I have had several people asking me about my testimony last week at the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. I ended up discarding my planned testimony to address the misinformation that had already been spoken in the hearing. I simply spoke to the Committee about my experience and the reality of the system for children. However, the Committee did receive this written testimony.
The hearing was actually over Senate Bill 11 which has Foster Care Redesign moving forward across the state, but even more alarming is that it wants to privatize even more rolls of CPS! If you know someone who works for CPS, you need to make sure they are aware of this Bill. It would do away with their job with DFPS. This Bill is very alarming! I will be posting bullet points tomorrow that I would ask everyone to call their Senator and Representative to voice the concerns and challenge the misinformation being given.
This is what I presented to the Committee:
To: House Health and Human
Services Committee Members
Background/Perspective:
I am a former foster parent, mother to 9 children (6 of whom
are adopted), and executive director of an adopt only child placing agency. I
have managed a contract with DFPS for adoption services for the past three and
a half years. I attempted to secure a contract with Providence, and currently
have a contract with OCOK. I have been a part of the adoption community for the
past 15 years. I have a passion to empty the Texas foster system of children
who are legally free for adoption, but remain in foster homes because of a lack
of adoptive homes. I have a passion for recruiting, training, and supporting
adoptive homes to ensure successful, life-long outcomes for our children who
cannot return to their biological families.
Problems
with Senate Bill 11
First, let me thank the committee for seeing the current
state of our child welfare system and desiring a change. I commend you for
that. However, upon reading the majority of Senate Bill 11, I am left with a
sense of dread as it is clear that the issues with our system have been
misdiagnosed. The issues that plague our current system and result in poor
outcomes for children cannot be fixed with the continued roll out of Foster
Care Redesign or the privatization of more case management services.
My concerns over privatization of any aspect of case
management for our children as well as the continued roll out of redesign
across the state come not from theory or unsubstantiated fear. My concerns come
from my actual experience with redesign and the current philosophy that the
competition of the free market will ensure better outcomes for children.
My first experience with redesign was in 2014 when
Providence, the SSCC in the catchment area for regions 2 and 9 refused to
discuss a contract with me as an adoption only provider. During my first phone
call to Providence I was told “We would never stand in the way of children
finding a home.” That changed over the course of my 6 week battle for a sibling
group of 4 to be placed in one of my licensed adoptive homes. I had a contract
with DFPS. I met all of their requirements. My licensed home was located in the
same catchment area, but because the SSCC would lose money by placing the children
in my licensed home the placement was denied. That is a decision that was
driven completely by profit margin. The outcome for those four children was a
sentence to languish in foster care for three more years. One child remains in
CPS custody still today. The siblings who would have remained a unit, are no
longer able to live in the same home. Did redesign fix the system for those
children?
Providence withdrew their contract in the midst of my
conversations with the HHSC as well as Kaysie Reinhardt the DFPS Foster Care
Redesign Director. As I continued to work in Region 9, my agencies home region,
to place waiting children in licensed adoptive homes through my DFPS contract,
I would have to wait 6 months for a case file for a little girl and her brother
so that one of my families could move forward with adopting them. When I
inquired time and again why we were having to wait, it was stated that the
overwhelming task of transferring cases back to CPS from Providence had left
the department paralyzed. What we would learn later is that every Sunday of
that 6 months, that little girl went up to the alter at her church and prayed for
an adoptive family. She had an amazing foster family who did a wonderful job of
beginning her healing process and preparing her for a forever family. However,
week after week, the little girl expressed her feelings of rejection that no
one wanted her as their forever daughter. The heart ache of trauma of this
little girl was extended by 6 months because of the failed privatized system of
foster care redesign. I am happy to report that once redesign was out of the
way, the little girl’s prayers were answered. She and her brother are thriving
in their adoptive home and have far exceeded anyone’s expectations of progress
in the time they have been in their adoptive home. Redesign did not fix the
system for these children. And the case turn over when Providence withdrew
leaves the question, what will we do with massive case turnovers when a SSCC
does not renew their contract if we continue the move to privatization. There
is not a good answer. It is an inevitable occurrence that will once again leave
Texas children vulnerable and unaccounted for.
We are simply exchanging the cancer that currently plagues our system
for another.
This was not an isolated occurrence with Providence. In the
January of 2016 I was contacted by CPS and asked if I had an adoptive home for
the twin sister of a 16 year old I had placed a few months prior. The sister
was now ready to be adopted, and her amazing CPS worker was attempting to find
a home geographically close to her twin sister to facilitate regular contact
between the twins. Again foster care redesign threatened to stop the placement
of a 16 year old girl simply because of financial reasons. I have black and
white emails where the SSCC worker was willing to let her remain in an RTC
instead of working to place her in an adoptive home that was ready to take
placement – and could have moved forward without any hesitancy in the legacy
system. Thankfully the potential adoptive parents along with the adoptive
parents of the twin sister already placed advocated for their daughters. With
the help of Representative Brooks Landgraff and Matt Krause, we were able to
secure a contract with OCOK in order to place this young lady in a home where
she is currently thriving – maintaining regular contact with her twin sister.
For this young lady, redesign was a huge step backwards. She has a bright
future despite redesign.
I hear many sing the praises of foster care redesign. There
are many goals of redesign that I support 100%. However, as a person working on
the ground, I do not see those goals being obtained for the children of Texas.
I hear reports that are given by the people with a vested interest – either an
interest in financial gain or an interest in saving face that redesign is worth
the tax payer dollars it has used. This leads me to one of the biggest concerns
of child advocates with privatization. How do we ensure quality outcomes when
profit margin is the driving force? I am perplexed when I speak to those at
DFPS as well as some who serve on the PPP for redesign. They all state there
are amazing outcomes from redesign. It leaves me wondering where is the
disconnect between the theory of what should be happening in this privatized
system and the reality of what is actually happening for our children in care.
For example, everyone I speak to about my concerns with adoptions under
redesign refers to the increased number of adoptions occurring in catchment
area 3b. Yet, I have a conversation with
the CASA office in Johnson County telling me that they have not had any of
their children placed in adoptive homes in months and are wondering why that
would be. I personally have experienced an increased delay in the process of
selecting children for adoptive homes under redesign. If I am working with a
CPS worker directly in the selection process, it takes a matter of weeks. Twice
I have had to enlist the assistance of Governor Abbott’s office to simply get a
phone call or email returned to by OCOK letting me know if children are still
available for adoption or if my family was selected. Yet the numbers say
adoptions are increasing. When I asked Ms. Reinhardt to see the numbers for
actual adoptive placements of children who are legally free for adoption and
placed into matched adoptive homes, I was told that data was unavailable. The
adoption numbers being reported include those where children were adopted by
their foster family as well as kinship placements. These are amazing and highly
desired outcomes for those children. However, the reporting of those numbers as
“adoptive homes” gives an inaccurate representation of the outcomes for our
harder to place children who are remaining in foster homes when they should be
in permanent, adoptive homes.
I would encourage those on the HHSC committee to talk to the
people on the ground. Ask foster families and CPS workers if they see an
improvement in our system under redesign. I have yet to speak to any CPS case
manager or foster family who feels redesign is a good model. At a town hall
meeting in catchment area 3b, foster family after foster family expressed
concerns over lack of support and poor outcomes for children. One foster family
stated that they had a bed available in their home that was 20 miles from a CPS
office where an infant was having to stay at the office due to no “available”
bed. This foster mother was a 3b home and was therefore not allowed to take
placement of this baby sleeping in a CPS office. So while redesign may show
that fewer children are sleeping in offices, what do the numbers of the regions
around redesign say? Is anyone looking at the entire picture to see what
creating a competitive market for children’s cases does overall to Texas
children? I have a string of emails I will be happy to share that show a region
3b family reaching out to a CPS worker in another region about adopting a Texas
child because she has had no movement on her case in months. The CPS worker has
a child she would like to consider placing in their home after visiting with
the family. However, the placement is not allowed to occur because the family
is told that her agency will not release her home study for a placement of any
child outside of 3b. This young man’s only other family being considered was in
New York. I believe this is an unintended outcome of implementation of
redesign. But is anyone looking at these unintended outcomes? Or are we just
looking at the numbers in the catchment area and ignoring the negative outcomes
for all other Texas children?
Based on my experience, I would have to say the latter. CPS
workers have been told they cannot speak out against redesign, or they will
lose their jobs. My initial contract with OCOK had a silencing clause in it.
Had I signed the contract as it was originally sent to me, I would not be able
to sit before you today exercising my right to speak up for children without
the threat of legal action against me. This begs the question, if redesign is
all the numbers say it is, why do we have to silence the people who know the
actual outcomes for children?
I understand the concept of free-market supply and demand. In
a consumer driven market, consumer choice drives the demand for quality. I am
told that is what will maintain the quality of care for children under
privatized systems like redesign. Yet, I know providers who are being paid less
under their contracts with OCOK than they were under contracts with DFPS. When
asked why that is, service providers are told that OCOK must recoup some of
it’s cost somewhere. How is paying a middle man, in this case an SSCC, making
the best use of the funds available to in fact provide quality service to our
children? That fact alone defies the entire philosophy of creating a privatized
system that will ensure quality care of our Texas children. We already have a vast shortage of agencies
willing to license families for adoption only due to the drastic profit loss
when an agency moves a child from a foster placement to an adoptive placement.
That shows that outcomes for children will in fact be affected by a system
based on monetary incentives. How will we ensure biological families are
protected, and every child who could be returned home will be when an
organization would profit from the child remaining in care? You cannot afford
to give large enough incentives to reunify a child compared to what an
organization would earn for keeping the child in care.
We need not look to Florida or any other state to see if
privatization of DFPS case management works. The private sector in Texas, of
which my organization is part, has proven is does not have the capacity to
manage the vast needs of our children in care. This is why Providence failed
and why we have seen no other redesign roll outs despite deadlines that have
come and gone for the next SSCC to take over.
Suggested
Solution:
I believe if someone brings a complaint to the table, they
should have a proposed solution as well. The sections of Senate Bill 11
suggesting we continue the roll out of foster care redesign as it is as well as
begin to create privatization of other case management currently under the
supervision of DFPS are simply exchanging one crisis for another.
I work with amazing people with DFPS who have a heart for
children. They have a desire to do their job well so children have positive
outcomes. However, they simply cannot do their jobs because of caseloads and
supervisor turnover. We need to funnel all of our available funds into
strengthening salary scales, and hiring more workers to make caseloads
manageable. We need to have accountability on the local level and empower our
regional offices to engage the community and take ownership of their outcomes for
children. Harris County is giving us an amazing example of how this can work. Let
us learn from their success and stop redesign roll out. We cannot simply
exchange one cancer for another. We need real, proven, successful outcomes for
our children. We must look at the facts of redesign as they apply to all Texas
children and understand it has not truly created the outcomes it was in theory
able to create. We cannot allow competition for outcomes and profits in one
area of Texas by an individual organization keep children from another area of
Texas from receiving quality care of permanence. We must not be divided in our
efforts to help children, but come together united for all Texas children.
The question I leave with you is: if you want to continue the
roll out of privatization of any case management of children where demand
drives quality, what is the price tag for ensuring our children have the safety
and future they deserve? I am quite certain it is a price you cannot afford.
***After hearing some amazing people who have a heart of the children of Texas speak against Senate Bill 11 and all it's challenges, it became clear that there should be a pilot program that would fully fund one region of CPS from investigations all the way through post adopt programs. Lets fund the current CPS program with the money they are using to fund redesign and see if by chance what we have now will actually work when it is fully funded! Our children do not have time for us to get this wrong....and Foster Care Redesign is too costly and has already failed in one of two attempts! Our children cannot survive under those odds!
