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News Tip : Texas Foster Care Scandal?

Having once been an investigator working child abuse, child neglect, sexual abuse of children, and infant/child homicide back in the 1970's for the State of Texas; I know a little about process.

First question, was taking custody of over four hundred children in one incident"over reaching"as the original complaint involved possible sexual abuse of teen age girls; not pre-teen girls, boys, or small children?

Having been involved in other investigations of Child Protective Services abuses and civil rights violations, as much effort needs to be spent investigating the State Agency as the people living in the religous compound. I am not defending neglect or abuse of children buy anyone, including those living in the compound, or those getting paid with taxpayer dollars who are in many cases the most incompetent and prejudicial investgators on"mother earth" to use a "green" term.

Do not take my word for it, review the following news tip.Then again, is it possible that the above state agency might srtarting raiding communities of conservatives for teaching their children bad thoughts? Satire or future prediction?

Orignally published in Youth Law News, April-June 2004.
In 2003, following a series of highly publicized tragedies in foster care nationwide, Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn launched an investigation into the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services (DPRS).1 As part of the investigation, Strayhorn and her staff made unannounced visits to foster care facilities across the state. They also reviewed records and spoke to people within the system, including the foster children it is designed to serve. On April 6, Strayhorn’s office released a special report entitled Forgotten Children, documenting the crisis in the Texas foster care system and calling for a massive system overhaul.2

Background
In 2003, Texas served 26,133 children in its dual, public-private foster care system. In that system, the state distributes funds and oversees the provision of services, while both the state government and private child-placing agencies (CPA) run foster care programs.

Whether a child ends up in a state-run or CPA program depends largely on the outcome of the child’s initial assessment. This assessment influences the child’s placement and services, and defines the reimbursement rate paid to the child’s care provider. Reimbursement rates vary dramatically. The basic individual reimbursement rate is $20 per day, but caregivers for children with the most complex needs receive as much as $277 per day.3 As a general rule, the state cares for children at the lower service levels, while CPAs and residential treatment centers serve children with greater needs, and higher reimbursement rates.

The Findings: A System in Crisis
Forgotten Children paints an unsettling picture of the Texas foster care system. In her executive summary, Strayhorn notes that:
Some foster children have been moved among 30, 40 or even more all-to-temporary “homes.” Some have been sexually, physically, and emotionally abused while in the system; some have run away and joined the ranks of the missing. A few have even died at the hands of those entrusted with their care.4

The system’s problems are many. Texas foster youth experience unstable and inadequate placements and services. These problems are then compounded by DPRS’s deficient licensing, inspection, and contracting practices.

Lack of Stability
Texas foster youth are moved frequently; often, children are moved hundreds of miles from their last placement, and from their biological families. During the first three years that a child is in foster care, he or she will face about two new placements each year. For some children, the lack of permanency has been even more glaring. Twelve of the children who were in foster care in 2002 had experienced 40 or more placements.

Deficient Services
Although many foster children live in clean, safe environments with loving caregivers, too many others do not. In far too many cases, DPRS has allowed children to spend years in overly restrictive, unsafe environments, without appropriate services.

Despite the requirement that foster children be in the least restrictive environment,5 DPRS offers a perverse incentive favoring restrictive settings—paying higher reimbursement rates for such placements. Even worse, the agency’s inadequate licensing and monitoring practices leave children in unsafe and unsanitary facilities. Children with acute needs are spending months and years in therapeutic camps licensed under lax temporary facility standards, where health and sanitation violations often go unchecked.

In addition, the Comptroller’s report documents a shocking prevalence of abuse and neglect. Foster youth often come to the system because those expected to care for them neglected that charge. Once in the hands of the state, these children are too frequently experiencing continued abuse, both from their new care providers and from their peers. Moreover, DPRS has failed to take steps to minimize the risks of abuserelated injuries and deaths. The agency has allowed children with histories of sexual offenses and violent crimes to be placed with other children, and has failed to investigate and publicize the details behind preventable tragedies.6

Foster children are harmed further by DPRS’s failure to offer appropriate services. Too many children are provided an abundance of medication, and little else, to address their health and educational needs. The report revealed that many foster youth are taking multiple psychotropic medications with serious side effects, some of which have not been studied in children.7 While the foster care system has been liberal in the distribution of medication, services to address the needs of medically fragile and special needs children have been far less abundant. As a result, too many children with developmental disabilities are institutionalized, and too few children leave the system with adequate educational training.

Inadequate Oversight
The report also presents a bleak picture of DPRS’s monitoring performance. High caseloads keep caseworkers from spending adequate time with their clients. CPAs complain that they are held to a substantially higher standard than state-run facilities. Worse, even the standards applied to CPAs are inadequate to ensure that children are safe, and receiving basic care.

DPRS also has a history of inadequate licensing standards, weak contract monitoring and insufficient investigations. Although state law requires annual facility inspections, only 42 percent of surveyed facilities received complete inspections in both 2002 and 2003. The state’s failure to oversee licensees allows the same problems to fester in the same facilities over a period of years.

Even when an investigation or public report does uncover serious violations, facilities that are in stark noncompliance with DPRS policies often receive little more than a slap on the wrist. An Austin newspaper published sheriff’s department figures indicating that over a four-year period, deputies responded to more than 350 calls at a single foster youth camp in the area. Even when faced with such clear evidence of problems, DPRS has no policy in place requiring review. Of the more than 600 facilities operating statewide in 2003, DPRS had revoked only one license, suspended four, placed one facility on probation, and placed six others on evaluation status.

Life After Foster Care
Not surprisingly, the inadequacies of the Texas foster care system have lasting effects upon foster youth. Upon leaving the system, these youth are more likely than their peers to face homelessness, poor educational attainment, criminal behavior, drug addiction, mental illness, and health problems. Thirty-two percent of the 900 children that exit Texas foster care every year leave without a high school diploma or its equivalent. In addition, 41 percent of former foster youth have experienced homelessness. Many of these young people, facing the prospect of life on their own without adequate educational or career training, resort to drug use and criminal activity.

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Two Options For Thank You Letter

Here is a friendly suggestion for you about correspondence for survivors of victims by crimes of illegal immigrants resulting from a Southern porous border without national security fence.

Dear (fill in blank),

My family, friends, neighbors, and tens of thousands of other American citizens, have suffered one or more of the following by illegal immigrants due to no Southern border national security fence: murders; sexual tortures (rapes); kidnappings; extortions; robberies; deaths or injuries in traffic accidents; illegal drugs and related criminal activities; damages to America’s natural environments; lost jobs, other greed driven evils, and most certainly future terrorists attacks.

Heaven’s Son may forgive your greed, prejudice, America last policies, and or ignorance facilitated crimes against innocent American citizens. As for me, I pray to the Highest Judge that he overturns His Son’s Blessings and sentences you to the eternity you deserve.

It is also my sincerest hope that American citizens start shunning you for my loved one’s blood on your hands that you will never be able to wash off.

(your name here)

Post Script: Send as many copies of above letter as you desire to individual politicians, individual members of news media, individuals at environmental fascist organizations, public school and college educators, and others who you feel are morally and perhaps civilly accountable for your family’s, friends’, neighbors’, and other American citizens’ needless sufferings by illegal immigrants.

Never missing an opportunity to record satirical irony, guess we now know that it would have been liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans who would have made “good” Germans during WWII. There is a story about General Eisenhower upon visiting a concentration camp in Germany towards the end of WWII; the story relates how he forced local German townspeople to witness the horrors and atrocities created by their policies of toleration and compromises with law breakers.

Maybe the time has arrived in America to force supporters of porous borders to witness the consequences of their compromises and toleration of crimes being committed by illegal immigrants that represent about ten percent of America’s population and possibly as much as forty percent of crimes in America. As for my critics who whine that my words are too brutal; consider the brutal reality of burying a loved one, or visiting a maimed loved one in the hospital because of someone else’s greed, prejudice, or foolishness.

Two options: copy letter, paste, sign, and send. Second option, copy letter, paste, print, sign, and send.

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Two Notes

First Note: After Thought Continue Plus 44

1. Identify good starting District Court.
2. Get parents (mother and father not mother and mother or father and father) on behalf of their child or children to file injunction based on First amendment to stop teaching in any schools receiving federal tax dollars; any and all global warming theory or theories based on science as religion, not verifiable facts based on scientific process.
3. Plan and prepare to appeal to Supreme Court.
4. Partial concept, giving a starving man ten dollars for a one hundred dollar horse is just as much unethical capitalism as using stolen money known as tax payer dollars to teach other people’s children scientific fraud while violating First Amendment.

Second Note: Farmer’s Son current “writing exercises” product inventory update

1. (IP-98% finished) Volume VI: Citizens Passions (based on Continue Plus Series and theconservativevoice.com essays not included in Continue Plus Series).
2. (IP) Volume V: Twenty Past Eleven
3. (F) Volume IV: Spy As a Verb – Art and Ethics of Surveillance
4. (F) Volume III: Dreams
5. (F) Volume II: Green White White
6. (F) Volume I: Citizens Flag


(IP) In Progress
(F) Finished