Tag: Texas

The continued decline in foster care placements: What, if anything, are children and families getting instead?

On May 9, 2025, the US Administration for Children and Families (ACF) announced that the number of children entering foster care had continued to decrease in FFY 2023. Entries to foster care dropped from an estimated 264,000 in FFY 2018 to 175,282 in FFY 2023–a drop of 33.6 percent. But foster care is not the only service provided by child welfare agencies after an investigation or assessment finds that a child needs protection. Instead of being placed in foster care, some children and their families receive “in-home services,” which aim to ameliorate the risks to their safety without removing them from their homes. With the large drop in child removals, it is natural to ask whether home-based services are being provided to more families as fewer children are placed in foster care. Unfortunately, the data to answer to that question is not available on a national basis or for most states.

Clearly we cannot determine what is happening to the children who “would have been placed in foster care” under previous policies and practices. But at least we can ask if declining foster care placements are being offset by the opening of more cases for in-home services–which some states call Intact Family Services, Family Maintenance, or Family Preservation Services, among other terms. These are the services that are provided to children and their parents after an investigation or assessment determines that the situation does not meet the criteria for foster care placement (usually imminent danger to the child) but that the family does need services and monitoring to reduce risks to the children. In a major investigation, Texas Public Radio (TPR) found that a 40 percent drop in child removals by the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) over a six-year period was not accompanied by an increase in family preservation services (as they are called in Texas) but instead by a “radical curtailment” of such services. Children were left in dangerous homes with no services or monitoring.

For many years, many powerful groups like Casey Family Programs blamed the alleged lack of federal reimbursement for services to families, like drug treatment, mental health care, and parenting support, for the removal of many children who could have been helped at home. As I have pointed out, this argument was largely spurious because states were already providing these services using Medicaid and other sources. In any case, the passage in 2018 of the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) was supported by advocates as a means to alleviate this alleged problem by making funds available for these in-home services. Given the repeated use of that narrative by proponents of FFPSA, it would have been logical to mandate that states report on the numbers of children receiving such in-home services, the characteristics of these children and the services they receive. But such a mandate was not included in the Act.

States are currently required to provide child welfare data to the Children’s Bureau via two separate systems. They must submit foster care and adoption data through the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS). A separate system, the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), includes data on abuse, neglect, and child protective services. NCANDS includes numbers of children receiving “postresponse services,” or services provided as a result of needs discovered during an investigation or assessment. But these numbers are provided in a form that is neither meaningful nor comparable to the AFCARS data, and therefore does not allow the comparison of foster care and in-home numbers for each state and the nation.1

Not only does the federal government not ask the states for meaningful data on in-home cases; most states do not provide such data on public-facing platforms. A review of reviewed publicly available data for the 12 states with the largest number of children in foster care yielded only two (California and Texas) that provided enough data on in-home services to answer the question of whether declines in foster care removals have been offset by the opening of in-home cases. The results are discussed below.

California

California has far more children in foster care than any other state, 43,095 children at the end of Federal Fiscal Year 2023, which was 12.6 percent of the national total, according to AFCARS data. Fortunately, California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP), a collaboration between University of California at Berkeley and the California Department of Social Services, provides excellent data on all child welfare services provided in California. The CCWIP dashboards include data on the number of entries into foster care and the opening of Family Maintenance cases, as in-home cases are called in California. According to CCWIP, entries into foster care declined from 26,766 in Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2019 to to 17,071 in FFY 2024. Rather than increasing to make up for the drop in children entering foster care, the number of children with Family Maintenance case openings as the first service component declined from 25,887 to 18,441 over the same period. The total number of children with cases opened for child welfare services dropped from 44,747 to 29,936 over the five-year period–a drop of 33.1 percent.2 Rather than a shift from foster care to in-home services, there has been an reduction in the number of children reached by child welfare services.

Texas

Texas has the third largest state foster care caseload, behind California and Florida. The number of Texas children entering foster care dropped from 16,028 in 2021 to 9,623 in 2022, an incredible 40 percent, and then stayed about the same for the following two years. Confirming the conclusions of TPR, the number of children entering family preservation services dropped from 51,806 in FY 2020 to 39,655 in FY2021 and then to 26,132 in 2022–half of the 2020 total. The drops in foster care and in-home case openings were presumably related to a new Texas law that changed the definition of neglect and put restrictions on child removals. In addition, a 2020 policy change restricted eligibility for Family Preservation Services in Texas, according to the TPR investigation. TPR found that the number of families that DFPS rejected for family preservation services jumped from 300 to about 2,800 in the first year the policy took effect. Perhaps in an effort to rectify the extreme curtailment of services, the number of children with in-home case openings increased in 2023 and 2024, while the number of children entering foster care remained stable. Nevertheless, the overall trend over time was a decrease in foster care entries, and in children with new family preservation cases.3

A look at the two figures above shows a major difference between the California and Texas. In California, substantially more children entered foster care (17,071) than entered family maintenance services (13,473) in FFY 2024. But in Texas, the number of children entering family preservation services (42,855) was more than four times the number of children entering foster care (9,220) in FY 2024. This vast difference makes clear that nationally we have no idea whether more investigations result in foster care or in in-home services. And we don’t know whether the number of children with new in-home cases has increased as the number being placed in foster care has gone down. Moreover, we don’t know what kind of in-home services parents and children are getting. Are children in California’s Family Maintenance Services getting a similar package of services as those in Texas’ Family Preservation Services? We just don’t know. That is not an acceptable state of affairs, especially given the use of federal funds for these services.

In order to make the needed information available, new legislation might be required. Section 479 of the Social Security Act required the establishment of a system to collect data on foster care and adoption in the United States. AFCARS was created based on general guidelines laid out in the law and more detailed regulations promulgated by HHS. But now it is time to expand AFCARS to include data on child welfare services delivered in children’s homes when a case is opened for the provision of such services. The same sorts of data on entries, exits, caseloads, demographics, and reasons for the initiation of services as is required for foster care should be included for in-home servcies. Required variables should also include the types of services provided to each family and whether they are voluntary or mandatory with court involvement.

While data from Texas and California suggest that child welfare has been reducing its footprint since 2018, we cannot assume that this is happening nationwide without data. That is why ACF should request that Congress act to require that states submit data on in-home cases. Even with this information we will not know how effective in-home services are in protecting children andhelping their parents ameliorate the conditions that put their children at risk; there is very little research that addresses this question. More and better research on that issue is needed. But not even knowing whether children who would have once been placed in foster care are now being protected at home while their parents are helped to make them safe is simply not an acceptable situation.

Notes

  1. The numbers provided include foster care as well as in-home services. The number of children provided is a duplicated count. And the number of children receiving each type of services is not provided. ↩︎
  2. These totals are lower than the sum of the children with foster care entries and in-home case openings, presumably because some children entered in-home services and were placed in foster care in the same year. ↩︎
  3. Texas does not provide the total number of children entering services of any type as does California. Adding those entering foster care to those entering in-home services would produce an inflated estimate since we do not know the number of children who may have entered both types of services during the year ↩︎

Did maltreatment fatalities in Texas really decline?

It may be too soon to celebrate. Policy changes may be obscuring the numbers.

This is a revised version of a column by Marie Cohen and Naomi Schaefer Riley that was published in the Dallas Morning News on April 1, 2025. Around the same time, Texas Public Radio published an excellent analysis with the same message, Why Texas’ Massive Drop in Child Neglect and Abuse Deaths is Misleading, as part of a major project called When Home is the Danger.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has reported a dramatic decline in child maltreatment fatalities from 199 in FY 2021 to 99 in FY in 2024. Perhaps most surprising about the purported decline in fatalities is that it occurred alongside a massive drop in the number of children placed in foster care from 16,028 in Fiscal Year 2021 to 9,623 in Fiscal Year 2022, with similar numbers of children placed in 2023 and 2024. 

Supporters of recent changes in Texas law regarding child maltreatment were quick to highlight these findings as evidence that foster care can be greatly reduced or eliminated with no adverse effects on child safety.

But these claims do not stand up under careful scrutiny. Changes to policy and practice can result in dramatic year-to-year changes in official counts of child maltreatment fatalities, and Texas has implemented at least three significant policy or practice changes during this period. 

First, a Texas law that took effect September 21, 2021 tightened the definition of neglect to require the presence of “blatant disregard” for the consequences of an act or failure to act that results in harm to the child or that creates an immediate danger to the child’s physical health or safety. This new requirement means that deaths that would have been attributed to maltreatment prior to the law change are now not investigated at all or not confirmed as maltreatment. Indeed,  DCF cites this changed definition as one cause of the decline in reported fatalities between FY 2021 and FY 2024. 

Child fatality numbers were also affected by a practice change implemented by DCF that involves the way the agency handles reports of child fatalities. Previously, DCFS assigned all child death reports it received for a full investigation. But starting in September 2022, reports to the Texas Child Abuse Hotline that involve a child fatality but include no explicit concern for abuse and neglect are treated as “Case Related Special Requests,” requiring field staff to confirm that the reporter or first responders had no concern for abuse or neglect. If there are any concerns for abuse or neglect, the child fatality is then sent for a full investigation, but otherwise there is no further action. DFPS reports that the number of child fatalities it investigated decreased from 997 in FY2022 to 690 in FY2023 and 587 in FY 2024.  DFPS attributes this decline in investigations to both this practice change and to the legislature’s change in the definition of neglect.

There is one newer policy change that DFPS announced in its recent report. Investigations that are closed “with a disposition of reason to believe for neglect with a fatal severity code” receive a further level of review. It seems possible that this level of review may be reducing the number of reported cases even further.

Given all these policy and practice changes affecting the count of child maltreatment fatalities, It seems highly likely that Texas did not see an actual reduction in these deaths, but rather reclassified them as not due to child maltreatment.  Perhaps it is not surprising that neither DFPS nor the supporters of weaker child protection are interested in exploring what is really happening to vulnerable children in the aftermath of the drastic decline in the use of foster care. 

As foster care removals plummet, where’s the promised help for families?

Year after year, states and the federal government continue to release annual data showing a decline in the number of children in foster care, congratulating themselves on keeping families together. They seem to have forgotten that reductions in foster care were supposed to be accompanied by increased services so that children could be safely maintained at home. Unfortunately, there seems to be little to no interest on the part of the federal Children’s Bureau, Members of Congress, advocates, or the media in whether such services are actually being provided.

The newest report from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) showed that the number of children in foster care dropped to 368,530 on September in 2022–a drop of 5.8 percent over the previous year 15.6 percent since 2018. “We are encouraged by the continued decrease in the number of children entering foster care and staying in foster care and we will continue working with our state, tribal and territorial partners to ensure an emphasis on family well-being and safe family reunification,” said Jeff Hild, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Administration on Children and Families (ACF) in a press release heralding the new numbers. ACF gave credit to the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which “helped change the conversation to be about prevention of foster care placements and preservation of families.” 

It seems premature to celebrate the shrinkage of the foster care rolls as a triumph without knowing what is happening to the children remaining at home who would have been removed in a different year. How many of these children are living with abuse or neglect that will leave lasting scars or impair their development, if not endanger their lives? Supporters of the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which passed in 2018, said that declining foster care counts would result from providing support to parents who needed help to address the problems (like substance abuse, mental illness and poor parenting skills) that led to their maltreatment of their children.

After an allegation of abuse or neglect is substantiated, an agency can place a child in foster care or open a case for in-home services, among other options.1 FFPSA made it possible to use the same federal funds for foster care and in-home services, allowing children to stay at home safely while their parents addressed the issues that put them at risk. A major purpose of FFPSA was to enable states to use federal funds that were formerly available only for foster care to pay for parenting support, mental health, and drug treatment that would enable children to stay safely with their families. The rationale for this change was that allowing foster care funds to be used for such services was necessary to enable states to keep kids out of foster care.

However, FFPSA has not made massive federal resources available for such services. ACF estimates that only 18,400 children in the entire country were served by Title IV-E prevention services programs in FY 2023, at a cost of $167 million. But perhaps states are using their own funds to pay for these services? After all, foster care is more expensive than services provided to families in their homes. Both require case management, but instead of the cost of room and board for foster youth, providing in-home services usually involve referring parents to mental health and drug treatment services often funded by Medicaid or paying for parenting support programs that cost less than foster care. (Of course the supporters of FFPSA ignored this basic fact and claimed the legislation would revolutionize child welfare!). States were already providing these services before FFPSA and they could have increased them without the promised federal funding.

But believe it or not, nobody knows if more children and their families are receiving in-home services as the foster care rolls decline, since the federal government doesn’t ask states for this information. While states were already required to report the number of children entering foster care, leaving it, and in care at a point in time, FFPSA did not add a requirement to provide the same data on services provided to children and families in their homes, now that they were also covered by federal Title IV-E funds.2 Hoping some states might track this data of their own accord, I searched the data publications and dashboards on the websites of the ten states with the largest number of children in foster care according to the most recent AFCARS report,3 but I was able to obtain this data for only California and Texas.

California has by far more children in foster care than any other state, 45,924 children at the end of September, 2022, which was 12.4 percent of the national total. Fortunately, there is extraordinarily good data from the California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP), a collaboration between University of California at Berkeley and the California Department of Social Services. The CCWIP dashboards include data on the number of entries into foster care and the opening of Family Maintenance cases, as in-home cases are called in California. Entries into foster care declined precipitously from April 2019 to March 2020 and continued declining, though more slowly, through March 2024. Family Maintenance case openings also declined continuously throughout the period. Thus, there was no increase in Family Maintenance case openings to compensate for the decline in removals. Or put in a different way, the total number of cases opened for child welfare services dropped from 46,264 at the beginning of the period to 29,969 at the end–a drop of 35 percent. Rather than a shift from foster care to in-home services, there has been a shrinkage of children reached by child welfare services overall.

Source: California Child Welfare Indicators Project, Entries, https://ccwip.berkeley.edu/childwelfare/reports/Entries/MTSG/r/ab636/l and Case Openings, https://ccwip.berkeley.edu/childwelfare/reports/CaseOpenings/MTSG/r/ab636/l.

Texas has the third largest state foster care caseload, after Florida. The Texas data are a bit more confusing. The number of children entering foster care dropped from 16,028 in 2021 to 9,623 in 2022, an incredible 40 percent, while the number of children entering in-home services declined steeply as well, resulting in a 35.7 percent drop in all case openings. Both drops may well have been related to a new Texas law that took effect on September 1, 2021 and changed the definition of neglect to an action or lack of action that puts a child in “immediate danger” of harm, rather than “substantial risk” of harm as the previous language read. The bill also put restrictions on child removals, requiring that children can be removed only from parents who display “blatant disregard” for their actions, or whose inaction “results in harm to the child or creates an immediate danger to the child’s physical health or safety.” Interestingly, in 2022, foster care entries actually rose slightly in Texas, while family preservation entries sprung back to where they were in FY2021, resulting a substantial increase in total case openings that year. Nevertheless, the overall trend over time was a decrease in foster care entries, family preservation case openings and the total number of children receiving help through open in-home or out-of home cases. That total dropped from 72,181 to 48,619 over five years–a drop of 32.6 percent–almost the same as the drop in California’s child welfare case openings.

Source: Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, CPS Conservatorship, Removals, https://www.dfps.texas.gov/About_DFPS/Data_Book/Child_Protective_Services/Conservatorship/Removals.asp, and CPS Family Preservation, Children Entering Services, https://www.dfps.texas.gov/About_DFPS/Data_Book/Child_Protective_Services/Family_Preservation/Children_Entering_Services.asp

Florida, the state with the second largest number of children in foster care, reports on the numbers of children entering foster care but not on the number entering in-home cases. One can, however, compare the number of children in foster care at a point in time with the number of children and young adults receiving in-home services. Both numbers have been decreasing and the number of children receiving in-home services has been consistently about half of the number of children in foster care. But these numbers don’t tell us whether declining entries to foster care have been offset by increasing entries to in-home services. In general, foster care cases last longer than in-home cases. Not knowing the average length of stays in foster care and in-home cases, and how they have changed over time, one cannot tell whether in-home case openings have made up for the reduced number of entries into foster care.

The Florida data show why point-in-time data cannot be used to answer the question of whether the decline in foster care entries has been accompanied by a rise in in-home case openings. Unfortunately, none of the other eight states with the highest caseloads provide this data on their websites. Illinois and Indiana provide point-in-time data on foster care and in-home participants. The other five states with the largest caseloads–Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and North Carolina–display no data on in-home case participants at all.

If California and Texas are typical, states have not been increasing their provision of in-home services to make up for declines in foster care. Instead, the total number of abused and neglected children being helped by in-home or out-of-home services (or foster care) has declined by as much as a third in five years. But we cannot assume that California and Texas represent the entire nation. It is unfortunate that the writers of FFPSA did not requiring states to include data on in-home case openings and total caseloads, given that the legislation allowed federal funds to be used for this purpose. States have not begun tracking and reporting on this data on their own, and are triumphantly proclaiming the drop in foster care without even reporting on whether in-home services are being provided instead. When Congress considers desperately-needed fixes to FFPSA, a requirement that states report in-home case data analogous to the foster care data in the AFCARS system should be included in the new legislation.

Notes

  1. Other options include referring a family to a community provider or even doing nothing nothing if the abuse or neglect was assumed to be a one-time event unlikely to occur. The family may also refuse in-home services, and the agency would then have to decide whether to file a court petition to require such services ↩︎
  2. States must provide to National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) information on how many children receive “postresponse services,” meaning services after a child protection investigation. But unfortunately, “postresponse services” includes foster care and provides a duplicated count, counting children every time they are the subject of an investigation, so it is not useful in telling us how many children receive in-home services. ↩︎
  3. State foster care data can be accessed from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/report/trends-foster-care-adoption. According to the latest information, the ten states with the largest number of children in foster care on September 30, 2022 were California, Florida, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Missouri, Pennsyhlvania, Arizona, and Indiana. ↩︎

Texas children adopted out-of-state: what happens when the push for adoptions goes too far?

 

Photos: nightlight.org
Photo: Associated Press

On May 24, 2018, the Chronicle of Social Change published “Bigger in Texas: Number of Adoptions and Parents Who Lose Their Rights.” Reporter Christie Renick points out that Texas has received 15% of the federal adoption incentives that have been given out since the program began in 1998. According to federal data, Texas has about seven percent of the foster children in America, so it has received over twice its share of adoption incentives based on foster care population.

So what is Texas doing differently from other states? Renick suggests that it is a combination of the state’s aggressive push to terminate parental rights along with an emphasis on placing kids with kin. But Renick does not address another factor that may contribute to Texas’ adoption success. And that is the number of Texas children who are adopted by families in other states. Texas is exporting many of its unwanted children.

Child advocates became aware of this issue in the wake of  the violent death of Jennifer and Sarah Hart and most likely all six of their adopted children when their car drove off a California cliff on March 26, 2018. We soon learned that Jennifer and Sarah Hart were living in Minnesota when they adopted their six children from the Texas foster care system. Three of the siblings were adopted in 2006 from Colorado County, Texas and another set of three in 2009 from Harris County, which includes Houston.

Oregon’s release of files from a 2013 investigation following the family’s move to Oregon provided limited information about these adoptions.  An employee of the Department of Human Services (DHS) in Douglas County, Minnesota told an Oregon investigator that  “the State of Texas works with this Permanent Family Resource Center…Texas seems to do a number of adoptions through this agency, even when the Child Welfare Office has not supported the placement.”

The Minnesota employee’s comment was somewhat misleading because the Minnesota child welfare agency does not approve adoptions of children from another state. Instead, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS)  requires that out-of-state homes  be approved for adoption by “agencies licensed or certified to approve adoptive home studies in the state where the home is located.” Apparently the Permanent Family Resource Center (PFRC) was such a licensed agency.

An internet search provides skimpy information about PFRC, which dissolved early in 2012. According to a 2008 article in the Fergus Falls Journal, PFRC was founded by Maryjane Westra and Kristy Ringuette in 2000 with a focus on placing children from foster care with permanent adoptive parents. PFRC’s archived website and its Twitter page are still online. Eerily, its Twitter avatar is a photograph of Markis and Devonte Hart. The internet archives contain a document with profiles of families approved to adopt children, including Jennifer and Sarah Hart, pictured with Markis, Hannah and Abigail, the first set of siblings they adopted. The Harts were described as a “fun, active family” that was “eager to open their hearts and their home to adopted children.”

PFRC emphasized its openness to all potential adoptive families. Westra told the reporter that in forming the agency, “they wanted to expand the range of adoptive families to include those that had the will but needed a little help along the way.” On its Frequently Asked Questions page, PFRC said that it “wants successful families and are not interested in ‘weeding people out.’ A home study is your opportunity to speak about your strengths so the best possible match is made.” “We can always use families. You don’t have to be a perfect family, there is no perfect family,” Westra told the Fergus Falls Journal.

And PFRC was as good as their word. The agency apparently approved the Harts for adopting the second sibling set even though five months before the adoption was finalized, Hannah came to school with a bruised arm and said that Jennifer had hit her with a belt, resulting in a police report and an investigation by Douglas County Social Services. It is not clear if PFRC knew of the incident. But it probably happened during the trial period for the second adoption, during which the agency should have been very carefully monitoring how the family was adjusting to the second set of three siblings.

The addition of three children aged three or under could have precipitated great stress for a family that already had three young children aged about 10, 6 and 5. But PFRC staff and adoptive families often adopted large numbers of closely-spaced children. Westra cited a family that adopted a twelve-year-old and two toddlers. Three years later, they returned and adopted six more children. “It’s heartwarming when that happens,” Westra told the reporter. Of the 16 families approved to adopt, three already had 5 children and four (including the Harts) had three children. Claudia Fletcher, an adoption worker for PFRC, has 12 adopted children and writes about her life in a blog entitled Never a Dull Moment: my Journey as a Foster and Adoptive parent….12 Kids in 12 Years.

The appropriateness of larger families for adoption is a controversial issue. There is strong evidence that child maltreatment increases with family size and more closely spaced children. Having more children, and children closer together in age, can result in increased stress. Moreover, many adopted children, especially those who are older than infancy, need even more attention than other children their age. It is clear from discussions on adoption websites that mainstream adoption agencies are often reluctant to work with larger families. Clearly, PFRC did not have a problem with large families becoming even larger through adoption.

The scanty information about PFRC raises many questions. Was the home study process for the Harts flawed? Were there signals that could have been picked up by a more sophisticated and critical staff? Are there other children adopted through PFRC who are languishing in abusive homes? Are there other agencies around the country that are not interested in “weeding families out?” Adoptions records are sealed, so we probably won’t ever know the answers to most of these questions.

Child advocates told KPRC Houston’s Syan Rhodes that the Hart children’s fate was the result of “a state desperate to remove kids from the system.” And Texas is not the only state where this desperation may lead to adoptions that should never have taken place. States are graded by the federal government as well as outside groups on the size of their foster care caseloads and the time it takes to achieve permanency. Getting children off the rolls also saves money that would be spent on case management and other services and vacates desperately needed foster homes. And then there are of course the federal incentives from which Texas has benefited so consistently.

There were 5,413 adoptions consummated in Texas in 2017. According to Houston’s KPRC, 320 of these children were adopted out of state. That’s a lot of kids to worry about every year.

We don’t want kids to languish in foster care, but we don’t want to adopt them out to abusers. So what is the answer?  Keep children at home with support if it is safe, place them with relatives if appropriate, but recognize that aging out of foster care would have been a better fate than what the Hart children suffered.

This article was modified on June 4, 2017 at 5:30 PM in response to a correction issued by KFRC Houston regarding the number of adoptions by out-of-state families. The number that was originally attributed to the Houston area was actually statewide.