N.Y. child advocacy group sues Texas over its foster care N.Y. group suing Texas over foster care system

Claims 12,000 children suffer in poor supervision

A New York advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday claiming that children in the Texas foster care system are forced to spend years in abusive, poorly supervised facilities and homes hundreds of miles from family and friends.

The group, Children's Rights, filed the suit in Corpus Christi on behalf of 12,000 children housed in long-term foster homes, group homes and residential treatment centers across the state. It names Gov. Rick Perry, Texas Health and Human Services Commissioner Thomas Suehs and Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Anne Heiligenstein as defendants.

The suit, which identified nine children by their initials as named plaintiffs, calls on the state to revamp a system that the group says fails foster children.

"For too many children, it's the end of hope for them," Children's Rights' executive director Marcia Robinson Lowry said.

In response to the suit, state officials declared Tuesday that children in Texas foster care are safe and case­loads are falling, and they said a redesign of the foster care system is well under way.

However, Lowry's group cites previous federal audits, state reports, 2010 media accounts and the details from nine child plaintiffs' experiences in arguing that the foster care system has failed to keep children safe from harm. Eight of 11 states where Children's Rights has filed child welfare lawsuits have settled with the group.

Daystar case cited

One of the child plaintiffs in the Texas case is identified as D.I., a 9-year-old Houston boy who has been in foster care since he was 6. D.I. was sexually abused by other children after being placed in a foster home with six teenagers.

The lawsuit claims the Department of Family and Protective Services never closed that foster home and continued to move D.I. to several other homes.

The lawsuit also includes the case of Daystar, a residential treatment facility in the Brazoria County town of Manvel that was closed after the restraint death of a 16-year-old developmentally disabled boy last November was ruled a homicide. The Houston Chronicle and Texas Tribune reported on the abuse of children in state-sanctioned care in Daystar and similar facilities.

Heiligenstein, the DFPS commissioner who last year began work on a state foster care redesign, said Texas has made tremendous strides improving the care of abused children who enter the system. More than $1 billion in additional funding has been pumped into the system in the past six years, Heiligenstein said.

"Texas foster children are safe, well-cared for and live in a system that is nationally recognized for finding thousands of loving, adoptive homes each year," she said in a statement. "We're on the right path and will continue to do everything we can to protect Texas children, but I worry that a lawsuit like this will take critical time and resources away from the very children it presumes to help."

Adoptions up 50 percent

In the same statement, the agency declared that Texas foster care children are safe by "an overwhelming margin" and that the foster care redesign is close to being a reality. A measure that would allow the agency to shift funds to help reallocate resources is pending in the Legislature.

The agency released figures Tuesday that show adoptions have increased more than 50 percent between fiscal years 2005 and 2010. Caseloads for foster care caseworkers have fallen by about 10 cases per worker in the same time period, from an average of 40.4 per worker a month to 29.5 in the period that ended last August, the agency said.

DFPS has been anticipating a lawsuit since 2009, after the advocacy group began requesting records. The agency notified lawmakers of such a possibility last fall in an unsigned "background memo" that is critical of the group.

"CR is very media savvy and it uses the press to 'try' its cases in the public arena to pressure agency officials into entering into settlement discussions," the memo stated.

$500-an-hour fees?

The memo also took aim at Children's Rights attorneys' fee requests to courts, which DFPS calculated are "about $500 per hour."

The document went on to list improvements made since 2004 by the DFPS Child Protective Services' division, which investigates child abuse and places children into foster care.

"Reform is working in Texas," the memo stated. "Texans know what's best for Texas. We don't need a litigious organization from New York City to tell us how to improve our CPS system. And we don't need its lawyers living off exorbitant fees paid for by the hard-working taxpayers of Texas."

However, the memo failed to mention how reductions in the agency's budget by lawmakers in the 1990s essentially pushed it to a point of crisis in 2004, prompting Perry to order a special investigation.

Perry's action came after a series of well-publicized child abuse deaths. Many of the children in those cases came from families with previous CPS histories and exposed soaring caseloads.

terri.langford@chron.com