Statesman.com
Senator questions
privatization of child protective services
Year-old state overhaul of
system plagued with problems.
By
Corrie MacLaggan
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
A year into a massive overhaul
of Texas' Child Protective Services, the death of a North Texas
boy in foster care has a key state lawmaker and some children's
advocates questioning a state plan to privatize the foster care
system.
Sixteen-month-old Christian
Nieto died of a head injury over Labor Day weekend while in
foster care in Corsicana. His foster mother has been charged
with capital murder, and the state is revoking the license of
the private agency that arranged his foster care, Harker
Heights-based Mesa Family Services.
At a meeting Tuesday of the
Senate Health and Human Services Committee, Chairwoman Jane
Nelson, R-Lewisville, said that when she bought into the idea of
privatizing the foster care system, she believed that there
would be protections to prevent this sort of tragedy.
"We're not privatizing the
printing of telephone books here," she said. "We're talking
about children, and we can't make mistakes."
Mesa Family Services, which
also had a child die in foster care a year before Nieto's death,
has about 350 children placed in foster homes in Texas,
including 58 in Bell County, eight in Williamson County and two
in Hays County.
With the license revoked, most
of the children will stay in their foster homes, although the
foster parents will report to a different placement agency and
will undergo additional training, said Patrick Crimmins, a
spokesman for the agency that oversees the CPS.
The privatization plan, which
followed several high-profile child deaths, calls for the
outsourcing of the foster care system to private agencies by
2011. Nearly 80 percent of the state's 20,000 children in foster
care are already in homes overseen by private groups. The plan
will also outsource case management, which involves monitoring a
child's progress. That is now done by state workers.
State officials last month
postponed awarding a contract for the first piece of the
privatization effort, which would have outsourced services in
the San Antonio area. They won't say exactly why it was delayed.
But the slowdown — and Nelson's worries — seem to make the
future of the privatization effort uncertain.
Although several agencies that
place children in foster care urged the state Tuesday to move
forward with the privatization, Barbara J. Elias-Perciful of
Texas Loves Children, a nonprofit group dedicated to preventing
child abuse, said that without firsthand knowledge of a child's
circumstances, there is no way for the state to hold private
providers accountable.
Outsourcing case management "is
a recipe for disaster and will lead to more child deaths," said
Elias-Perciful, an attorney specializing in child abuse law.
But Jack Downey, president of
the Children's Shelter in San Antonio, said children in Florida
were safer after that state's privatization. Further delay in
Texas would "truly, truly hamper everyone's efforts to make
privatization successful," he said.
Outsourcing the foster care
system comes in the midst of a major privatization of another
health and human services task: enrollment of Texans in public
assistance such as food stamps and subsidized health care.
The state hired a group of
companies led by Accenture LLP to run call centers to sign
Texans up for benefits. After the project hit training and
technical problems, officials indefinitely postponed statewide
rollout of the system.
"Contract management may be the
one thing our state does worse than managing foster care," Lee
Spiller, executive director of the Citizens Commission on Human
Rights of Texas, told Nelson, the only senator to attend the
committee meeting. Nelson authored 2005 legislation that reforms
Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services.
Carey Cockerell, commissioner
of the Department of Family and Protective Services, told Nelson
that CPS has begun random inspections of foster homes, increased
the number of children placed with relatives and decreased the
average daily caseloads for investigative caseworkers.
But although the state has
hired more than 2,200 CPS workers since September 2005, high
turnover continues to plague the agency. About 30 percent of
Child Protective Services workers left in the 2006 budget year,
Cockerell said.
One of the highest rates of
turnover is among special investigators, a new group of
caseworkers with law enforcement backgrounds who work on complex
cases.
Cockerell stressed that the
benefits of hiring caseworkers and putting them through training
will take time.
"We're just at the beginning of
that process," he said.
cmaclaggan@statesman.com;
445-3548
