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Child welfare system transitions to private contractor
Beginning Friday, the foster care system is making changes in Texas. Kathleen LaValle with Dallas CASA joined Good Day to talk about the transition from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to a private contractor called Empower.
DALLAS - It’s no secret that the foster care system in Texas is a mess. But beginning Friday, there will be big changes to try to fix that.
The state’s child welfare system is moving from the Department of Family and Protective Services to a private contractor.
Texas Family Initiative LLC was awarded the contract to oversee foster care in Dallas County and its surrounding counties with a program called Empower.
"It affects a nine-county area what’s happening tomorrow, which includes Dallas County," said Kathleen LaValle, the CEO for Dallas CASA. "What’s going to happen tomorrow is that case management is going to transition over to a private employer named Empower. And so, today’s state caseworker who’s assigned to a case will tomorrow be an employee of a private employer."
It’s part of the state’s move to community-based care. It has the potential for more efficiency, flexibility, more opportunity, and more people stepping up.
"The idea is that we should as a community embrace children who are brought into protective care," LaValle said. "And so rather than have an entirely centralized system statewide, we’re hoping that community organizations will help support children and that we’ll have more children that are actually placed in their local community, so they have the potential for example to stay in their same school."
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Last March, Texas Family Initiative LLC told FOX 4 that Empower's first goal would be to recruit and train foster parents to create more licensed foster homes in the Dallas region.
Another benefit is more possible funding and less red tape for the system that will no longer be run by the state.
"It just depends on the contractor. We’ve had some contractors who have brought a tremendous amount of additional revenue to this opportunity and so there are more funds available. This organization will be able to do fundraising in a way that a state agency does not," LaValle said. "And what we’re hoping for is that flexibility, that innovation so that if you have a bright idea to improve the outcome for a child, it doesn’t have to go through a whole state bureaucracy to be approved."
However, a drawback is that not all of the state’s caseworkers are transferring to a job with Empower. The system will lose some of its expertise.
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"Many of them have transferred over. But it tends to be the workforce that had less experience. So maybe they were just hired in the last year or two. And so that’s where our role as Dallas CASA really becomes critical because we have been on the case since the beginning. We’re that consistent grown up for a child. You know, they may have a different caseworker tomorrow, but they’re gonna have the same CASA" LaValle said.
More than 700 children were removed from homes in Dallas County last year and nearly 2,200 were placed in foster care or protective care.
LaValle is hopeful that they’ll see benefits from the private system fairly quickly.
"The idea is that this is a performance-based contract and so there are actual outcomes that are outlined in the contract. We’ll know what percentage of children stayed in their home communities. Today, about half of the kids end up being placed outside of their home county," she said.
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Other measures of success would be the number of children who stayed with their siblings and the number of times a child is moved.
"We’ll be looking at all of these kind of standard measurements to see are we getting better outcomes through this privatization?" LaValle said.
Dallas CASA has a luncheon panel discussion planned for next month. Some big names are moderating the discussion including the Dallas ISD superintendent and Dallas Mavericks CEO Cynt Marshall, who has adopted multiple children.
For more information about the event or to volunteer, visit www.dallascasa.org/dallas-casa-events/cherish-the-children/.