Children's Rights initiates suit to reform Texas Foster Care

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Class action lawsuit challenges Texas foster care
By DANNY ROBBINS Associated Press © 2011 The Associated Press
March 29, 2011, 5:28PM
DALLAS — Texas' foster care system is unconstitutional and should be reformed, according to a class action lawsuit that was filed against the state Tuesday.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Corpus Christi, claims Texas forces thousands of children to live in poorly supervised institutions and move frequently from one place to another. It also contends that children languish for years without permanent families, face a higher risk of abuse, are denied mental health services and are routinely separated from their brothers and sisters.
The suit was initiated by Children's Rights, a New York-based child advocacy group that regularly supports such legal action. The plaintiffs are nine children between the ages of nine and 16.

Marcia Lowry, the executive director of Children's Rights, said the 85-page pleading is the product of five years of scrutiny of Texas' child welfare practices by her organization. A ruling that the Texas system is unconstitutional would pave the way to reform, she said.
"This is a system that's been bad for a long time," Lowry said at a news conference in Dallas. "It's not going to turn around overnight, but it can be turned around."
According to Lowry, improving the system wouldn't necessarily require major new funding, even though the suit contends that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is "severely" understaffed.
"It's a question of where the state wants to put its money," she said. "There are ways to redesign the system."

Anne Heiligenstein, commissioner of the Department of Family and Protective Services, said Texas' foster children are safe, well-cared for and in a system that's nationally-recognized for seeking adoptive parents. The system has been subject to reform and has received more than $1 billion in additional funding in recent years, she said in a written statement.
"We're on the right path and will continue to do everything we can to protect Texas children, but I worry that a lawsuit like this will take critical time and resources away from the very children it presumes to help," Heiligenstein said.
According to statistics compiled by the agency, the number of caseworkers in Child Protective Services has risen in the last six years from 2,947 to 4,660. The number of adoptions consummated during that time period also has increased dramatically, from 2,512 to 4,803.

The Texas suit is the 12th class action initiated by Children's Rights seeking reform to the child welfare systems administered by state or municipal governments. Three other suits remain in litigation, and eight have been settled, according to the organization.
The suit names Gov. Rick Perry, Heiligenstein and Thomas Suehs, executive commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, as defendants.
It contends that "deficiencies" in the system, including overburdened case workers and poorly supervised contract providers, have led to a number of harmful conditions for the 12,000 children in long-term foster care. These children in the state's permanent managing conservatorship have become "forgotten," according to the suit.
The suit cites statistics showing that, as of 2009, children who had been in the state's custody more than three years had been placed in an average of 11 different homes or other settings such as shelters or residential treatment centers. Cycling children through the system in this manner doesn't comply with "reasonable professional standards," the complaint alleges.
The suit also is critical of the state's use of foster group homes that accommodate seven to 12 children. Those homes can be "little more than poorly supervised dormitories," and they provide further evidence of how the Texas system differs from conventional standards, according to the suit.
The suit draws much of its narrative from recent media accounts, including an Associated Press story detailing how one foster group home in East Texas was a collection of mobile homes and how the state repeatedly ruled out allegations that young girls living there were sexually abused by their foster father until he was arrested on those charges.
"(That type of home) is an unusual form of treatment and was one of the things that surprised us when we began our investigation," Lowry said.

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N.Y. group suing Texas over foster care system
Claims 12,000 children suffer in poor supervision
By TERRI LANGFORD
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
March 29, 2011, 10:28PM
A New York advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday claiming that children in the Texas foster care system are forced to spend years in abusive, poorly supervised facilities and homes hundreds of miles from family and friends.
The group, Children's Rights, filed the suit in Corpus Christi on behalf of 12,000 children housed in long-term foster homes, group homes and residential treatment centers across the state. It names Gov. Rick Perry, Texas Health and Human Services Commissioner Thomas Suehs and Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Anne Heiligenstein as defendants.
The suit, which identified nine children by their initials as named plaintiffs, calls on the state to revamp a system that the group says fails foster children.
"For too many children, it's the end of hope for them," Children's Rights' executive director Marcia Robinson Lowry said.
In response to the suit, state officials declared Tuesday that children in Texas foster care are safe and case¬loads are falling, and they said a redesign of the foster care system is well under way.
However, Lowry's group cites previous federal audits, state reports, 2010 media accounts and the details from nine child plaintiffs' experiences in arguing that the foster care system has failed to keep children safe from harm. Eight of 11 states where Children's Rights has filed child welfare lawsuits have settled with the group.
Daystar case cited
One of the child plaintiffs in the Texas case is identified as D.I., a 9-year-old Houston boy who has been in foster care since he was 6. D.I. was sexually abused by other children after being placed in a foster home with six teenagers.
The lawsuit claims the Department of Family and Protective Services never closed that foster home and continued to move D.I. to several other homes.
The lawsuit also includes the case of Daystar, a residential treatment facility in the Brazoria County town of Manvel that was closed after the restraint death of a 16-year-old developmentally disabled boy last November was ruled a homicide. The Houston Chronicle and Texas Tribune reported on the abuse of children in state-sanctioned care in Daystar and similar facilities.Heiligenstein, the DFPS commissioner who last year began work on a state foster care redesign, said Texas has made tremendous strides improving the care of abused children who enter the system. More than $1 billion in additional funding has been pumped into the system in the past six years, Heiligenstein said.
"Texas foster children are safe, well-cared for and live in a system that is nationally recognized for finding thousands of loving, adoptive homes each year," she said in a statement. "We're on the right path and will continue to do everything we can to protect Texas children, but I worry that a lawsuit like this will take critical time and resources away from the very children it presumes to help."
Adoptions up 50 percent
In the same statement, the agency declared that Texas foster care children are safe by "an overwhelming margin" and that the foster care redesign is close to being a reality. A measure that would allow the agency to shift funds to help reallocate resources is pending in the Legislature.
The agency released figures Tuesday that show adoptions have increased more than 50 percent between fiscal years 2005 and 2010. Caseloads for foster care caseworkers have fallen by about 10 cases per worker in the same time period, from an average of 40.4 per worker a month to 29.5 in the period that ended last August, the agency said.
DFPS has been anticipating a lawsuit since 2009, after the advocacy group began requesting records. The agency notified lawmakers of such a possibility last fall in an unsigned "background memo" that is critical of the group.
"CR is very media savvy and it uses the press to 'try' its cases in the public arena to pressure agency officials into entering into settlement discussions," the memo stated.
$500-an-hour fees? The memo also took aim at Children's Rights attorneys' fee requests to courts, which DFPS calculated are "about $500 per hour."
The document went on to list improvements made since 2004 by the DFPS Child Protective Services' division, which investigates child abuse and places children into foster care.
"Reform is working in Texas," the memo stated. "Texans know what's best for Texas. We don't need a litigious organization from New York City to tell us how to improve our CPS system. And we don't need its lawyers living off exorbitant fees paid for by the hard-working taxpayers of Texas."
However, the memo failed to mention how reductions in the agency's budget by lawmakers in the 1990s essentially pushed it to a point of crisis in 2004, prompting Perry to order a special investigation.
Perry's action came after a series of well-publicized child abuse deaths. Many of the children in those cases came from families with previous CPS histories and exposed soaring caseloads.
terri.langford@chron.com