• Children removed from abusive homes are inadequately assessed physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally and educationally before being placed in substitute care.
• Little or no assessment leads to placement breakdowns, where children experience multi-placements and shuttled from one foster home or relative placement to the next.
• Multiple placements disrupt a child’s ability to bond with caregivers, which leads to other emotional attachment difficulties later in life.
• Children need a safe predictable school, home, spiritual and recreational environment to ensure healthy development.
• Relatives are often the best choice of placement, yet may not have adequate resources, training, support to handle abused kin and many families have intergenerational abuse factors that deem them unsafe placements.
• There are too few foster homes and foster home providers lose needed subsidies when they opt to adopt the children they foster.
• Family Court Judges are required to be trained in Family Violence but not necessarily Child Abuse and Neglect issues.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ISSUE #4: To increase appropriate & permanent placement

• Reduce Placement breakdowns:
• TDFPS needs adequate funding in order to thoroughly assess a child in assessment centers (or at the agency) within 30 days of removal before temporary or permanent placements. Appropriate initial placements will save costs on multiple placements.
• Ensure collateral child placement decision makers are sufficiently trained.
• Child abuse risk factors and child development training should be separate and distinct training required from the Judge’s family violence training requirements.
• Child Ad Litems should require same mandatory training and must be required to interview the child before recommending case decisions.
• Facilitate Safe Kinship Care Placement. Kinship caretakers need to be offered adequate support:
• Based on successful results to date, expand the kinship one-time stipend program implemented from SB 58 to all qualifying kin.
• Offer kinship parent training, parent support services and other benefits associated with inclusion in the Texas Foster Family Association.
• Increase kinship CPS caseworker/home-assessment specialists to offer kinship parents the CPS worker support and facilitate quicker placement with safe kin.
• Investment in kin support could be cost saving or cost neutral compared to foster costs.
• Facilitate adoption of CPS children: FPS should initiate a pilot project to study the outcomes of a subsidy increase for adoptive parents commensurate with foster parent subsidies in order to remove barriers to foster parents adopting foster children.
• Explore alternative to paid foster care for prospective parents for potential cost savings.
• FPS should study the feasibility of creating an alternative to parents who want to care for children temporarily yet do not require subsidies.
• CPS could create a designation other than foster home for those that don’t want to be associated with the term “foster parents”. A sub-group could be added such as “Bridge Caretaker” for prospective non-paid parents, which also reflects the provider’s true role.
• Bridge providers would be able to donate their forfeited subsidies to fund child abuse prevention best practices.
• Bridge providers would need to comply with training, home study and all the same necessary foster parents licensing requirements.
• This new designation could be piloted along with an awareness campaign to measure the effectiveness of this option, which may result in significant cost savings to the agency.