Edgar Walters, Texas Tribune
Daniel Hernandez, an investigator for the state’s Child Protective Services agency, left his South Austin home at dawn on a recent Thursday holding a stack of folders. Their contents detailed troubles facing the children and families Hernandez was scheduled to check on that day: a starving infant, parents using drugs in front of a child and a teenager’s suicide attempt.
The Texas foster care system in which Hernandez works has been giving off increasingly desperate distress signals for months. Officials are scrambling to find homes for an influx of traumatized children, sometimes having them sleep in state office buildings or parking them in psychiatric hospitals. A recent federal court ruling condemned the state’s long-term foster care as an inhumane institution in which children “often age out of care more damaged than when they entered.”
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In Grand Prairie, the death of 4-year-old Leiliana Wright last month led to the firing of two state workers and the resignation of another. And on Friday, news broke that the 17-year-old suspect in a homicide case on the University of Texas at Austin campus is a runaway foster youth.
It falls to people like Hernandez — a 27-year-old Texas State University graduate making roughly $43,000 each year, who’s logged 125,000 miles and countless hours in his Toyota Corolla over the past four years — to try to keep the system from collapsing.
On this Thursday, first came an 8 a.m. meeting with lawyers from the district attorney’s office who had come to a Travis County children’s forensic services center. They were there to interview a 7-year-old and a 3-year-old about their infant sibling, who was apparently being starved at home. Hernandez watched from behind one-way glass. Four weeks earlier, Hernandez had discovered the infant, who at that point was “basically just bone,” he said, and accompanied the child to a hospital, staying until 2 a.m. The infant remains in the hospital and is gaining about a pound of weight each week, Hernandez said.
His investigation led Child Protective Services to find a home with relatives where the infant’s older siblings could stay while the case continued. But these days, he says, those homes are harder and harder to find.
“It’s been a lot more difficult to find placement,” Hernandez said. The Department of Family and Protective Services, the state agency overseeing foster care and CPS, is struggling with new policies and a lack of funding that have made both temporary and permanent homes for children scarce.
Advocates for foster children say the system is in crisis. If the state can’t find more money to ensure good homes, they say, children will continue to endure hardships that rob them of a chance at success: no permanency, no sense of belonging and recurring trauma. In recent months, the state’s ability to find temporary, out-of-home placements for children with friends or relatives has fallen dramatically, leaving an already strained foster care system to pick up the slack.
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