AUSTIN — Texas has agreed to guidelines for trying to reduce workloads for three types of state employees who touch the lives of foster children.

Though not hard caps, the rough targets could improve treatment of foster children — especially with a federal judge and her special masters monitoring actual caseloads and turnover for years to come.

Under the deal, the Department of Family and Protective Services will embrace an internal caseload standard calling for each Child Protective Services “conservatorship caseworker” to oversee between 14 and 17 children in state care.

Statewide last month, each such worker had an average of 17.6 youngsters — though in Denton, Tarrant and eight other counties in the western portion of the Dallas-Fort Worth region, it was an average of 19.2.

In Dallas County and counties in the eastern part of North Texas, the typical CPS conservatorship worker oversaw 15.2 kids — considerably below both the November statewide average and the new standard, according to the department.

“This is an exciting step forward,” said Paul Yetter of Houston, a lawyer who represents foster children in a long-running, class-action federal lawsuit.

“For the first time, Texas now has caseload guidelines around which to improve and reform its system,” he said.

Will Francis, executive director of the state chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, also welcomed the deal.

For CPS conservatorship workers, he said, a high caseload “severely hampers their ability to adequately support and engage with kids in care.”

Terms of the deal

Lawyers for the state and plaintiffs, consulting with U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack’s special masters, hammered out the caseload guidelines pact last week.

Also under the deal, a new standard of 14 to 17 investigations per worker will apply to the child-abuse investigators at the department who specialize in examining foster children’s outcries that they have been maltreated.

Last month, such investigators, who are assigned to a relatively new Child Protective Investigations division that is separate from CPS, had an average of 23.9 investigations each, department spokesman Patrick Crimmins said.

The deal also will affect a third type of worker — residential child care licensing inspectors, who police foster homes’ and congregate-care facilities’ compliance with the state’s minimum standards. Deficiencies can lead to suspensions of further child placements and contract terminations.

Now assigned to the Health and Human Services Commission, the inspectors as of Dec. 1 had average workloads of 21.76, said commission spokeswoman Christine Mann.

The new internal guideline calls for each inspector to have between 14 and 17 “total tasks,” such as minimum standard investigations and other duties.

The agreement comes several months after the state stopped appealing Jack’s rulings. Amid high emotions, the suit has entered a compliance phase. In recent hearings in Dallas, Jack administered tongue-lashings to the department, aides to Attorney General Ken Paxton and a Hunt County provider. So far, she has levied $150,000 of contempt of court fines against the state.

‘Silver bullet’

Certain unresolved issues remain. Paxton’s office and plaintiffs’ lawyers continue to haggle over whether Jack should order the state to pay plaintiffs more than $20 million in legal fees and expenses. After hundreds of pages of briefs, yet another state reply on that topic is due Jan. 13.

In Paxton’s first reply, he urged Jack to cut the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ pay in half because “plaintiffs lost on their most important claim” — a request for “specific caseload caps” for CPS conservatorship workers overseeing the suit’s “general class” of kids in long-term foster care.

“The caseload cap was Plaintiffs’ silver bullet, the remedy that would start a chain reaction resulting in innumerable benefits to the class,” Paxton wrote mockingly. In the end, he stressed, all the plaintiffs won was a workload study that would lead to “a flexible set of criteria” for caseloads.

Earlier this month, though, plaintiffs called Paxton’s argument irrelevant and “of no moment.”

However much the appeals court modified Jack’s original remedy, the caseload guideline approach still “constitutes a massive victory for Plaintiffs that directly addresses the constitutional infirmity of high caseloads,” Yetter, the Houston lawyer, and lawyers for Children’s Rights, A Better Childhood and the Dallas firm of Haynes and Boone LLP wrote.

Foreshadowing calm?

While it’s early, the deal on caseload guidelines could augur smoother relations between Jack, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, and state GOP leaders such as Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott, who is a defendant in the suit.

“Always hard to know, but things may quiet down,” said Yetter, the lead litigator for the plaintiffs.

U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack (2008 File Photo/Corpus Christi Caller-Times)

Last week, Jack quickly accepted the parties’ agreement, which shelved a potentially costly set of workload studies.

“These agreed guidelines are consistent with the Court’s order, as they will save the cost and avoid the delay of workload studies and speed the implementation of improvements to benefit children in the custody of the Texas foster care system,” Jack said.

Earlier, Jack was told by an all-Republican panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that hard caseload caps were too intrusive a remedy.

In her latest order, she stressed that the new guidelines “shall not be used or interpreted as a ‘caseload cap’ or an ‘enforced caseload range.’ ”

As testimony at a 2014 bench trial in the 8 1/2-year-long suit showed, many of the nearly 12,000 children in the state’s “permanent managing conservatorship” didn’t know who their CPS worker is. Some experienced further trauma, beyond what birth families have caused, while in the care of the state’s mostly private contractors. When the children turn 18, many were incapable of coping. Many broke the law, succumbed to addiction, became homeless or sex-trafficking victims — in any event, piling more costs on taxpayers.

Francis, the lobbyist for the social work profession, said he hopes Jack and special masters Kevin Ryan and Deborah Fowler push the state for progress toward lower caseloads. CPS conservatorship workers “are typically going to work around 50 hours a week whether they have a caseload of 15 or 50 — but fewer kids means more unique and responsive services,” he said.

Under the deal, beginning Jan. 15, the state will establish the internal caseload and investigation standards, the deal says.

Starting Feb. 14, supervisors will have to begin using the guidelines as they distribute cases. Also starting in mid-February, the state’s hiring goals will have to begin to “be informed by” the standards, Jack’s order says.