CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (CN) — “Have you ever seen the inside of a jail cell?” a federal judge asked two top Texas officials on Monday, angered they had not produced documents concerning the state’s troubled foster care system.
Leading an effort to improve Texas’ care of youth in its long-term care, Senior U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack ordered the chiefs of two child welfare agencies to bring an array of documents to a hearing Monday.
But Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Stephanie Muth and Health and Human Services Commissioner Cecile Erwin Young showed up empty-handed for the 9 a.m. proceeding.
“You were ordered to bring them to court today,” Jack said. “Where are they? I need them now, otherwise somebody is going to be held in contempt, right now. This is not amusing.”
“Commissioner Muth, Commissioner Young, have you ever seen the inside of a jail cell?” she added.
They answered with silence.
But at the end of Monday’s five-hour hearing, the state’s outside counsel, Prerak Shah of the Houston office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, reached a deal with Jack.
He agreed to get the documents to her by 5 p.m. Wednesday. If not, she said, the state will face contempt fines.
Jack asked for paperwork pertaining to plans Texas has to implement recommendations issued in 2021 by three experts with experience improving child welfare practices in numerous U.S. states.
The trio were retained to make suggestions for how Texas can stop its practice of placing children in dangerous unlicensed housing.
The number of youths Texas puts in these settings — which range from rundown motels to budget hotels, to rented homes, churches and Family and Protective Services office buildings — had dropped to 79 last month, a small percentage of the roughly 8,000 kids who are wards of the state after being removed from their families due to abuse, neglect or inability to care for their extreme disabilities.
But the so-called "children-without-placement" settings are driving caseworker staffing attrition — Muth testified Monday that Family and Protective Services has a caseworker turnover rate of 25% per year — as those leaving the jobs are complaining in exit interviews about mandatory overtime shifts supervising kids in unlicensed facilities.
Paul Yetter, lead counsel for a class of Texas foster children, read excerpts from some of the surveys Monday.
Departing caseworkers complained that they had been assaulted or threatened by foster kids in such settings, and that young teenage girls were turning up on sex trafficking websites after running away and being taken in by pimps.
“It’s a disgrace … Everyone is leaving, especially tenured workers like me,” Yetter said, quoting a former caseworker’s statement in an exit questionnaire.
Shah, the state’s retained counsel, said Texas is considering repurposing vacant buildings on the campus of Rusk State Hospital, an in-patient psychiatric facility, to house foster youth for whom it cannot find licensed placements.
The environment would not be unfamiliar to many of the children. A large percentage of them have a history of psychiatric or mental health hospitalization, according to reports from two child welfare experts that Jack dubbed “monitors” and appointed to ensure the state’s compliance with her reform orders.
Jack has proven to be a fierce advocate for Texas foster children. In hearings for the case, she often chastises top officials for what she perceives as ineptitude.
The Bill Clinton appointee stayed true to form Monday.
“I don’t think in my almost 30 years on the bench I’ve ever dealt with an agency that’s more dysfunctional,” Jack told Muth.
Muth explained to her on the witness stand how the state is working to provide safe housing for all foster children.
She said her agency convinced the state Legislature last year to allocate funding to double the pay rate for kinship foster parents — those who are related to the children they agree to take in — to $25 per day starting in 2025.
Muth also noted Health and Human Services is setting up 17 mobile crisis teams to provide support for kinship families, and Family and Protective Services had decided to dedicate 30 caseworkers to only caring for children in unlicensed placements.
But these are rare positive developments in a slow reform effort, and Jack has signaled sanctions are in the works.
She has already held Texas in contempt twice and fined it $150,000 for not complying with remedial orders she finalized in 2018, three years after she decided it was violating foster kids’ 14th Amendment due process rights to adequate care and a safe placement while in state custody.
She entered Monday’s hearing with a third contempt motion pending against Texas but gave no timeline for a decision.
Yetter, the plaintiffs’ counsel of the Houston firm Yetter Coleman, citing an investigation from the case monitors, presented evidence in a contempt hearing in early December that Texas was flouting Jack’s orders by not timely investigating reports of abuse and neglect of foster kids at group homes and overmedicating them with psychotropic drugs.
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