High employee turnover, lack of adequate funding put Texas foster care children at risk

A task force in a Texas county where two children died while in foster care last summer has found that the main problem with Texas’ foster care program is that employee turnover is too high at the state agency that investigates child abuse and monitors the safety of children in foster care.

“Our number one problem is the turnover of (Child Protective Services) workers,” said Williamson County Commissioner  Lisa Birkman in a meeting of the task force reported by the Austin American Statesman.

According to the Statesman article, four children have died while in foster care in Williamson County within the past few years. Williamson County, where a number of Austin suburbs are located, is just north of Austin.

The problems with foster care in Williamson County extend throughout the state, and Texas for years has struggled to improve its foster care program.

Improvement became more urgent in 2013 after ten children died in foster care or in the care of a relative providing foster care services.

The 2013 deaths led Child Protective Services (CPS), the Texas agency that oversees the foster care program, to enact more regulations intended to improve the monitoring of foster care homes and facilities.

Before the agency implemented the new regulations, the state began experimenting with a redesign of the foster care program that relies heavily on privatization.

But Myko Gedutis, assistant organizing coordinator for the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU), said that it will take more than new regulations and privatization schemes to improve foster care in Texas.

“Foster care outcomes will improve when services are funded adequately,”  said Gedutis. “The state needs to pay foster parents more so that more families can afford take care of foster children; it needs to ensure that foster children receive the services they need to thrive; and it needs to improve pay and reduce caseloads in order to reduce the high turnover rate among CPS employees.”

Lawmakers thought that they could save money and provide more services by privatizing foster care management, but that hasn’t worked out very well.

They instructed the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), which oversees CPS, to contract with private companies to manage foster care services. The privatization of foster care management is called Foster Care Redesign.

Last summer Providence Services Corporation, one of the state’s two Foster Care Redesign contractors, quit because, according to Providence CEO Mike Fidgen, Texas foster care is inadequately funded.

“The failure of Providence showed that systemic under funding of the foster care system is the source of foster care’s problems,” said Gedutis.

Gedutis said that he is encouraged by the fact that more people like Commissioner Birkman, a Republican, are recognizing that employee turnover is a problem that needs to be addressed.

In fact, there’s a growing consensus that reducing the turnover rate at CPS is essential to improving foster care.

An operational review of CPS conducted by the Stephen Group finds that employee “turnover is a major organizational burden.”

DFPS has told lawmakers that the agency’s high turnover rate needs to be addressed, and some lawmakers such as Larry Gonzalez, a Republican from Williamson County, have agreed.

But while a consensus about the problem is growing, there’s no consensus on a solution.

The official response seems to be that the key to reducing turnover is to reduce job stress.

With this in mind, the Texas Sunset Commission and the Stephen Group have recommended simplifying the state Family Code so that child protective workers don’t have to spend so much time documenting compliance with the Family Code.

That might be a good start, but if lawmakers and state officials are serious about reducing employee turnover at CPS, they should listen to the workers.

Former CPS workers who responded to an exit survey said that the main reasons that they left were poor working conditions, excessive workloads, supervisor issues, and inadequate compensation.

Another survey of workers still with the agency found that only 3 percent of those surveyed said that they were adequately paid, while 75 percent said that they were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their current pay.

Average pay for CPS caseworkers ranges from $34,516 a year to $37,718 a year. The job requires a four-year college degree or comparable work experience.

In addition to low pay, CPS caseworkers struggle with high caseloads.

According to the CPS Annual Report, the statewide average daily caseload for a CPS investigative caseworker is 19.7 cases. The Midland region with an average of 24.4 cases per worker is the region with the highest average caseload.

The Child Welfare League of America recommends a caseload of 12-15 foster care children per caseworker.

CPS employees understand the impact that high caseloads have on their jobs.

“When caseloads are too high, you cannot provide quality service to the client,” wrote one CPS employee on the survey referred to above.

“Workers are overloaded and . . . this puts children at risk,” wrote another employee

Addressing the high turnover rate by raising pay and lowering caseloads is one step that the Legislature needs to take when it convenes next year, said Gedutis, but there are other areas of concern that need to be addressed.

“TSEU’s Family Protective Services caucus (the union members who work for DFPS) has taken the position that foster care outcomes will improve when the program receives adequate funding,” said Gedutis. “As the failure of Providence showed, systemic under funding of the foster care system has resulted in an inadequate foster care network, both public and private. Improvement can’t take place by changing who manages that inadequate network. Only by providing adequate funding can we ensure that all foster care children are living in a safe environment.”

Company quits Texas Foster Care Redesign project

Another Texas privatization project has failed to produce the results touted by free market boosters and private contractors.

Providence Service Corporation, a self-described “national leader in the management and provision of the highest-quality human social service,” announced on August 1 that it was quitting its job as manager of the Foster Care Redesign project in West Texas.

Providence CEO Mike Fidgen said that the company was quitting because the redesign program needed to be “more adequately funded.”

To put it less delicately, Providence quit because it couldn’t make enough money.

Texas lawmakers in 2011 authorized Foster Care Redesign under the assumption that private companies like Providence could improve the state’s troubled foster care program and lower costs.

Providence was the West Texas Single Source Continuum Contractor that was to oversee and coordinate services among private foster care placement agencies in West Texas, an expansive region that covers 60 counties. The region is mostly rural but includes some mid-sized cities such as Abilene, Midland, Odessa, San Angelo, and Wichita Falls.

Providence in 2013 signed a five-year, $30 million contract to manage the region’s Foster Care Redesign. Fifteen months into the project, DFPS has already paid Providence $8.3 million. According to Myko Gedutis, assistant organizing coordinator for the Texas State Employees Union CWA Local 6186 (TSEU), Providence is already $2 million over budget.

“The news (that Providence is quitting because of the lack of funding) confirms it’s time to stop expanding privatization and start adequately funding child protection,” said Ashley Harris a policy expert for Texans Care for Children, a child welfare advocacy group. “(The state needs to begin) reducing caseloads for overwhelmed (Child Protective Services) staff and establishing basic safety and training standards for foster parents.”

Prior to Province’s withdrawal, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), which oversees state child protective services, notified Providence that its shortcomings that needed to be corrected.

According to a media statement issued by DFPS, the company

• Missed performance goals such as keeping siblings together and placing children close to home,
• Failed to develop staff and an adequate network of foster care providers, and
• Was unable “to develop a full array of service to better serve children.”

“Providence walking away from the contract after one year clearly answers the question about whether a for-profit agency can provide quality services with the same inadequate funding provided by the Legislature,” said Gedutis. “Providence’s attempt at placing children closer to their own communities, and improving outcomes and services, all with the same inadequate budget, didn’t work.”

Members of TSEU who work for DFPS have for some time tried to convince lawmakers that there are no shortcuts to providing quality care for abused children.

And in Texas, the problem of child abuse is critical. Between 2008 and 2012, 237 children a year died from abuse or neglect, nearly 100 more than in California (148) and nearly 140 more than in New York (99).

During state fiscal year 2013, eight children died in foster care.

But state leaders have chosen to address this crisis on the cheap.

For example, lawmakers have failed to provide funding to keep child protective caseloads manageable. The national standard for child protective caseloads is 17 cases per worker. The average Texas caseload is 28.

State caseworker pay is also low. According to the State Auditor’s Office, the average base pay for a state child protective caseworker, a job that requires a four-year bachelors degree, ranges  from $34,656 a year to $40,560 a year.

Low pay and high caseloads have led to a high turnover rate. The State Auditor reports that the DFPS caseworker turnover rate for 2012 was 26.1 percent. The high turnover rate affects the quality of work.

Instead of addressing these funding problems, the state has turned to private agencies to deal with the child abuse crisis.

In the last decade, the number of private agencies providing foster care services has increased to 350. Some of these agencies are run by for-profit companies and some by non-profit companies.

Whatever their status, generating revenue remains their main focus, said TSEU member Erica Harris to special legislative committee hearing in April. The focus on revenue causes many private agencies to cut corners.

Harris, a caseworker who worked for a private agency and now works for DFPS, told lawmakers that she was troubled and eventually quit after she learned that her private agency allowed unqualified people to serve as foster parents, doctored paperwork to make it look as if they were meeting goals, inadequately trained foster parents, and did not properly supervise foster parents.

“The root of many of these problems with the private agency stemmed from the agency being responsible for maintaining a foster care system while having to watch their own bottom line,” said Harris in her testimony.

While Providence’s failure to remain on the job is a setback for the privatization of foster care, it also is another in a growing list of Texas privatization initiatives that failed to meet expectations, including:

• An $899 million contract with Accenture to privatize state health and human services, which was canceled in 2007,
• An $863 million contract with IBM to consolidate state agency data centers, which was canceled in 2010,
• A $210 contract with Accenture to update the state’s child support computer system, whose cost increased by $64 million after the company failed to meet the original deadline for implementation, and
• A multi-million Medicaid claims contract with Xerox, which was canceled in May after Xerox, “allegedly erroneously doled out for medically unnecessary Medicaid claims,” reports the Texas Tribune. Xerox’s error cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

Gedutis said that foster care in Texas needs to be redesigned, but, like the other failed privatization efforts, the failure of Providence to complete its job shows that privatization is not the way to improve state services.

“Instead of contracting with more private agencies and getting the same results, efforts to improve the foster care system need to address inadequate funding, accountability, oversight of private agencies, and dangerously high caseloads,” said Gedutis. “TSEU members will continue to fight to improve our agency and the services we provide to vulnerable Texans, and to oppose privatization experiments that continue to fail.”