Better mental health services would reduce how many children CPS removes and more money for high-quality care and stipends for grandparents offering kinship help is needed, advocates say.
“The state has not responded with the sense of urgency that this crisis demands,’’ said Lowry, executive director of the New York nonprofit A Better Childhood and co-counsel in the suit. One child advocacy group, Texans Care for Children, welcomed the state’s agreement in the filing to adopt some of the experts’ recommendations.
All parties to the nearly 11-year-old, class-action suit over conditions in the state’s system of long-term foster care agree that children removed from their birth families because of maltreatment should be housed in homes with trained foster parents — and if that’s not possible, humanely operated congregate-care settings.
The department also agreed, in each of the four regions that have the most CWOPs, to hire a community liaison. That employee will “build community capacity to prevent placements in unlicensed care and to transition children out of unlicensed care into safe settings,” said the state agencies’ response. And they agreed to study how, last year, Texas made out-of-state placements of children in CPS’ care more than 2,100 times — and to develop a plan to bring them home.
Said Lowry, who has launched many class-action suits over foster care nationwide, “The state is not treating this as anything like an emergency.”
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