More than 250 children in Texas foster care slept in hotels, offices or other unorthodox housing last month, as the state struggles to provide enough stable placements for kids in its care.
The latest numbers were provided in a report from an agency leader at a meeting Friday of the the Texas Family and Protective Services Council, which helps develop rules and policies for the Department of Family and Protective Services and meets every few months.
“Placement capacity is a big challenge for us,” said Brock Boudreau, a Deputy Associate Commissioner for Texas Child Protective Services, describing the issue of children without foster home placement as a “systemic issue” for the agency.
It’s an issue that has plagued the department for years. The number of children living in unlicensed placements such as hotels, rented office building space and even social workers’ cars reached as high as 416 statewide in July 2021, the agency reported then.
The total per month has not since reached that peak: Boudreau reported to the council that there were 254 children in unlicensed placements in May.
But per night, after waning at times in recent years, the average number of children in unlicensed placement crept back up last month. While the average reportedly decreased from 80 children per night in 2021 to 60 in 2022, May saw an increase: an average of about 100 youth per night were in these haphazard living situations.
“As with any process improvement, you can make good gains in the beginning and then you hit that wall,” Boudreau told the council. “That’s where it’s tough to make gains. Every time I come and address you, I tell you we’re doing the best we can.”
The issue of children in foster care without stable housing — known in the field as “children without placement,” or CWOP — has drawn concern from child advocates and been the subject of frustration for court monitors and a federal judge overseeing a yearslong lawsuit against the state and the Department of Family and Protective Services.
The lack of homes for these foster youth — children 13 and older who have often had behavioral or mental health challenges — leaves them vulnerable to exploitation, advocates and child welfare experts have consistently warned the agency and the courts.
In reports last year and early this year, monitors Deborah Fowler and Kevin Ryan, reporting to U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, have continued to warn of the risks of these temporary placements, questioning in the January report “whether the agency is adequately protecting children from a serious risk of harm when it continues to house children in CWOP settings.”
They wrote, “based upon the Monitors’ review of DFPS investigations of CWOP settings over the past 18 months, the answer frequently is no.”
Last year, two young teenagers under the care of the agency in unlicensed facilities were sexually assaulted after running away, despite the fact that at least one of them was supposed to be under “constant” supervision. In 2021, a teenager who snuck out of an unlicensed facility was fatally shot.
The next hearing for the case will be June 27, and a monitors’ report is expected to be filed prior to that meeting that summarizes their findings on whether the agency has improved.
Boudreau expressed some optimism in today’s meeting about the agency’s progress in setting up “qualified residential treatment programs,” a designation for care facilities intended for youth who have complex mental and behavioral health needs.
The Texas Tribune reported in January that the state has struggled to get interest from residential treatment centers about contracting to create these programs.
Boudreau said in his presentation that the agency had signed two contracts to get two programs set up and was close to signing a third, which will bring the total number of patient beds in those facilities to 93. The department has also worked with the University of Texas to create a similar program for youth with mental health needs to stay for up to 60 days at the university’s in-patient psychiatric facility. There are 18 beds available to them.
Instead of sending kids who have not had time to be stabilized in medical care back to unstable placements, Boudreau said, “we’re able to keep them in this and then truly step down to a treatment center and then therapeutic foster care.”
Bonnie Hellums, a judge and the chair of the Texas Family and Protective Services Council, praised the department for making progress on the treatment facilities, noting, “we need to treat trauma – every one of these incidents is a trauma.”
The council members also heard updates from other divisions and leaders within the Department of Family and Protective Services, including a legislative update.
Jennifer Sims, the deputy commissioner of the department said its leaders “were very pleased with how things turned out” with the historic $302.6 billion state budget for the next two years, which will boost funding for numerous child welfare initiatives, including overhauling state payments to foster care providers.
Lee Ann Biggar, acting CFO for the department, added that the agency got $209 million for stabilizing its foster care capacity, plus millions more for other programs.
“A lot of programs doubled funding,” Biggar noted.
