Texas’ foster care reforms were supposed to fix a deadly system. Instead, they might make it worse.
As published by the Texas Observer on May 29, 2013. Written with Emily DePrang.
Crystal Bentley is poised. She sits up straight at the formal dining room table of Angel Reach, a transitional home for former foster care youth in Conroe, and speaks with the measured voice of earned authority. In the little kitchen nearby, birdsong drifts through an open window. It’s a peaceful setting in which to describe her nightmarish childhood. It’s a story she’s told before, to advocates and policymakers, anyone who might change the system, and Bentley is an experienced, almost regal storyteller.
“I’m really comfortable with my life story,” she says, “because my situation is not the same anymore.”
Bentley never lived at Angel Reach, but she goes there for counseling and to volunteer. The nonprofit helped her find an apartment and a flexible job with a career prep agency. Before that, she lived at a women’s shelter.
Bentley is 23 now, independent, raising her three children and taking college classes, but for most of her childhood she was a ward of the state. Abandoned by her mother at age 4, Bentley grew up with Texas for a parent. Texas placed her in a series of homes its employees inspected and deemed safe. Texas paid people to feed and clothe her. Texas sent a caseworker to check on her once a month, and when Bentley told that caseworker she had been abused, which happened often, Texas moved her.
With no choice in the matter, Bentley became an expert on the state’s suitability as a parent. She and other foster care alumni and advocates travel to Austin every chance they get to tell legislators what’s wrong with the system, and beseech them to fix it. The lawmakers listen politely. Then Bentley goes home.
She says the most urgent problems—the ones that have to be fixed now, the ones that should never have been problems in the first place—concern basic child safety. Foster families should be more meticulously screened. Caseworkers should be responsible for fewer kids and have more time to spend with them. Children who report abuse should be believed. Abusers should be punished.
Many child welfare advocates list the same priorities. Texas’ foster care system needs more accountability at every level, they say; the system needs better screening, better training and, for God’s sake, more money. The advocates’ goal is so basic it’s almost pitiful: that when Texas removes children from their homes because of maltreatment, life should get better, not worse.
Life should, at the very least, continue. In the state’s 2013 fiscal year, 14 children died from abuse or neglect while in Texas’ custody. One was Alexandria Hill, taken from her parents because they smoked marijuana and one had seizures. In a rage, Alexandria’s foster mother smashed her head against the floor, killing her. She was 2. Another of the 14 lost was Karla Vasquez. Available records say only that she died of neglect at a residential treatment center that had been investigated six times in the past five years for allegations of physical abuse, sexual abuse and neglect—but never disciplined. A third was Orion Hamilton, whose head was crushed under the knee of her foster mother’s boyfriend, Jacob Salas. He had been arrested twice for family violence but never screened by Child Protective Services despite listing the foster home as his official address. Orion was less than a year old. Read More.