Foster Care and Child Welfare Week in Review – May 8, 2023
Here are some news items from last week related to foster care, adoption, and child welfare that caught our eye:
Texas officials received strong criticism from a federal judge on Monday for challenging her jurisdiction to investigate the use of potent mental health medications given to foster children. The court-appointed monitors have accused Texas of overmedicating these children, while state attorneys argue that the reviews of such prescriptions are excessive. During a status hearing arranged to address her authority to investigate the use of psychotropic drugs and the monitors’ invoices for March, U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack suggested that “outside pressure” may have led the lawyers for two state agencies to abruptly object to the monitors’ findings and request additional information. However, Jack did not provide any further details about the source of this pressure.
During a virtual status hearing held on Monday, U.S District Judge Janis Graham Jack spoke candidly about the ongoing lawsuit against the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) brought by plaintiffs representing children who are, or were, in the state’s care. The lawsuit, which has been in progress for more than ten years, alleges that DFPS is failing to safeguard the welfare of these children in numerous areas. Consequently, the court has appointed two monitors to conduct inquiries into the department and submit reports to Jack every six months.
The residential facilities in Texas that provide care for children in foster care have come under scrutiny in a recent review. The review raises serious concerns about the administration of multiple powerful psychotropic drugs to some of the children. In some cases, the children were given four or more of these drugs daily, which may be excessive. Moreover, monitors appointed by the court visited 14 facilities in 2022 and discovered poorly maintained medication logs containing errors or missing critical information for mentally ill children. The report on this review was presented in two tense hearings before U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack, who has been overseeing a class-action lawsuit against Texas’ foster care system for more than a decade.
Advocates claim that the system used by Texas foster care officials to track and monitor the health records of the nearly 20,000 children in their custody is outdated and unreliable, leading to harm or risk for the children. Despite a federal judge’s order in 2015 to fix the system’s deficiencies, these problems persist. Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat from Houston, acknowledged that the aging software, known as IMPACT, is widely frustrating for caseworkers, the court system, and others. The system, which has been in place since 1996, was designed to securely store foster children’s records, including health records and histories of neglect and abuse, but it does not allow for easy sharing of information among state and local health agencies, Medicaid, and healthcare providers for the foster children in Texas’ care.
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