Austin News

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) is "unable or unwilling" to provide necessary information in a legislative-mandated report released earlier this month, according to the study, which the department's head criticized.

The report, "Community-Based Care Process Evaluation" of DFPS, provided multiple and "egregious" examples of the department's "unwilling to share information."

Those examples included DFPS' central office's refusal for its single source continuum contract (SSCC) about funding because that topic was being handled in an outcome evaluation, despite funding being part of the legislative authorization that commissioned the report. The central office also declined to allow a regional employee to talk about conservatorship. Instead, a central office team member was provided, and the evaluation teach was invited "and then disinvited without explanation" from protocol sessions, the report said.

Texas Tech University Associate Professor Eugene W. Wang | depts.ttu.edu/

The central office also declined to provide a data codebook, requests for which began in the fall of 2018, according to the report.

"DFPS was either unable or unwilling to share some information necessary to meet some of the legislatively-authorized evaluation requirements," the report said.

The report is dated from November 2020 but was not released until earlier this month.

The report is rooted in the Texas Legislature's efforts in 2017 to begin reforming the state's foster care system and to adopt community-based care.

That same year, lawmakers commissioned a report intended to review progress of those reforms, seeking, among other things, to determine successes and barriers, operations and resources, and what areas of difficulty still need to be addressed. The research was supervised by Texas Tech University associate professor Eugene Wang, who works in the university's community, family and addiction sciences department in the College of Human Sciences. The research also had financial support from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

The report found the current system has been "random, chaotic," overly centralized and "lacking an overall implementation strategy" with a clear need for greater transparency and accountability.

"One global impression of implementation was that there was a lack of a strategic framework and a lack of explicit, operationalized expectations," the report said. "This created processes that were random, chaotic and trial-and-error. This lack of a strategic process had many diffuse [and long-lasting] effects, most of them more negative than would be true with a more structured, strategic process. The lack of a strategic framework also means that there has been no structured process by which to learn from past mistakes, nor even a way to document that there had been past mistakes."

The report is not critical of the community-based care approach but did highlight many deficiencies on the part of state agencies responsible for implementation.

DFPS Commissioner Jaime Masters' objections to the report were included in the study's conclusion. The report lacks examples of random, chaotic or trial-and-error processes that would be instructive for DFPS to improve, Masters argued in a memo attached to the report.

"All I can glean from this portion of the report is that whomever was interviewed felt there was a lack of a strategic framework," Masters wrote. "It is not clear whether those interviewed were DFPS staff, SSCC staff, residential providers, health care providers, etc. Change invites confusion but without details of who felt this way, why, what processes were weak and why, and how DFPS could improve these processes, I do not know how to improve upon the challenges hinted at."