Plaintiffs: 9 foster children, aged 9 through 16 years old

About the Texas Foster Care System

• Texas law gives caseworkers up to 18 months to either bring children back to their biological families or find adoptive families for them. After that point, the children enter the permanent managing conservatorship. These children then often face a childhood filled with neglect, abuse, and little hope for their futures.
• In December 2015, a U.S. District Court found the Texas foster care system unconstitutional because children were not free of an unreasonable risk of harm.
• The District Court found that children “almost uniformly leave state custody more damaged than when they entered.”
• Judge Janis Jack said the Texas system is one “where rape, abuse, psychotropic medication, and instability are the norm.”
• Currently, workers at the Department of Family and Child Protective Services (DFCS) have caseloads that far exceed reasonable professional standards, making it impossible to provide the requisite attention to the cases. DFCS is so overwhelmed that on average, four caseworkers quit their jobs daily.

Allegations

For over 20 years, Texas’ child welfare system has failed its children. The state has consistently failed to provide for the safety and well-being of children who are long-term wards of the state. There are ongoing problems with: high caseloads for workers, resulting in lack of supervision over children’s placements; an inadequate array of placements and services throughout the state, with many children being placed great distances from their families and communities; lack of necessary oversight of private agencies providing foster care services; a high error rate in the resolution of reports of maltreatment in care; the use of group homes where foster children live side by side with biological children, all of whom have varying needs, ages, and genders mixed together without adequate supervision; and the state’s failure to track child-on-child maltreatment.

Advocacy Goals

The executive director of ABC is one of four lead co-counsel in the case, instituted in 2011, representing nine Named Plaintiffs. Our goals are to reshape the Texas child welfare system and to ensure that any reconstituted system corrects the judicially recognized constitutional deficiencies.

Update

In December, 2016, the court-appointed Special Masters recommended an overhaul to the Texas child welfare system, including measures that would, among other things:

• significantly reduce social service workers’ caseloads;
• halt the use of foster group homes;
• reduce the risk of child-on-child abuse;
• increase the array of available foster home placements;
• improve medical care available to foster children;
• improve accessibility and monitoring so that maltreatment in care reports are handled more appropriately.

Despite many attempts by the Special Masters to work cooperatively with the state over the following year, the state would not even consider the many recommendations that the Special Masters made to develop some of the plans to implement the judge’s ruling. During the 2017 legislative session, the state legislature appropriated additional funding for the child welfare agency, but rejected the judge’s ruling in most respects. In December, 2017, the district court judge entered her final order, adopting with some modifications the final recommendations the Special Masters made, ruling that the state was unwilling to make the necessary changes.

While the state administrators of the system seem to agree in their public statements that the current system continues to injure children, the state nevertheless sought an immediate stay from the Fifth Circuit, challenging all aspects of the district court’s order. After an administrative stay and failed mediation between the parties, the circuit court’s merits panel issued a full stay without ruling on the likelihood of success on the merits. The case was argued before the Fifth Circuit at the end of April, 2018.

The state has asserted that it will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if it should lose at the Fifth Circuit. In the meantime, Texas’ foster care children continue to suffer.