dollar grants for figuring out how to better serve biological families, how to serve children better in their homes, and how to help parents with unresolved trauma in their own lives that may be effecting their ability to parent.
October 4, 2013
Foster care agency accused of fraud to pay $1 million
Taxpayer money was used for luxury cars, trips, and excessive salaries for owners
October 3, 2013
Kansas officials investigate complaints about Wichita child welfare group
This is why Parent Guidance Center fought so hard during Texas foster care reform to keep “case management” out of the hands of private companies who wanted to “own the whole case” and thus “own the family” and all decisions about them. It is important to keep boundaries and checks and balances in place so that private companies can’t do this in our state. Bravo for the brave legislators that believed their constituents and actually asked for the investigation.
September 30, 2013
Children’s Rights loses lawsuit against Massachusetts CPS
This is good news for the people of MA because in our opinion Children’s Rights lawsuits only serve the lawyers involved and put states in a decades-long choke-hold via outside monitors. Although CR lawsuits often contain true information, the “fix” for the state CPS system involved never matches the problems. The “monitors” settle for undisclosed amounts of taxpayer money and put people from outside the state in charge of the CPS system, thus creating what we call a “fourth branch” of government. We feel CPS should remain under control of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of each state.
Click here for a copy of the full judgement
September 23, 2013
Mother loses parental rights to 4 of her children
September 10, 2013
Washington couple could face decades in prison for their adopted daughter’s death
At what point will someone decide that we need to start following up on adopted children – both foreign and domestic adoptions???
September 10, 2013
Americans use the internet to abandon children adopted from overseas
July 3, 2013
Foster care deaths up 20% in Georgia
Texas is not the only state with increasing foster care deaths. Is this becoming a national trend?
July 2, 2013
Pennsylvania mom settles lawsuit over poppy seed drug test
June 17, 2013
Suspension won’t be removed for kindergartener with cap gun
If a biological parent interrogated their child for hours and made them wet their pants, they would be accused of child abuse, but when school officials do it, it’s apparently okay.
July 2, 2012
State high court ruling may effect parents with mental health issues
Under the “predictive neglect” doctrine or “potential risk” standard ALL parents’ rights are at stake, sometimes merely based on another’s opinion of them or their behavior.
April 11, 2012
St. Charles County foster parent charged with child abuse
Sometimes it seems CPS has lower standards for stranger foster care and only gives lip-service to relative placements. This child could have been healthy and safe at the beginning of the case if CPS had followed their own procedures and placed him where he should have been – with his great aunt.
February 26, 2013
Family Reunification Act could restore parental rights in some lost custody cases
Bravo for another state doing something right. Ironically, this begs the question of why can’t CPS systems do right by children they serve in the first place by helping parents with complicated problems rather than spending millions on foster care only to then decide biological parents are okay only because the kids were not adopted. However, this kind of law is definitely a step in the right direction.