It's all too common to hear the gridlock and bottleneck that has hobbled the Texas' Child Protective Services. The victim of each of these incidents is a Texas child whose life gets upside down due to reasons beyond the child's control. Numerous reports in recent months have been published by various Texas newspapers, including The Dallas Morning News, shining light on the plight and pain of many of our state's young citizens.
According to The Dallas Morning News account, many of the vulnerable kids removed from their families had to spend night at the CPS offices. In Harris county alone, half of the children at risk were not visited by a CPS case worker on time, and worse, one out of five had never been seen at all. Prompted by the news published by The Dallas Morning News and other media outlet covering the horrific conditions of tens of thousands of vulnerable children, Texas' three top government officials--Governor Gregg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker Joe Strauss--prodded the head of the Family Protective Services, parent organization of the CPS, to work on a solution to address the problem.
Last month (October 2016), FPS head Henry "Hank" Whitman asked state leaders for an additional $144.5 million in the remainder of the current fiscal year to hire 829 additional case workers and give a pay raise of about 1,000-per-month to each of 7,087 frontline CPS employees. By and large, there is appreciable degree of support among lawmakers for the additional funding requested by Whitman. However, what Whitman has proposed will provide a Band-Aid to a festering wound, but not necessarily cure it. The additional funding of $144.5 million, if approved, will not by itself address the causal factors at their root. Instead, it's a wait-watch-react strategy that's expensive, and provides an ad hoc solution at best.
In this context, the Texas House County Affairs Committee's November 16, 2016, hearing and the panel's Democratic Chairman Garnet Coleman's focus on the causal factors such as parental addiction and substance abuse problems deserve praise. The hearing has tried to put a spotlight on a problem which most Texans don't think when they talk about fixing the CPS. Every year, tens of thousands of Texas children become endangered, or at the brink of being endangered, because of parental addiction, or substance abuse, problems. In 2015 fiscal year (September 1, 2014 to August 31, 2015) alone, according to The Dallas Morning News, approximately 8.1 percent, or 1,626,126, adult Texans had substance use disorder. About a quarter of them, or 689,803, were poor enough to qualify for free, or low-cost, treatment. Unfortunately, only 39,387, a staggering low number, of those qualified had sought help. It would be much more cost-effective and humane if the parents who qualify for such remedial measure can be reached at the first place to provide treatment instead of removing the children from the family after parental substance use disorder gets much worse down the road.
What Rep. Coleman and his panel pointed out is an upstream malaise that afflicts low-income families at a disproportionately higher rate and in turn creates a severe mess down the road, putting children's life at stake in many situations. As a result, an understaffed CPS is always on a scramble mode and the caseworkers are often forced to work on a heavy caseload, leading to missing on-time, face-to-face interviews and costlier intervention on many occasions. Our government officials will serve our great state well if they focus on formulating a strategy that aims at identifying families qualified for indigent care and maximizing the effort to provide it (indigent care) to help parents overcome the substance use disorder. This approach is not only humane as it will minimize the odds of removing the children from their homes, but also smart because it will cost taxpayers less.
According to The Dallas Morning News account, many of the vulnerable kids removed from their families had to spend night at the CPS offices. In Harris county alone, half of the children at risk were not visited by a CPS case worker on time, and worse, one out of five had never been seen at all. Prompted by the news published by The Dallas Morning News and other media outlet covering the horrific conditions of tens of thousands of vulnerable children, Texas' three top government officials--Governor Gregg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker Joe Strauss--prodded the head of the Family Protective Services, parent organization of the CPS, to work on a solution to address the problem.
Last month (October 2016), FPS head Henry "Hank" Whitman asked state leaders for an additional $144.5 million in the remainder of the current fiscal year to hire 829 additional case workers and give a pay raise of about 1,000-per-month to each of 7,087 frontline CPS employees. By and large, there is appreciable degree of support among lawmakers for the additional funding requested by Whitman. However, what Whitman has proposed will provide a Band-Aid to a festering wound, but not necessarily cure it. The additional funding of $144.5 million, if approved, will not by itself address the causal factors at their root. Instead, it's a wait-watch-react strategy that's expensive, and provides an ad hoc solution at best.
In this context, the Texas House County Affairs Committee's November 16, 2016, hearing and the panel's Democratic Chairman Garnet Coleman's focus on the causal factors such as parental addiction and substance abuse problems deserve praise. The hearing has tried to put a spotlight on a problem which most Texans don't think when they talk about fixing the CPS. Every year, tens of thousands of Texas children become endangered, or at the brink of being endangered, because of parental addiction, or substance abuse, problems. In 2015 fiscal year (September 1, 2014 to August 31, 2015) alone, according to The Dallas Morning News, approximately 8.1 percent, or 1,626,126, adult Texans had substance use disorder. About a quarter of them, or 689,803, were poor enough to qualify for free, or low-cost, treatment. Unfortunately, only 39,387, a staggering low number, of those qualified had sought help. It would be much more cost-effective and humane if the parents who qualify for such remedial measure can be reached at the first place to provide treatment instead of removing the children from the family after parental substance use disorder gets much worse down the road.
What Rep. Coleman and his panel pointed out is an upstream malaise that afflicts low-income families at a disproportionately higher rate and in turn creates a severe mess down the road, putting children's life at stake in many situations. As a result, an understaffed CPS is always on a scramble mode and the caseworkers are often forced to work on a heavy caseload, leading to missing on-time, face-to-face interviews and costlier intervention on many occasions. Our government officials will serve our great state well if they focus on formulating a strategy that aims at identifying families qualified for indigent care and maximizing the effort to provide it (indigent care) to help parents overcome the substance use disorder. This approach is not only humane as it will minimize the odds of removing the children from their homes, but also smart because it will cost taxpayers less.
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