Advertisements
I am interested if any of my fellow Texas foster parents have heard any changes that will affect us as caregivers from the"Foster Care Redesign". What little I have been able to find just sounds like a whole new layer of bureaucracy taking resources away from caring for kids. It is also being billed as a way to increase the number of foster homes but I know through the DFPS Ombudsman's office that the department does not even have retention rates on foster homes or why people get out of the system. Interested to hear what others think. Thanks.
Like
Share
We just got our license as of Friday. They briefly touched on the redesign but the only thing I really walked away with was that all foster families will have to go through an agency. They are taking away the "straight CPS" option when becoming a foster family. I also know they added the rule about all babysitters being finger printed along with their background check.
Advertisements
We were licensed almost 8 years ago and even back then, they were saying, "we're moving to licensing strictly through private agencies" LOL. Yeah.
So one of the tenets of the redesign is to remove levels of care and instead of documenting bad behaviors, to document the good ones and provide incentives for better outcomes. Sounds great on paper, but how do we get the care needed for the kid that has problems if we aren't able to show the need? The purpose of this is apparently to move toward permanency quicker, which again sounds great(it all sounds great), but how is that to be achieved exactly? By not providing services to foster families and their foster children and returning kids to families as soon as possible. The laws are already written to move things along quickly. I'm not understanding how removing care from foster families will help.
Another tenet of the new design is to keep siblings together and to place kids within their communities. Sounds great, but if there are not any foster homes in that area, the kids will be sent to the nearest available home and that might be 100 miles away in a state as big and as rural as Texas. Most of my placements came from another county due to the lack of homes there. In one particular case, the judge ordered the case worker to place the child in the present county/city and she looked right at him and said, exactly which home should I take her to, yours?, because there aren't any open homes here in X town and the closest home to take her is an hour away. The judge was stunned because he had no idea there weren't just a slew of foster homes waiting to take a teen. My own daughter languished in foster care for 13 years all because CPS would not separate siblings. She and her 4 sibs were in and out of foster care in that time because CPS would not terminate on the mother, but instead would remove and return over and over. Each one aged out until she finally came to us at 14 yrs old free for adoption after the nurses found her mother beating her in a hospital bed and that was deemed reason for termination. Apparently being beaten for the first 13 years wasn't enough.:arrow:
After all my years in the system, I find the new rules to be designed to make it harder for foster parents to advocate for their foster children, does nothing to bring more families into fostering, takes the pressure off of CPS to do their job and instead shifts the work over to us, and that in the end, things will remain just as they are; broken and ill-equipped to handle the reasons children come into care When they decide that taking care of these children is a priority instead of an afterthought, then we can see real change toward bringing foster care up to the level that is required and I just don't see the legislature moving in that direction with the financial support that is needed to hire, keep and train good case workers and foster families.