As of last month, 7,370 child abuse cases are under investigation by Child Protective Services in Harris County

The News interviewed current and former caseworkers and reviewed nearly 10,000 child abuse cases from Region 6, which includes Harris and a dozen nearby counties. It found CPS’ performance and the plight of kids in Harris County was far worse than the agency previously acknowledged:

Former Child Protective Services caseworker Stephanie Taylor, photographed on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2016, in Houston, with a projected image of data about at-risk children overdue for face-to-face visits from caseworkers. (Smiley N. Pool | Staff)

“That is crazy to put that kind of incentive in when you’ve got people’s lives at stake,” Stephanie Taylor, a former Houston CPS investigator, said of the party contest.

Some have resorted to promising pizza and ice cream parties for workers who can catch up on extreme case backlogs, The News found. Agency chiefs, alarmed at recent media reports of children in trouble, prod workers with mandatory overtime and help from other CPS offices in the state, as they did last weekend. They achieve modest but short-lived gains.

While leaders in Austin have yet to offer a permanent solution to stem the tide of exiting caseworkers, regional CPS bosses are scrambling to check on more and more kids with fewer and fewer experienced workers.

Exhausted and demoralized workers flee the job, sometimes suddenly, and their caseloads are often inherited by investigators and supervisors who can’t even keep up with the children and families they already have. And the agency can’t stabilize the workforce the way child-welfare experts recommend, by paying a more competitive salary and reducing caseloads, because Republican state leaders don’t want to spend the necessary money.

“We have a complete array of efforts in place in Harris County and Region 6 to ensure that more kids will be seen,” he said.

After The News shared its findings with him, Crimmins released statistics showing that between Sept. 12 and Monday, Harris County investigators reduced by about half — to 740 from 1,494 — the number of children in open cases who hadn’t been seen.

Those include assigning some units to focus solely on departing workers’ abandoned caseloads; possibly expanding an experiment in which a Harris County unit works 10-hour shifts from Thursday through Sunday, to keep late-in-the-week tips from growing stale; and maybe revamping Harris’ current assignment of cases by ZIP code, which produces uneven workloads, he said.

Patrick Crimmins, spokesman for CPS’ parent agency, the Department of Family and Protective Services, said the agency is aware of problems with Houston-area investigations and is rushing to make improvements.

“These numbers are shocking,” said Scott McCown, who runs the Children's Rights Clinic at the University of Texas law school and, for decades, has urged state leaders to plow more resources into CPS. “You court disaster by waiting months to go see a kid. And the lack of urgency about this problem from our state leadership is deeply troubling.”

As of Sept. 11, about half of children referred to the county’s CPS investigators weren’t being seen on time, The News’ analysis shows. And in 1 out of every 5 open cases there, children weren’t being seen at all.

Child-abuse investigators in Harris County are failing to make initial contact with at-risk children more so than in any other of the state's largest counties.

But the Harris County CPS office — by far the worst when it comes to seeing children on time, if ever — is failing to check on kids far more often than officials have previously disclosed.

A.J., N.T. and C.W. are only a few of tens of thousands of potentially endangered Texas children who haven’t had a timely visit from CPS workers who, faced with low pay and untenable caseloads, have been quitting in droves.

The database shows in new detail the magnitude of dysfunction within Texas’ child welfare system. It tracks hundreds of at-risk children who are slipping through the state’s grasp as leaders fail to stem an exodus of experienced child-welfare workers.

Their names and specifics of their cases are among more than 7,300 Harris County child abuse cases detailed in an agency database obtained and analyzed by The Dallas Morning News.

C.W., an infant whose parents are suspected of extreme neglect, was last seen in a hospital in April 2015, according to state data. In over 500 days, no caseworker has documented an attempt to follow up, a crucial step in ensuring his safety.

Two-year-old N.T. was believed to be at risk of sexual abuse. But as of last month, the Houston-area girl had gone more than 96 days without being seen by a child-abuse investigator.

Under state law, a Child Protective Services investigator should have seen her within 24 hours of receiving her report of abuse. But according to the agency’s own accounting, as of mid-September, no one had checked on her in at least 170 days.

A.J. is a 4-year-old Houston-area girl believed to be at risk of serious harm or death from physical abuse.

After The News shared its findings with the governor’s office Tuesday, the next day Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus, all Republicans, released a joint letter in which they condemned the agency’s failure to check on at-risk children promptly.

That letter, addressed to department chief Henry “Hank” Whitman, ordered the department to develop an “innovative plan” to hire and train more child abuse investigators to address the extreme backlogs.

While the letter acknowledged “associated financial costs,” it directed Whitman to essentially bolster existing efforts and fell short of calling for higher wages for caseworkers and child abuse investigators, which advocates say is the necessary fix.

Whac-A-Mole

High-level staffers at the Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees Whitman’s department, and Abbott’s office have known since at least February that tens of thousands of endangered Texas kids aren’t being seen by caseworkers promptly — while thousands aren’t seen at all.

In Dallas County, spiraling caseworker turnover and punitive management policies set off a crisis more than a year ago.

Last spring, the fatal beating of 4-year-old Leiliana Wright of Grand Prairie highlighted systemic failures and the potentially deadly consequences of the agency’s high turnover of low-paid caseworkers buried beneath extreme case backlogs. The News also reported that Harris County was headed for trouble, possibly disaster.

Yet, internal records and data show little statewide improvement, while Harris County has gotten worse when it comes to seeing endangered children promptly.

Houston-area personnel cited a Whac-A-Mole effect: Over the winter and spring, dozens of the the area’s investigative caseworkers were sent to help rescue Dallas County, which sent Houston workloads spiraling.

Then, over the summer, two investigative supervisors abruptly walked off the job, each leaving about a half-dozen workers demoralized and in the lurch. Many of them soon quit, dumping on remaining workers cases that were growing old — sometimes “delinquent,” or open for over 60 days, and with kids never seen.

CPS’ new leaders, installed by Abbott’s social services czar last spring, have kept top state officials abreast of problems with Houston-area operations, Crimmins said.

“We communicate regularly with the governor's office and state leadership, and legislative offices, about CPS issues,” he said.

Trends in the data, which are updated daily and used by managers to assess investigators’ performance, have clearly alarmed the region’s CPS leaders.

Abbott has promised an agency “overhaul,” which has come in the form of replacing four of 10 CPS regional directors. A review of all regional managers under them, and whether “they are helping caseworkers make correct decisions in the field,” is under way, Crimmins said.

Neither Abbott nor protective services chief Whitman has embraced what many child advocates and state employee union leaders say is the solution to sky-high turnover among investigators: better pay and working conditions to retain experienced caseworkers.

Instead, officials in Austin have lowered the education requirements to become a caseworker, which allows the state to expand pools of applicants for jobs where the average salaries remain about $18,000 below those of public schoolteachers and $24,000 below those of police officers. CPS pays a starting investigative caseworker about $39,000. The department also has asked the Legislature for money to create more positions, even though the agency’s own data show it is struggling to fill the low-paid vacancies it already has.

Meanwhile, as more children with increasingly difficult needs are referred to CPS, the agency’s ranks grow less experienced by the day.

And, veteran workers suggest, top leaders have little clue what motivates the beleaguered caseworkers and investigators to try to clean up the mess.

In late August, managers eager to improve numbers announced a new initiative.

Noting that on average, more than 20 percent of children referred to the office aren’t seen — state rules say it shouldn’t surpass 5 percent — a top CPS manager in Harris County announced that regional leaders would throw pizza and ice cream parties each week for units that met new benchmarks in seeing children.

Eligible units would have to bring down the share of Priority 1 children who haven’t been seen to 5 percent or less, Deputy Director Debra Reyna wrote in an email obtained by The News.

A flyer obtained by The News to incentivize CPS workers to see more Priority 1 children.

“Let's show everyone how we can turn it around and have the largest improvements in the state!!” she said in a later email.

Quick tracking of sometimes dysfunctional and highly mobile families is paramount in investigations, experts say. Visiting families swiftly can mean the difference between life and death.

But some workers see the contest as suggesting that laziness and lack of motivation among workers are the problem, rather than high caseworker turnover and impossible workloads.

Crimmins described the parties as a show of appreciation by management. “It may brighten a caseworker’s day, and we see nothing wrong with that,” he said.

Crushing workloads

About half of full-time Houston-area investigators, those with at least 10 active cases, are juggling 30 or more children, the new Region 6 data show. Of them, 10 caseworkers have over 70 children under their purview. The Child Welfare League of America, a national advocacy group, says the ideal caseload is 12.

Jess McDonald, who ran the Illinois child welfare system in the 1990s and early 2000s and is credited with turning it around, said the missed or late visits in the Houston area are “very serious” lapses.

“How important is it that people get out timely? If your fire department got out as timely as your CPS system is, think of what the consequences would be to neighborhoods in any large city,” he said.

Thirty-two percent of CPS investigators in the 12-county Houston region quit each year. McDonald said low pay, heavy workloads and inexperienced unit supervisors — “your most important management position in these agencies” — create an unsolvable mess.

“You’re never going to escape turnover at the front end,” he said, without a major infusion of resources and creation of a cadre of supervisors who can keep rookies “calm and focused, and help them manage their time.”

Child-abuse investigator case load While inexperienced investigators are assigned just a few cases as they learn the job, many workers in Region 6, which includes Harris County, are responsible for checking on 50 or more children and families.

SOURCE: Data obtained by The Dallas Morning News

Agency dysfunction

Some current and former caseworkers take issue with being graded by face-to-face contacts because the data can contain errors. Some are caused by inputting missteps, which can be hard to avoid, given the clunkiness of the state’s aging computer system.

Chronic miscommunication between swamped caseworkers and data-focused higher-ups is also a factor, they said. Often, children and family haven’t been seen because caseworkers have been unable to locate them. Confusion about which county a child resides in can also lead to the case being shuffled back and forth among units, while potentially endangered children remain unseen.

Taylor, the former Houston investigator, said regional managers don’t support workers. Instead, they insist on rapid-fire decisions about children and parents before investigators have time to properly analyze families, she said.

“They want you to close the cases like clockwork [but] you can’t do that,” said Taylor, 41, who quit in April after 2½ years of what she called unceasing misery in the job.

“Then you know what happens? That’s when we get the news that one of these kids died,” she said. “My heart won’t let me do that.”

On a given day, statewide, over 3,400 children who were on CPS’ radar hadn’t been seen once by a caseworker, The News reported in May. That figure has risen steadily, however, to reach about 4,700 children as of Sept. 12, according to data released this month.

Last spring, about 1,300 Harris County children who were supposed to have already had a face-to-face contact with a caseworker hadn’t been seen. On average, 13 percent of Priority 1 children weren’t being seen on time in the first few months of 2016.

By September, more than one-third of Priority 1 children weren’t being visited on time, The News’ analysis found. According to its own data, Harris County has gotten worse, with about half of all cases logged as not timely by child abuse investigators.

Across Texas, this alarming trend also hasn’t budged. Nearly 10 percent of all credible Texas child abuse calls aren’t resulting in caseworker contact with children, newly released state data show.

In Region 3, which includes the Dallas-Fort Worth region, about 8.4 percent of children haven’t had a caseworker visit, internal agency memos show.

Absent higher pay, the agency’s tracking of worker retention indicates CPS probably can’t keep workers on board. It costs the state $54,000 to train a new hire — money wasted if the worker quits. Last year, CPS lost 1,543 caseworkers, meaning it blew $83.3 million, Crimmins said.

McDonald, the Illinois child welfare leader, said there’s no breaking the cycle on the cheap.

“If you’re working on this kind of a job and you’re getting clobbered every time you walk into the office and you feel like you’re going to be held responsible for something bad that happens to a kid — and you’re getting paid [s--t] wages — if you’re not thinking of another job, you ought to be,” he said.

Follow J. David McSwane on Twitter at @davidmcswane and Robert T. Garrett at @RobertTGarrett.