Foster Care and Child Welfare Week in Review – March 6, 2023
Here are some news items from last week related to foster care, adoption, and child welfare that caught our eye:
On Monday, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services announced it had chosen a lead “community-based care” contractor for Dallas, Collin and seven nearby counties east of Interstate 35. The nine-county area is the latest in Texas to have foster care removed from Texas Child Protective Services, which once almost entirely ran the system, and handed over to a private contractor. For at least two decades, private entities have been recruiting most foster homes — but they didn’t have lead responsibility for managing children’s cases. Private entities now will do that, too. The EMPOWER child welfare collaborative, which won the Dallas-area contract, is headed by the Texas subsidiary of TFI Family Services, Inc., a four-state foster care nonprofit based in Topeka, Kansas.
Texas lawmakers have filed more than 100 bills aimed at improving the state’s long-troubled Department of Family and Protective Services, which cares for the state’s most vulnerable children. Legislators are considering increasing the Department of Family and Protective Services’ budget, giving extended relatives more money to care for kids and notifying the subjects of child abuse investigations of their rights.
Hayim Nissim Cohen, 38, was charged last week with eight offenses including injury to a child under 15, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault of a child, and continuous sexual abuse of a child, adding to several charges against him from earlier last month, and a separate abuse case in 2019. Cohen was born Jeffrey Lujan Vejil in Odessa, Texas, in 1984 and graduated from Odessa High School in 2005. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services said six of Cohen’s adopted sons who are still minors have been transferred to foster care.
More children are up for adoption in the Abilene region than the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has seen since at least 2013. In 2022, DFPS had 275 children up for adoption in the Abilene region. Even though the number of children in placement went down in 2022, the number of children legally able to be adopted has been rising since 2013, the earliest year shown on their online database. A Sweetwater family is sharing their story of adopting seven children and raising many more to encourage others.
The Department of Family and Protective Services and the Office of Child Safety recently released its annual report on child fatalities for 2022. In 2022, 182 children died due to abuse and neglect in Texas. The most common causes of fatalities involving neglect were drowning, unsafe sleep, and physical neglect and medical neglect deaths. There were decreases in most causes of child deaths including in vehicle-related, unsafe sleep, neglectful supervision and drownings. The report identifies specific risk factors associated with child maltreatment and how often those factors appeared in confirmed child deaths. These risk factors include children who are 3 or under, families with a history of child maltreatment, substance abuse, parental mental health concerns and domestic violence in the home.
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