Real reform for Texas CPS demands much more than just a management shakeup
Filed under Editorials at Sep 2016
Dallas Morning News Editorial
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Sometimes a shakeup at the top signals a critical message: It's a new era. Things are changing. We mean business.
That was almost certainly the intent this week in the news that half of the regional directors for Texas Child Protective Services offices will be replaced. On Tuesday, an agency spokesman confirmed that five of 10 regional chiefs — all of whom were recently ordered by the agency's new top official to reapply for their jobs — have either been fired or have chosen to retire.
This is not bad news. Texas CPS is an agency in crisis, plagued by high turnover, widespread inefficiency, inadequate response to its own critics and, worst of all, appalling failures to protect vulnerable children. This week's bureaucratic exodus is, if nothing else, a grim signal of intent from new agency chief Hank Whitman. The former head of the Texas Rangers was appointed in April as commissioner of the state's Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees CPS.
We should bear in mind, though, that while a management shakeup may be entirely appropriate, it's not actual reform.
Reform for Texas CPS demands hard work, systemic change, legislative will and public support. It means succeeding where other leaders — just as determined, just as well-meaning — have failed. It means more than a handful of heads on sticks.
It means struggling free of the agency's own dismal, cyclical history of tragic headlines, scrambling reaction, and a slow fade back to business as usual.
Children in this state are suffering. Some have been traumatized, over-medicated, shuffled from one dismal group home to the next. Some have been virtually abandoned, lost in the system by overburdened caseworkers.
A few, such a 4-year-old Grand Prairie girl named Leiliana Wright, have made the case for reform by the most tragic means possible. Leiliana was beaten to death by her mother and the mother's boyfriend last March after a burned-out, overloaded CPS caseworker failed to track her welfare.
No reshuffling of the organizational chart or revision to the policy manual will help Leiliana now. Victimized by monsters, she had no one to save her but the state of Texas — and Texas failed her miserably.
State Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, complained to agency officials this week that he has seen the same cycle of tragedy-and-reaction repeatedly, but that the agency has still not undergone the transformative change it needs to protect Texas' most vulnerable children.
A CPS spokesman responded that Whitman "realizes the urgency" of the need for change, and that there is "intensive activity going on behind the scenes."
Legislators, child welfare activists and Texas citizens need to see evidence of that urgency and activity — sooner, rather than later.
No one needs it more than Texas' most desperate kids. Some of them can't wait another day.
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