In interviews with The Imprint, a broad spectrum of child welfare professionals — from activists to conservative analysts, officials and policymakers — agreed: The state’s systemic reforms have kept more families intact and fewer kids from entering foster care.
The number of American children taken into the foster care system has been on the decline for years, dipping further during the pandemic when lockdowns shuttered family courts and schools made fewer reports of suspected abuse and neglect.
But among all states, the reduced reliance on foster care removals in Texas stands out: In 2018, 20,685 children entered government custody. Last fiscal year, that number plunged to 9,965. And in the past two years alone, there has been a roughly 40% population decline.
Child welfare experts and officials in Texas attribute the significant downsizing to a series of policy changes and state legislation — particularly a 2021 law that narrowed the legal definition of child “neglect,” and barred child removals based solely on a parent’s positive cannabis test. State officials also say a growing number of families are being provided “alternative response” pathways that do not involve removing kids from their homes.
“Children who had other options to stay safely at home or with relatives were occupying space in our system that other children desperately needed,” said Brandon Logan, executive director of the west Texas nonprofit One Accord for Kids.
He added that the law passed three years ago, combined with other policy changes, has prompted child welfare agencies to narrow their focus on those who really need it — benefitting kids, families and the state agency responsible for child protection.
“There have been more net positives than any negatives that show up,” Logan said. “We’ve not seen any fatality numbers or any demonstrable way that this has led to more risk.”
All told, the collection of reforms in an otherwise politically conservative state amount to a noteworthy progressive change to a system particularly punishing for the poor and people of color, who are disproportionately impacted.
In interviews with The Imprint, a range of Texas child welfare professionals from divergent viewpoints — including state officials, jurists, right-leaning policy analysts and activists seeking to abolish the foster care system — agreed one recent law change stands out in its impact: House Bill 567. The 2021 law tightened the state’s legal definition of neglect, a catch-all allegation that can rope in families who simply lack resources, such as stable housing, adequate child care, groceries or money to keep the lights on.
Under current law, neglect is an act or lack of action that puts a child in “immediate danger” of harm. That is a revision of the prior standard of “substantial risk.” The law also states that children can only be removed from parents who display “blatant disregard” for their actions, or whose inaction “results in harm to the child or creates an immediate danger to the child’s physical health or safety.”
“There are probably multiple factors, and it’s hard to pin down. But clearly the legislation is having an impact, as it was intended to do,” said Andrew Brown, vice president at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin. “The goal with the legislation was to try to right-size the system, so that the agency was focused on the children who have been harmed. Changing the neglect definition is playing a role in that drop.”
Other recent policy changes in Texas also aim to preserve family life and keep kids out of the state’s foster care system, which has spent the last 13 years under federal court oversight for its severe failure to provide children with safe homes and adequate care.
A state law passed last year strengthens due process rights for parents under investigation for maltreatment and bars anonymous reports to Child Protective Services — calls that are less likely to be substantiated, and can be phoned in by vindictive spouses and disgruntled landlords. The state also now requires a regional director to approve the removal of older children from their families, an indication of too many teens entering a system that cannot properly care for them.
Hearings in the federal court overseeing the state child welfare agency have revealed that hundreds of older children were being housed in unlicensed settings such as offices and hotel rooms, where poor supervision by overworked caseworkers leaves them unprotected from serious harm, including vulnerability to sex traffickers.
“There are children dying and being injured on your watch,” the federal judge overseeing the case has warned officials with the state Department of Family and Protective Services.
“CPS was removing so many children. There was no space for those kids, no beds available in facilities, no relatives available — there were all these removals happening but no place for them,” said Josie Pickens, program director at the Houston-based upEND Movement. The organization seeks to “reimagine” the child welfare system’s model of surveillance and separation, in favor of systems of support for struggling children and families.
Pickens is among the wide array of supporters of the 2021 law, who points to its significance in reducing the reliance on foster care in Texas.
“Redefining the way we define ‘neglect’ is a step in the right direction,” she said. “All of these things together are aiding in the decline of children being removed.”
Inside courtrooms, the devastation of COVID-19 provided a striking backdrop to the culture shift that Judge Aurora Martinez Jones said she too has seen. Martinez Jones presides over civil, family and juvenile court matters in Travis County district court.
“We were in a situation where a removal meant a family may not see each other forever if someone gets sick and dies. I can say as a judge — and I hear from other judges and prosecutors — we looked at it differently from a perspective of values,” she said. “Families had no physical contact with each other for even a year, that’s damaging. So it raised the standard for what’s been required for a removal.”
In the wake of the early effects of the pandemic, the legislative and policy shifts further underscored the need for family preservation whenever possible, she added. “All of that coupled together is what I think has created a dramatic decrease in removals.”
While the overall foster care numbers have dropped precipitously, they have become increasingly more disproportionate by race. In many parts of Texas, Black children are more than twice as likely to be removed from their families as white children. State data show they are also more likely to be investigated and to be reported to CPS.
According to the state’s “Disproportionality and Disparity Analysis” report, the gap between CPS removal of Black children and white children has widened in the last few years. In the 2021 fiscal year, Black children were 1.7 times more likely than white children to be reported, 1.9 times more likely to be investigated by child welfare investigators, and 1.5 times more likely to be removed.
“Unfortunately, when we start weeding out cases that shouldn’t have been involved in the system, the policing of families is still only happening in certain communities.”
— Judge Aurora Martinez Jones
In 2023, Black children were 1.9 times more likely to be reported, 2.1 times more likely to be investigated and 1.8 times more likely to be removed than white children.
Across some of Texas’ largest counties, the disparities were even more pronounced.
In Travis County, for instance, Black children “were 4.3 times more likely to be reported, 5.7 times more likely to be investigated, and 11.3 times more likely to be removed than white children.”
And while the report noted that Hispanic children had similar or “slightly better” outcomes compared to white children statewide, they were still over-represented in investigations and removals compared to white children in most of the large counties, including Bexar County.
“Unfortunately, when we start weeding out cases that shouldn’t have been involved in the system, the policing of families is still only happening in certain communities,” Judge Martinez Jones said. “We’re still focusing on these areas where families of color reside or marginalized people reside or there are language barriers.”
The 2021 law that narrowed the definition of child neglect took aim at the conflation of poverty and maltreatment, a concern nationwide among those working to reform child welfare systems and address systemic racism.
But although the Texas bill passed, it did so amid warnings of dire potential outcomes.
“The heightened standard for removal, which has resulted in dramatically lower removal numbers, has not been matched by an increase in family interventions designed to support struggling families and mitigate risks to child safety,” said Kathleen LaValle, president and CEO of Dallas CASA. LaValle’s court-appointed special advocates are volunteers who are paired with kids in foster care to assist them during their time in the system, and represent their interests in court.
“What we’re most concerned with is a situation where one or more suspected child abuse or neglect investigations have closed and the next interaction by the state is an inquiry into a severe injury to a child or a child death,” she said.
So far, those projections have not panned out.
According to data from the state’s “Child Maltreatment Fatalities and Near Fatalities Annual Report” published last month, the decreased reliance on foster care has not resulted in an increase in child deaths.
Fatalities where child abuse or neglect was confirmed have continued to decline through the recent period of fewer foster care removals. In 2023, 164 children died, which is 18% fewer than in 2021 and 30% fewer than in 2019. That places Texas from a spot well above the national average on child fatality rates, to below the nationwide rate.
Nonetheless, amid all the policy shifts, some concerns remain about children’s safety.
“I’m glad not as many kids are going into foster care — I’m also a little nervous,” said Monica Faulkner, a University of Texas at Austin researcher and the founding director of the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing. “Are those families getting the resources they need? We didn’t necessarily redirect funding that way.”
