Lubbock Times

The move by the Texas foster care system to a community-based plan has not been a smooth one, and a recent report from an associate professor at Texas Tech University pointed out the deficiencies in the system.

The Texas Legislature in 2017 commissioned a report to review the progress of implementing the community-based care reforms. The report was completed in November 2020, not released until recently and has received push back from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

The move by the Texas Legislature enacted reforms to transition the state's system to a community-based model so that local charities, both private and nonprofit, can be given primary responsibility for foster care children in their communities. The Legislature was responding to ongoing problems in the state's centrally managed foster care system.

Eugene Wang, an associate professor with Texas Tech University College of Human Services, wrote the 115-page report that showed ways to improve the system. 

The report concluded that DFPS's implementation of community-based care is too centralized. 

"CBC effort is central-office-centric, despite wide variation among regions ... central office has also been more heavily involved in day-to-day operational decisions than regional offices or local communities," the report states.

In addition, the report indicates there is poor organization.

"Scopes of work and contract amendments are currently ill-defined for effectively communicating the differentiation of expectations and responsibilities of DFPS and the SSCC," Wang wrote. "This lack of clarity and specificity has led to significant and unnecessary confusion and frustration in local implementation efforts."

He noted that it was especially true during placement of a child and that there is a lack of transparency and accountability in the system.

"The overall evaluation process has been structurally limited by having separate process and outcome evaluations," Wang said. "The evaluation would also benefit by having a more robust logic model of what stakeholders [DFPS as well as community stakeholders] agree are the desired outcomes and their weighting, and what processes are hypothesized to achieve each specific outcome. Evaluation would also be more effective with validated tools [i.e., "readiness" tools]."

The report concluded, "Finally, evaluation efforts would be helped by a more robust evidence base linking processes (and their costs) and outcomes. These linkages are necessary to conduct cost-benefit analyses."

In addition, Wang said, CBC, DFPS and SSCC should be "evaluated by an independent entity" and "agencies should not evaluate themselves."

Andrew Brown of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, in testimony recently submitted to the Texas Senate Finance Committee, pointed out that over the past several years much work has been accomplished in reforming the system.

"Over the last several years a considerable amount of work has gone into addressing systemic deficiencies that have long plagued the Texas foster care system," Brown said. "This work is bearing fruit, and the 87th Legislature has a unique opportunity to build on the successes already achieved by reform efforts. Seizing this opportunity will require the Legislature to carefully coordinate the continued expansion and improvement of the community-based care system created by the 85th Legislature. Data from the four regions of the state currently operating under community-based care show that the model is doing exactly what it was intended to do." 

Wang's report also found that DFPS was "unable or unwilling" to share information for an evaluation that was mandated by the legislature.

In addition, Wang pointed out a lack of "strategic framework" that has resulted in "chaotic" processes.

“One global impression of implementation was that there was a lack of a strategic framework and a lack of explicit, operationalized expectations," the report said. "This created processes that were random, chaotic and trial-and-error. This lack of a strategic process had many diffuse [and long-lasting] effects, most of them more negative than would be true with a more structured, strategic process."

A recent poll by WPA Intelligence found that 76% of registered Texas voters support a community-based model for foster care.