Changes in child welfare paying dividends

Tucked in a back room on the seventh floor of Harris County's juvenile courthouse, Judge Katrina M. Griffith often sits shoulder-to-shoulder with a teenager who has been uprooted from home. Then she's known to fire off probing questions: "What relatives have you friended on Facebook?" "Whose numbers have you got in your phone?"

Her goal is to find permanent connections for children in custodial limbo, either by returning them to their homes or finding adoptive parents. The 590 active cases in her court include three siblings getting adopted by an adult half-sister in her 30s who never knew the kids existed before Griffith and others began shaking down remote branches of the family tree.

Griffith's Child Protective Services Project court opened in 2014 amid a top-to-bottom overhaul of Harris County's child welfare practices. It's reform that appears to be paying dividends. While the numbers of children in court custody have remained fairly stable at the state and national level, Harris County has seen a 32 percent drop, a reduction of 1,832 cases, between 2010 and 2015.

New culture embraced

Judges, lawyers and social workers said the marked decline cannot be explained by a single policy. The decline in cases is the result of a series of reforms across agencies. For example, judges set more frequent court dates and process cases more quickly. And social workers have embraced a new institutional culture.

From the moment a child is removed from a home, case workers focus on finding safe placements and proactively hustling on the child's behalf to avoid bringing the custody question into court. They have a dual goal: to ensure a child's safety while working to find the child a loving, permanent home, ideally with family members.

Foster care exists to protect vulnerable children, but some languish for years in safe but impermanent settings, leaving one temporary home for the next.

Sometimes protective custody is the only option and services have to kick in to support the family, said C.J. Broussard-White, Harris County regional director for the Department of Family and Protective Services. But that option in the long term may not be the best solution. "Child welfare groups across the nation have come to a greater recognition that we don't make the greatest parents," Broussard-White said.

Historically, children here were taking longer to enter the system, and once parents' rights were terminated, they spent longer in limbo than in other regions, said John J. Specia Jr., a former civil judge from San Antonio who would bring sweeping changes to the state agency when he became commissioner of Texas DFPS in 2012.

As a result of this sluggish legal process, a large number of children were aging out of the foster system without a safety net.

"I've been screaming from the rooftops for years that we needed more resources in Harris County," said Judge David Farr, the administrative judge for the county's family court division. "But I didn't get much traction."

A number of major research foundations began looking into best practices for child welfare. A 2004 study by the Pew Commission on Foster Care recommended that judges exert leadership to fix the process. A study the state commissioned from the non-profit Texas Appleseed, which focuses on justice for children and low-income families, sought to identify legal barriers to children exiting foster care: Were judges seeing kids often enough? Were they asking the right questions? Issuing the right orders? The report found that infrequent hearings, and a singular emphasis on safety - rather than also pushing for a permanent home - led to an overall lack of urgency about getting children out of foster care.

Children's Commission

The courts improved how cases were docketed. The Harris County Attorney, whose office represents the CPS as an agency on foster cases, cut each of its lawyers' caseloads in half. In 2008, the state established the Children's Commission, a permanent task force, chaired by Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman to strengthen courts and improve safety and well-being for children in custody.

Specia is a veteran jurist considered an avid reformer in child welfare circles. Since becoming DFPS commissioner, he has visited the county's CPS courts more often than all his predecessors combined, said Lynn Chamberlin, who has represented CPS for the Harris County Attorney since 1991. When Specia gave talks about finding permanent homes for children, his new mantra, social workers and family advocates would swarm him afterwards and take selfies with him.

Adoptive parents used to wait nine months to a year for custody due to the backlog of cases needing redaction. The court is obligated to remove names and identifying information from the file before an adoption goes through. Harris County Protective Services paid nine employees to redact over 600 adoption files. Adoptions now close in four to six months.

Another seismic change was the creation of the county's CPS Project Court run by Griffith, the juvenile court judge. This court is one of 25 in the state but the only one in an urban setting and the only one co-funded by the county. Griffith has nothing on her docket but cases that have reached the stage where the state needs to find permanent homes for children. The cases get transferred to her court at that phase from 10 of her colleagues' juvenile and family court dockets.

The judge has extensive one-on-one conversations with children about their goals. She shows them motivational videos, offers them pizza, reviews college funding options and asks where they plan to spend the holidays.

"The magic of Katrina's court is she only does one thing, and she does it really well," said Judge Michael Schneider, one of eight district judges who pass cases on to her.

Change is also palpable at CPS, where social workers now begin looking for possible kinship placements within three days, rather than within a month or two, of removal. They set up visits with birth parents as often as possible, rather than once a month, and they tailor the length and location of visits to the risk factors of each case.

Visits are opportunities for case workers not only to provide guidance but to praise parents about what they were doing right, said Sheryl Dotson, a CPS program administrator for Harris County. It's a chance to say, "I liked how you changed that diaper, or read a book" or "I like how you comforted the child," Dotson said.

Part of the cultural shift in Harris County is acknowledging that it is OK if these visits are tough for children and if they cry. The staff also began drawing up informal contracts between a child's parent and a relative arranging for short stays, to bide time while they figured out whether the child could eventually return home and to sidestep going to court.

"What we saw happening was we were losing our families," Dotson said. "Children didn't know their parents. Siblings were separated. We weren't keeping kids connected."