The repeated claims that Texas takes proportionately few children are false.
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| Texas Gov. Greg Abbott |
The claim has been made over and over by Texans who want the
state to take away more children: Texas, it is claimed, takes away children at
a much lower rate than other states.
That claim always hid
more than it revealed. But now it turns
out that the claim is flat-out false in every respect. Because now we know that when Texas tells the
federal government, and the public, how many children it placed in foster care
in a given year, Texas simply leaves out nearly two-thirds of the placements.
Texas does this by slapping a different label onto these
placements. They’re called “parental
child safety placements.” They are a
form of kinship care – that is, placement with extended family or friends of
the family instead of with total strangers.
Kinship care almost always is a better, safer option than stranger care. But it is still foster
care.
Here’s how it works. The state Department of Family and
Protective Services decides to remove a child from the home. In order to make the process easier – for the
agency, not the family – they essentially blackmail the parent: Give us the
child and let us place him “informally” with a relative, without involving the
court, or we’ll go to court and your child might wind up with a stranger – or
worse, in one of our wonderful
Texas institutions.
And make no mistake – once the child is gone, the child
welfare agency and maybe, at some point, a court, but not the parent decides
when or if that child will ever come back. It is a foster-care placement in
everything but name.
The federal government understands that these placements
are, in fact, foster care and should be counted as such. As we noted in a previous
post to this blog:
Federal regulations define
foster care as :
24 hour substitute care for all children placed away from their parents or guardians and for whom the State agency has placement and care responsibility.
The regulations go on to say that
the State is required to count a placement that lasts more than 24 hours while the child is in foster care under the placement, care or supervision responsibility of the State agency”
Note
that it does not say “custody” of the agency, only “placement, care or
supervision responsibility.”
What we did not know when we put up that previous post, and
the real shocker in all this, is how widespread the practice is.
Officially, Texas took away children 17,357 times in 2014 –
at least that’s what Texas reported to the federal government. But according to a December,2015 report from a “roundtable” of
“stakeholders” convened by the Texas Supreme court Children’s Commission there
also were 34,000 so-called parental child safety placements.
According to the report, about 4,000 of those PCSPs later
became officially-counted foster care placements, so counting those 4,000 would
be double counting. But that still leaves 30,000 foster care placements in 2014
that Texas simply chose to call something else.
Or to put it another way, Texas has been hiding more than 63
percent of its foster care placements from the federal government – and from
anyone else trying to compare the rate at which states take away children.
Put back those
off-the-books placements and Texas is apparently taking away children at a rate
more than 60 percent above the national average – even when rates of child
poverty are factored in.
Of course, that assumes Texas is the only state that cheats
this way. That’s almost certainly not
the case. We’ve known for nearly a
decade that Kansas has
its own way of cheating. And kinship
care is particularly
vulnerable to this kind of cheating. But I doubt that there are many states
that cheat to the extent of hiding nearly two-thirds of their entries into
foster care. Maybe everything really is bigger than Texas.
The reason all this is coming out in the open is that PCSPs
now are under attack by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who wants to crack down on
these kinship care placements, not because they’re off-the-books, but because
two of them were the scenes of headline-grabbing horror stories. (And, of course, nothing ever goes wrong in other
Texas placements.)
So now, caseworkers are afraid to use PCSPs, and traditional
foster-care placements are skyrocketing.
Soon, we may finally see an official figure on entries into foster care
that is closer to reality – but thousands of children will pay the price, by
losing out on the chance to stay with relatives.
There are other revelations in the “roundtable” report:
The report notes that “PCSPs are not really voluntary when
the alternative is removal of the child.” The roundtable participants also noted
that, since the state doesn’t have to go to court first, “the parent does not
have a lawyer or understand the child welfare or legal system.”
There’s also a truly Orwellian twist:
In theory, federal law requires states to make “reasonable
efforts” to keep families together before resorting to foster care. In fact,
this has never been
enforced and the law is full of loopholes. But Texas actually claims that,
if they put a child in foster care and call it a “parental child safety placement”
they’ve met the “reasonable efforts” requirement – because, supposedly, that’s
not foster care.
One other point about the Roundtable and its December, 2015
report: Scott McCown, the state’s leading champion of a take-the-child-and-run
approach to child welfare, served on the roundtable. So I don’t understand why, one month after the report came out, McCown, still
was repeating
his claim about Texas having an unusually low rate of removal.
