Travis County Commissioners Court
August 21, 2007
Item 31
Number 31 is to receive annual report from the Travis County children's protective services board.
>> > today we have representatives from children protect sieve services to give you an overview of what's happening with this board over the last year. Bylaws call foon annual report to the court, so I believe we submitted that to you in writing a couple of weeks ago. And they're going to give you a brief overview. Do you want to introduce yourselves.
>> bob endy.
>> cirstein moody.
>> sheila brown.
>> nancy bell lows.
>> and ms. Belllows, will be doing the bulk of the presentation this morning and I'm going to try to work this computer.
>> what we tried to do with this annual report is to show trends across time. With no further adieu... You may know that the department of family and department services divides the state into regions. We're in region 7 and Travis County is the largest in the region. I used to work for that agency, by the way. And we have 18 investigation units, nine conservatorship units where we have legal responsibility for children or the agency does. And then we used to call them inhome services, but now called family-based. And finally foster and adoptive home development unit. That's all with the agency as opposed to the county. This is one of the trends across time that we added to the chart or the report. You can see that they're basically about a 24 percent increase in the last decade in children ages zero to 13 and also all children zero to 17. Okay. And then as you can imagine with plieption growth, we've had an increase in the number of alleged and confirmed victims. And of course although not all alleged are confirmed, it's also true that not all confirmed are necessarily -- in other words, you can have an allegation and it isn't confirmed, but that doesn't mean abuse or neglect didn't occur, it just hasn't been confirmed. We do have about 211,000 children in the county now as of fy 2006. And you can see the numbers there about alleged, confirmed and then roughly 500 children were removed from their home. This was a prevalence rate. This is per 1,000 children in our population as compared to other major counties. As you can see, we have the second highest prevalence rate, and this is confirmed victims of abuse or neglect. And that was true last year as well. This is an increase that really does concern me. Some of the increases you saw earlier could be attributed to population growth, but this is a prevalence rate. This is number of children in dfpf legal responsibility per one thousand in the children population. So this is an increase that probably reflects things like stress factors, more substance abuse, whatever might be the factors that contribute to child abuse or neglect. And this is definitely a new addition to the annual report. Okay. We don't like to talk about child deaths. We had eight this last fiscal year. And you can see from the chart the number has remained six, seven, eight or nine over the last -- well, since about 2000. So although we don't like child deaths, at least it hasn't been going up the way we've been seeing increases elsewhere. And altogether we've had 88 die as a result of abuse or neglect since 2000. I know when I worked dmirn's protective services I was anyway eve nif to -- naive enough to think that physical abuse was the smeers just kind of abuse, but you can see that neglectful sprfghts most common kind. And when I worked in the agency, we found more fatalities are due to neglect. And I think it's just something to really appreciate that neglectful supervision is the most common type of confirmed abuse or neglect. And then this is just showing you that along with some of the other increases you've seen, we have had an increase in the number of children in substitute care in Travis County. Again, over the last decade. Now, victoria barr, we don't nornlly talk -- normally talk about specific cases, but she was in the news when she was first removed from her home, she suffered severe neglect. You may have read about her in the newspaper. And in plart statesman did an article about her on June 17th. I wanted to go ahead and highlight her partly because she's an indication of why we need the flexible dollars of the Travis County board that it can provide dpierd the department of children and protective services. As children get older they normally need less supervision, but she suffered such severe neglect, lacks language and decision making abilities, presumebly because of the severe neglect, and so she continued to need things like summer day care, so forth. She was lucky to have foster parents that have been very, very dedicated and we've been able to help her stay with those particular foster parents. So she's kind of a success story. We helped provide services to her over several years. There are a couple of us on the board that are particularly concerned about children aging out. Victoria barr being one of them. That there is a statistic -- I wasn't able to track down the source, but 40% of children who age out of foster care become homeless. And I don't think it's just a Travis County statistic. I understand it might be a national statistic. By we are very concerned about the plight of youth as they age out of foster care. There is a program called p.a.l. That the dfpf helps to provide to help prepare older youth for living on their own, but in investigating we found it's basically a pretty underfunded program, not able to provide a lot of the services that are definitely needed. We found that the caseloads are about 300. That's huge. Again, this is not going to meet the need of preparing older youth for independent living. There's little training for foster parents who have older youth in their care about preparing the youth for independent living. Virtually no services for youth that are in residential facilities according to what we were told. Very limited transitional housing. And of course, youth don't have a credit rating and they have little money and then on top of that they don't have the family support that most youth would have to help them out with with that kind of thing. These youth could use more mentoring. And then finally, I work at a.c.c. And a.c.c. Is trying to do something for these youth, but the resources for college-bound youth are quite a bit more than for resources of youth that are not bound for college. Okay. We just wanted to give you a little bit of a flavor of how we spend our money. You can see that the original budget was 450,000 and what we spent was a little under 400,000. We have -- of course the county, and you may know more about this than I do, but the county provides a lot of support to the whole children's protective services system in the sense of judges and attorneys and thing like that. This chart here is just to emphasize to you that while the prevalence rate, be and that's a rate that can't be explained in terms of population growth. It's really a reflection of growth in problems because it's a per 1,000 children in the population. But that has been going up over time. You can see that in kind of the green, blue color. While the budget that Travis County cps board has had has both revised and spent has been going down. It focuses on the tremendous service of foster parents and things like April is child abuse prevention month, so we try to participate and collaborate with other organizations in increasing awareness, that kind of thing. And then the advocacy committee, which is one I'm on, we try to be aware of legislative issues that could improve such as the aging out concern. Okay. Some of our accomplishments, we do review expenditure requests every month. Lots of these are real urgent. And we do try to recognize dfps staff on a quarterly basis. Some of them do incredibly admirable work. Like I said before, we tried to participate in some of the April and may activities, April being child abuse prevention month and may being foster parent appreciation month. The prom project is kind of special. That's helping make sure that the youth in foster care can have the attire and everything that they need. We do have a board member not here today, jean stamp, who has been doing an excellent job of representing us at the region 7 council of child welfare boards. And then communicating back to us where we can collaborate with them. And then finally, the Texas council of child welfare boards is for the entire state. Just to let you know, even more flexible source of funding for is the capital area safe kids fund. This is a nonprofit. This is a doing business as name, and I can't even myself remember the official name. When we get real urgent needs, like a foster parents just can't wait or we need to help with travel so that a parent can see a child that was placed out of the county. These are just some examples we may draw on the capital area safe kids fund. And then just a few figures here, we actually spend a little bit more using this capital area save kids fund, roughly about $6,000, whereas we raised only about 4,000. I should tell you, though, that the united heritage credit union recently gave us quite a lot of money and we are in the process of developing guidelines of how we might spend that money.
>> are you at liberty to tell us how much?
>> I think it's about 20,000. Do I remember? About 20,000. Yeah. So anyway, some other examples of how we use that money, gifts for pal graduates. Again, these are the older youth that are going to age out of foster care and sometimes we help them buy like a high school ring or something like that. I think that about wraps is up. I want to thank you for the opportunity to do this report. I haven't been in touch with ms. Gomez who appointed me, but I really have been very thrilled to be on the board. I was appointed when my father was dying, and so I technically got appointed in may 2002, but I didn't technically start getting active until that fall. Victoria barr is a good example of how important it is that we have good foster parents and that we support them like we do with the Travis County board.
>> any other comments before we take questions from the court? From board members? Questions? So how many age out annually?
>> that's a good question. I couldn't really tell you, but I just --
>> 30, 40, 50, about?
>> I would think so. When you consider there are three pal coordinators, plus a supervisor who has a few -- carries a caseload and they each have a caseload of about 300. Not the supervisor, but the 3 pal coordinators. So these are all used that are 16, 17, 18 years old. So yeah, I'm sure the number aging out is significant.
>> so do you age out at 18 after high school or just whenever you reach 18?
>> yeah. There are some complications. If you didn't graduate from high school and you're still 19, you can still be part of foster care. There are some complications.
>> they can stay until 21 now if you don't graduate.
>> okay, until 21. Did that change recently?
>> yes.
>> thank you.
>> so what is your most urgent need that the Commissioners court can help you with.
>> that's a very good question. I hate to answer that by myself, but I would like to say I would like to see us fund another pal position. And I don't think it's uncommon for counties such as harris county, bexar county, to help fund positions that actually end up doing dfps agency work. But what I was thinking is just if we could just help fund one more pal coordinator, then more youth could be better served to be prepared.
>> my recommendation to the board is to make a list of recommendations. We fund 40, 50, 60 agencies, many of which work with young people, and in my view it's important to us to get young adults into a life-style that enables them to take care of themselves.
>> there are a lot of resources out there, but you have to know where they are and how to access them. So maybe we can put together a strategy to help do that. As a last resort during another budget cycle, maybe look at an f.t.e. If we need to.
>> okay. Well, we're just delighted to hear that. And we will certainly --
>> I'm just thinking as one member of the court.
>> yeah. That's music to our ears and we'll be glad to go back to the board and come back with a list of recommendations for sure. That would be just super.
>> any other questions or bold recommendations?
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> one of the things that we are truly working on is to try to limit the placement, but they can have anywhere from two to 20, it just depends on their behavior, the commitment to the child, so that can go -- a child will kind of dictate the number of placements, but I don't want to sit here and say there's a limit because we do have some children that have several placements.
>> and often times the placements may be kin, grandma and so forts. Forth. And the capital area safe kids fund has helped kin when they can't get funds elsewhere.
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> we have a kin ship program and if we meet the guidelines, they can get a very small amount of help.
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> relatives can become a foster parent and they can get more aid and they will get foster parent ream reimbursement. A lot of relatives don't do that because of the regulations and the minimum standards that they have to meet, the guidelines.
>> I would just like to say also that I didn't really fully appreciate until I got on this board how much taking in one child, much less a sibling group, requires beds and linens and some of those really practical things that dfps is just not set up to help families with. So there's a lot we could do in the way of supporting kinship care.
>> we look forward to additional opportunities and partnering with the state.
>> thank you so much for your time.
>> thank you so much for coming. And we do appreciate your work. That is heart wrenching, gut wrenching.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Wednesday, August 22, 2007, 18:30 AM