Working out the puzzles of children's services
By Kurt Senske

Posted on Monday, April 09, 2007
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Assembling a puzzle that shapes our children's future is the task before the Texas Legislature. Each piece is vital: education, child welfare, health insurance for poor children, care and rehabilitation of youthful offenders to create a complete picture that portrays a bright future of promise for our children.

But imagine trying to put together a puzzle without all the pieces. Unfortunately, the Texas Youth Commission scandal and Children's Health Insurance Program reforms are threatening to knock out some of the pieces.

I am concerned that some of our neediest and most vulnerable children, those who have been abused and neglected, are going to be shortchanged. Failure to address their needs adequately will have long-term consequences for our state and will cost us dearly in social services, mental health services and the criminal justice system.

In the last legislative session, significant energy was spent on child welfare reforms. Many were steps in the right direction; others deserve to be reviewed and improved upon.

Some changes, we believe, have done more harm than good by reducing the number of foster care beds available for children removed from dangerous environments, inadequately funding foster care and imposing onerous rules and regulations upon families without improving safety.

Lutheran Social Services is the largest provider of residential services to abused and neglected infants, children and teens in Texas. Each day, more than 650 dedicated foster families care for more than 1,300 infants, children and adolescents. We also care for 180 children with severe emotional and behavioral problems in three residential treatment centers.

We are deeply committed to serving children who have been failed by their families and, in some instances, the system designed to protect them.

Like many private providers, we struggle to cover the costs of providing a quality foster care program. A 5 percent increase in reimbursement for programs is pending before the Legislature -- a rate that is inadequate to cover increased expenses to recruit and train more families and to meet revised minimum standards.

The state must pay higher rates or risk driving away private providers and foster families because they can no longer afford to care for the children.

We believe that shifting the case management to private providers who work with the children on a daily basis makes the most sense for the children.

Despite the negative generalizations thrown about by critics of privatization, the vast majority of private providers offer quality services, which is reflected in the resources they commit to those services. For example, most LSS caseworkers have master's degrees and field experience and carry significantly lower caseloads than their counterparts at Child Protective Services (12 to 1 compared to CPS's 44 to 1).

LSS caseworkers work closely with foster families and children and are in contact with them several times a week. In contrast, we have had foster families come to our agency from CPS who have said that they would go months without hearing from their CPS worker or that, because of turnover, they never saw the same caseworker twice.

CPS caseworkers -- often overworked, inexperienced, underpaid and certainly underappreciated -- are making critical recommendations about children in custody.

It is just plain logical that private providers -- those who know the children best and who work with them daily -- should also be given the responsibility of working with the children's biological families and should have a greater say in what happens to them.

We also believe that foster parents (and, by extension, foster children) will be better served if the foster families who are now licensed and monitored by CPS are moved under the auspices of private agencies.

CPS should focus its limited resources on licensing and monitoring and let private providers do what they do best: provide direct care, as they already do to three-fourths of the more than 34,000 children in foster care.

State Sen. Jane Nelson's proposal recommends a pilot program that would call for privatizing 10 percent of the case management for children. This would be a good start, but we believe that, for the sake of the children, a more robust pilot program is needed.

A hearing on these issues is likely before the House Human Services Committee on Thursday.

Legislators have the difficult task of crafting and funding the pieces required to create a better future for the next generation. We just ask that they don't leave out any pieces, and thus end up with an incomplete picture.

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