AUSTIN – A key lawmaker says she was horrified to read of the death of a 16-month-old boy in a Corsicana foster home and now is thinking twice about the state's mandate for full privatization of foster care, adoption and management of abused children's cases within five years.

Senate Health and Human Services Committee Chairwoman Jane Nelson, R-Lewisville, said she now favors a more cautious approach after reading a Dallas Morning News account of Christian Nieto's death. She said she might recommend that the state throttle back its plan and go with a pilot project instead.

"We continue to hear about child abuse and just horrible deaths in foster care," Ms. Nelson, R-Lewisville, said at a hearing to discuss progress under a protective services overhaul bill passed last year.

Referring to The News' account of how young Christian and his older brother disappeared in the state's foster system, with Christian ending up dead, Ms. Nelson said:

"Quite frankly, when I read that, it just, it kills me. I see so many times that we should have done something. That child's death is at the bottom of a spiral. And up here, parents who were abusing drugs. I would like for us to head off the problem way up here instead of waiting until we've just missed opportunities to protect that child all the way down to, you know, the last opportunity – and the child's not with us."

Ms. Nelson asked Carey Cockerell, commissioner of the state Department of Family and Protective Services, "What went wrong in the instance ... and what else do we need to do to prevent this?"

Mr. Cockerell said Christian's death was sobering, and the state still is reviewing what went wrong.

"Any time there is an instance of abuse, it touches the very core of who we are and what we are about," said Mr. Cockerell, a former Fort Worth juvenile justice official who was tapped by Gov. Rick Perry's administration two years ago to clean up the troubled Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services agencies.

"It calls on us to examine what we've done, everything that we're doing and everything that we can do as we move forward," he said. "And we are certainly in the process of doing that, as we have done in every case of abuse and neglect tragedies such as this one."

Ms. Nelson did not go into specifics on how she would change the law ordering privatization. Lawmakers, who meet starting in January, would have to approve any change.

Mr. Cockerell said his agency is still reviewing its regulation of Mesa Family Services, the child-placement agency that shipped Christian and his brother, Logan, from Dallas to the Corsicana home of Beverly Latimer on Aug. 30.

Christian, 16 months old, died of severe head injuries five days later.

Ms. Latimer, 53, has been charged with capital murder, although there are indications the child might have been injured before he arrived at the woman's home.

Ms. Latimer, beset by health and financial problems, already was caring for three foster girls under age 5 when she says Mesa officials pressed her also to take in the Nieto brothers. They had been removed from drug-abusing parents in Denton in January.

The state has acknowledged it relies heavily on private child-placing agencies to report their actions and rule violations to the state.

Officials also say Mesa Family Services informed them of only two of the five foster homes where the company placed the Nieto boys from Jan. 27 to Labor Day.

Christian was at least the second child to die from neglect while in a Mesa-run foster home. Sierra Odom, 3, died while living in an Arlington foster home in August 2005.

In reviewing his department's enforcement actions against Mesa, Mr. Cockerell told the Senate panel Tuesday that the department halted placements of more children with Mesa Family Services after Sierra's death.

"In some instances about a year ago, we suspended placements," Mr. Cockerell told Ms. Nelson. "We put them on corrective actions. We moved the monitoring plan down to the most rigorous monitoring plan that we had. We continued to do a fairly robust system of monitoring them and identifying deficiencies and asking them to correct those and move forward."

Questioned later by a reporter, Mr. Cockerell said he had misspoken.

"We did not suspend [placements] after the first death," he said.

The licensing division's report on its investigation of Sierra's death found foster father Timothy R. Warner responsible. Mr. Warner still is awaiting trial in the case.

"Our investigation did not find deficiencies for which Mesa Family Services was specifically responsible," program specialist Arthur Bussey wrote to Mesa on Oct. 21, 2005.

Mr. Bussey said this even while attaching a list of deficiencies that mentioned a nighttime child-care service being run by Mr. Warner and his wife, which could have conflicted with being a dutiful foster parent. Another violation said Mr. Warner was unfit.

Ms. Nelson said she was relieved to hear that Mesa has relinquished its $7 million state contract for placing abused children in foster homes, and the state has moved to revoke the company's license. Mr. Cockerell said the revocation would last five years.

He said Mesa's 350 foster children and 160 foster homes have been transferred to other placing agencies' supervision.

Patrick Crimmins, the department spokesman, said 140 of the former Mesa homes have been assigned to Therapeutic Family Life, an Austin-based nonprofit with Dallas operations.

Mr. Cockerell said newly revised standards for child-placing agencies take effect Jan. 1. They will require the firms to hire more staff to oversee foster parents and, in some circumstances, reduce the number of children a foster parent may care for. He also said his licensing division will place "weights" on violations so that serious ones lead to more intensive scrutiny, while mere paperwork lapses do not.

Representatives of placement agencies said the state should move forward with its privatization plan. The plan calls for measuring performance, and whether children spend less time in fewer foster homes. If so, the agencies would be rewarded financially. If not, they'd be punished.

But Ms. Nelson said a pilot project, to test proponents' contentions, might be in order.

"We need to make sure that we move very slowly until we're sure that the protections are in place," Ms. Nelson said. "I don't object to privatizing ... It's just we're talking about kids. You can't afford to lose a kid."

E-mail rtgarrett@dallasnews.com

The mandated timetable:

Sept. 30, 2006: The state was supposed to tentatively award a contract to an independent administrator to oversee child-placement agencies and service providers in Region 8, which includes Bexar and 27 other counties. Two bids came in. However, the state has put the process on hold while it assesses critics' concern about the delivery of services, Family and Protective Services Commissioner Carey Cockerell said.

Dec. 31, 2007: All foster-care contractors, child therapists and other service providers in Region 8 start working for the independent administrator.

Dec. 31, 2008: An independent firm hired by the state issues a report evaluating progress in Region 8. The state tells lawmakers if the outsourcing plan needs changes.

Dec. 1, 2009: Two more of the state's 11 protective services regions ­ still to be determined ­ go fully privatized, each with an independent administrator.

Sept. 1, 2010: Another outside evaluation is due, this time of the second and third regions to be privatized. State again advises the Legislature if tweaks are needed.

Sept. 1, 2011: The other eight regions make the switch.

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research

State officials say there's a chronic shortage of loving foster homes for abused and neglected children. According to the Department of Family and Protective Services, there are several ways Texans can help:

Become a foster or adoptive family. To learn more, call the Texas Foster Care and Adoption Inquiry line at 1-800-233-3405 or visit www.adoptchildren.org

Donate coats or toys to the Rainbow Room. It helps CPS caseworkers assist Dallas County families in need: Call 214-583-4010 or visit www.communitypartnersdallas.org/rainbow.cfm

Urge your church, synagogue or mosque to recruit at least two foster families, with the rest of the congregation providing support services to those families: Call Congregations Helping in Love and Dedication (CHILD) at 817-792-4421 or visit www.adoptchildren.org and click on "Adoption Partners."

Volunteer to become the champion of an abused or neglected child while the case goes through the court system. Call Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) at 214-827-8961 or visit www.dallascasa.org

SOURCE: Department of Family and Protective Services