Children removed from their home after suspected child abuse or neglect meet a sometimes chaotic process, as CPS tries to determine their needs in terms of mental health and more. Some children receive very little screening to determine the best services and placement for them, while others get redundant evaluations by provider after provider, with no control on quality. Cleaning up these front-end assessments, the goal of a task force to be created under SB 681 (West), would prevent kids from languishing in the system and improve CPS's effectiveness at getting children's initial needs met.
Texans Care for Children policy intern and former CPS caseworker Ashley Harris testified last month on the bill, which, this week, received unanimous support in a vote in the Texas Senate. It now moves to the Texas House. Excerpts from Ashley's testimony:
Currently, the Department of Family and Protective Services uses developmental, psychological and psychiatric testing to assess the needs of children in foster care. These assessments are critical because judges, caseworkers, and providers use the information from these assessments to determine what services are needed, medications prescribed, and appropriate placement for children. It is important that the assessment process is evaluated to ensure testing is evidence-based and recommendations are most appropriate for the child and those providing services to the child. The appropriate provision of services and appropriate first placement of a child has shown to have a lasting impact on a child’s likelihood of success within and after involvement with the child welfare system.
In the fall 2009, Partners in Child Protection Reform, a forum facilitated by Texans Care for Children developed a group to focus on behavioral assessments for children involved with Child Protective Services. The Assessment Improvement Circle, in part comprised of providers and provider associations who rely on the information in assessments to [care for] foster children, identified improvement of the assessment process as an area of priority, having experienced challenges in making use of many evaluation reports. . . .
We believe that this bill has the potential to ensure that children in the system are more quickly matched with the services they need, are more often placed in appropriate settings and are not assessed and reassessed at great cost when doing so is not warranted. We ask for you to support the passage of SB 681.
