Roxanna Asgarian

The city's Administration for Children’s Services sought changes that advocates say essentially gutted CPS reform bills.

The Washington Supreme Court used a recent case involving a 6-year-old boy separated from his family to set new expectations in the state for prioritizing kinship care in the child welfare system.

Each year, thousands of foster children in Texas are shuffled into little-known “treatment centers” where they are frequently neglected and abused. State officials have largely ignored allegations of wrongdoing and calls for reform.

The spread of COVID-19 among children in Texas’ long-term foster care system has been rampant, particularly in residential care facilities, and the pandemic has left more than five dozen kids without a bed to sleep in, a new report filed in federal court shows. 

Calling the lack of compliance “stunning,” U.S. District Judge Janis Jack again held Texas in contempt of court Friday for failing to comply with court-ordered reforms of the state’s foster care system.

In the final hour of a daylong Health and Human Services committee meeting for the Texas House of Representatives last November, Sammi Jo Magee took the microphone. Magee, the chief prosecutor in the Child Protective Services division for Taylor County, Texas, which includes Abilene, had been summoned to explain why Taylor and surrounding counties were taking more kids into foster care than any other region in the state.

In December 2015, a federal judge ruled that Texas was violating the rights of children in long-term care of the state by subjecting them to abuse, overmedication and repeated placement moves.

Buried within a wonky “needs assessment” report recently released by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) is a finding that should raise alarm bells around the state. And perhaps around the country.

In December 2015, a federal judge issued a scathing ruling against Texas’s child welfare system, saying “foster children often age out of care more damaged than when they entered” and ordered a laundry list of fixes the state needed to implement.

Lisa Jarrett presides over what’s known as the crossover docket in Bexar County, Texas, where she handles cases involving youth known to both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Jarrett says that bundling all the cases of a dual-status youth reduces replication of services and helps the child understand what they need to do to comply with the court — after all, with two separate cases come separate judges, court dates and orders.