>> I think we're ready to start. Good morning. I call the september 12,
2025 meeting of the family and protective services council meeting
to order at nine o'clock. I hope it's nine o'clock.
I'd like to welcome everyone here in person and also those that are watching online.
we're going to start by introducing the council members.
I guess, I will start. I'm dr. Connie almeida,
and I am from fort pine county, richmond texas.
>> I'm enrique mata, and I'm from el paso, texas.
>> good morning everybody. Omedi cantu arismendez, jim wells county.
>> good morning everyone. Michael barton, also from fort pine county.
>> good morning, juli craze, dallas.
>> great. Thank you. Also up here with us, we have audrey o'neill,
the acting dfps commissioner [inaudible]. I really hope that by the time I'm done,
I pronounce your name. I really apologize. The general counsel for the department.
great. Thank you. We're going to go ahead and start with our agenda for today,
and we have a quorum, that's great.
the first item on the agenda is to make a motion to
accept the minutes from our last meeting.
>> I moved that we accept the minutes from our last meeting.
>> do I have a second for that? >> I'll second that.
>> is everyone in agreement with that?
yes. Thank you. We have accepted the minutes from the june 13 meeting.
thank you. Just some general items,
administrative items to remind everyone is our upcoming council meeting dates.
our next meeting for this year will be december 12, 2025.
then in 2026, we have two meetings,
march 13 and june 12.
next, we're going to move on to council actions
and activities of the council members in their communities or throughout the state.
let's go ahead and maybe, anybody that would like to share about what they're doing in their community,
that would be great since our last meeting. Thank you.
>> sorry, not so much in the community specifically, but I've taken an interest in the upgrade of our software system, the reporting system.
impact, as I understand, is extremely old. I've done some work in tac and so
I'm working with the team just answering some general questions. I have a general idea of everything that seems to be going smoothly,
but I want to be involved in that because it's one of these things that often gets overlooked,
but it's a system that our folks are going to be using every single day in the future.
>> hello. The last few months has been very interesting being a council member.
but I do want to share that I attended jim wells county. I was invited by the judge,
the jim wells county family court. I was able to listen and see our staff in action,
and I want to thank them for being so professional and very caring. I really appreciate that.
second has just been very busy talking to different folks out there,
what is the need and relying that message back to our laison.
I want to thank cheryl and our acting commissioner for being so compassionate and understanding and listening. Thank you so much.
>> well, out in el paso, we've had quite a few activities going on.
one of the things that I thought I'd highlight for you all is that the recent updates to the cell phone prohibition and ban in schools,
we have a group that comes together called the family leadership council,
and they established a task force to talk about how we make sure that this is
a positive approach that it's not something that becomes so punitive that it causes trouble for youth.
what was surprising to us that this task force met a couple of times.
as school started, there was an anticipated move for there to be panic from parents that they couldn't get
a hold of their children and that we were going to see kids have a lot of negative consequences from it.
surprisingly, we saw a lot less of that. The comments from the associate superintendents that we talked with
were very positive and that the kids were very compliant.
most schools have moved to a position where if they walk in the door and turn the phone off and keep it in the backpack,
that it's not a problem. But one of the things that they're trying to track right now and
I thought this was interesting in particular is that they're seeing a marked decrease in
cyberbullying but they're getting a lot less commentary from that.
this is anecdotal information and we're looking at how to track that, but it was a positive thing that was reported to us.
aside from that, we are working towards other programs with dps involvement,
we're looking at how we're handling some of our residential treatment and human trafficking conditions in our community
and our north center of hope out in the community has been working closely with the office of the governor on this,
and we've been really appreciative with the support that we're getting. Thought I just share those two things.
>> good morning. I want to share a couple of take a different approach today.
the adult protective services conference is coming up october 14-17th here in austin.
I'm trying to get a good picture of all of you because I expect to see you all there.
if you haven't registered, register. Speaking of that, one of the many wonderful things that happened at
that conference is the bruce davis award of excellence is given to community boards around the state.
I thought this would be a good opportunity to recognize the 17 who will receive that bruce davis award.
there's 22 boards across the state of texas. These are boards, the volunteers who are dedicated to serving the community,
like all of us, and for nothing other than to support the work of adult protective services in their communities.
these are the 17 boards who will receive that award of excellence during that conference,
the silver ribbon community partners board, the regional aps advisory board,
permian basin, silver advocate partners board, aps silver star board.
let's see brazos valley volunteer board, south texas aps community board.
smith county adult protective services advisory board, silver star room board of the high plains,
dallas county aps community board. That's my board for the record. Tarrant county aps advisory board and
jefferson county adult protective services advisory board. I'm really proud of all the work these boards have done,
how the community has rallied to come back together. Especially post covid,
many of these boards really struggled to maintain their 501(c)(3) during that period of time,
and most of them are back in compliance. I think that really speaks to the work of these individuals
who have a passion for adult protective services. Then lastly, on behalf of my council member lisa hackett, who can be here today.
I said that I would share some of the great things happening in walker county for her.
they have a financial exploitation awareness event coming up on october 29.
then they're doing something really cool in walker county that I was excited to hear about,
which is connecting with care, which is parenting workshops basically. Working with those of us who are care-giving or just
dealing with parents who are aging and don't know how to handle that or how to navigate that.
they have that going on regularly in their community. Thank you.
>> thank you. You can hear me, right? Correct. A little bit about fort bend county.
one thing that I want to share is for many years,
I had the honor of working with judge ronald pope, and judge pope was the family court judge of the 328 district court in fort bend county,
and he was really a pioneer in this infant toddler work in increasing the awareness around
the special needs and the need for special attention and timeliness of
service delivery for the youngest children in our system with a focus on the 0-3 population.
I was honored to work with judge pope and help him establish the first court in texas,
and I think one of the first in the nation that was really focusing on this population,
and this was back in 2005. We worked in fort bend county,
we expanded our work to harris county, we expanded our work to bear county.
many times, we're challenged because we wanted to do things differently.
we wanted to connect children with early intervention services. We wanted to change visitation.
when the goal was reunification, we know that contact with parents is essential.
we wanted to add things like parent child evaluations and parent child services.
judge pope retired in 2018 and sadly passed away in the end of july.
he also served on the children's permanency commission,
and I just wanted to recognize him for his work and the honor that I had working with him.
in fort bend county, I've mentioned this before.
we have a grant from the department of justice and through second chance.
really the focus is working with parents that are incarcerated in their minor children.
we're now going into our fourth year of this grant, it's funded again through the department of justice.
what's interesting about that grant, we know that family contact and family supports are critical to reducing recidivism.
we also know that unfortunately, having a parent that's incarcerated is
a risk factor in an increased adversity for many children.
what I didn't know, even though I've been doing this work for 40 years is
the challenges of the community caregivers that are taking care of these children.
they can be grandparents, they can be another parent, they can be an aunt.
in my ideal view, I was thinking, these children need mental health services and things like that.
but we are spending the majority of our time just stabilizing living environments,
just making sure that these kids have close to go to school transportation needs.
again, bringing that to everyone's attention because this is
a very important work that needs to be done.
really are reaching out to the children of those
that have or are currently incarcerated in supporting those community caregivers.
we are also trying to add parenting classes and parenting services in
the jail so that parents have access to those services while they're
incarcerated and then continue those supports when they get out. Thank you. I guess I'm on.
yes. Sorry. >> good morning, everybody. How are you?
just some updates of things that we've been working on. Since we last met,
we had a wonderful conference at the university of texas at austin for teenagers in foster care.
we brought in over 200 youth young adults
and staff to come to ut for three days, overnight stay,
so very fun to do that with so many teenagers and teach them about programming,
what it's going to take to go to college, trade schools, employment, any path forward the military.
any path forward is a path forward, and this conference was dedicated to their future and looking
at what options they have to explore after they leave foster care.
that was wonderful. We've also been working with the governor's office and
the texas department of transportation to establish foster care internships at state agencies,
and we're starting with textdot who has a lot of things.
our students at ut austin will be eligible for these internships, so they'll be working at I 35 filling potholes. I'm kidding.
they're going to be doing things that textdots does.
we've also been working with the texas workforce commission at the university of texas.
we went to their foster care workforce conference.
I presented there and facilitated a panel and networked with folks there.
there are some new initiatives coming that we've been working with them on that
are going to connect young people and people that have left foster care to resources,
and most importantly to people. Young people, they get a lot of information while they're in foster care,
they get tons of meetings and packets and all these great things.
but once they have left care, putting that into practice and
actually receiving some of those things can be a challenge. We're trying to get something established so that people can navigate and
do things with them after they have emancipated and gone on.
some of the other cool things that I'm seeing that we're doing at ut is that we're
establishing more resources for young people that have been in foster care.
as everyone here knows, young people that are in care are eligible for
an immense amount of resources that are just wonderful and trans formative.
however, for some people that were adopted, some of the equivalent resources are not available.
some of the supports that people are eligible for if they were adopted,
they're not eligible for some of those things. Well, through the work that we've been doing at
the university of texas with support from the president's office, we've been able to get things like scholarships for
young people that were adopted so that even though they don't qualify for things like the supervised independent living contract
that we have and aren't eligible under federal law, they could still get some help to pay for things like the dorms and stuff like that.
I want to also give a real big shout out to day 1 bags and the texas exes
who contributed a generous donation to our program at the university of texas to support young people who were in foster care.
they raised well over $9,000 and provided that to us to provide
directly to students for coming back to campus and getting started again.
our program has grown and with the growth of our program comes more need.
I want to just give a shout out to hunter at day 1 bags and all the texas exes that contributed to this.
we were able to get each of our students a $200 gift card to just
help them go to target and buy some things for their dorm or for their apartment,
help offset some of the costs of groceries, books, things like that.
I'm very appreciative of them. That's a summary of things that have been going on,
and appreciate the opportunity to share. >> thank you, in my apologies.
moving on, I'd like to introduce our acting commissioner,
audrey o'neill, to deliver the commissioner's update.
>> good morning. Thank you. I'm happy to share a number of updates this morning.
I want to start by just sharing that. I know cheryl had shared with all of you a few weeks ago
the process to apply for the investigations advisory committee which we discussed at our last meeting.
that is the committee that is being stood up to advise the department on investigations practices.
it's hb 140, the hb 140 advisory committee. Those applications were due last friday,
and we appreciate the applicants who participated in that process.
cheryl also recently shared with you all some communication guidance.
we're really trying to make it a little bit easier for you all. When you receive an inquiry from someone that
our system might be engaged with to give you just real quick,
easy, accessible talking points. We certainly welcome any feedback you have on those talking points,
and we're happy to answer any questions about what you can and cannot say in those situations,
if that would be helpful to all of you. I'm excited to share.
I think you all are aware because we have previously presented to you twice.
I think we've talked with you about the sunset review that we're in the early stages of.
the very first major part of the sunset review is the self evaluation report.
I will just say this self evaluation report, it's really a very important and reflective process for an agency to look
at their strengths and weaknesses at their opportunities for growth and the challenges that they face.
there's also a wealth of information in that report about how the agency programs work.
it is certainly a great resource if you just want a one stop shop or how does a family
investigation work or what does the family based safety services stage of service look like at dfps.
we're in the state of texas. But the highlight of that report is
where we reflect on what are the major issues facing the agency, and the section of the report is called major issues.
I just wanted to share a little bit about the major issues that we're facing and I will tell you this is available on our website.
I think cheryl may have also shared a copy of it with you, but we actually have a sunset landing page now on the dfps website.
as we move through sunset when there are appropriate things to add, we'll be adding that to the sunset webpage.
we highlighted four major issues. I will say, it's their dense major issues.
it's pretty intense reading, if you read it. The first is around the quality and consistency of
investigations and our ongoing work to continue to enhance.
I think that's an area of the agency where will never be done
continuing to work on that's a continuous improvement for sure in that area of the agency.
but also on improving access to timely due process and to case records,
which I think we've talked with you all about is an ongoing challenge.
the amount of records requests that dfps receives is very voluminous and is increasing.
to your point, the case management system does not make dealing with those records requests easy.
that is certainly a key item in planning for our new case management system.
the second issue is around challenges in
the community based care model of delivering conservatorship services and related to capacity issues.
we've talked at length with you all about about needs
for youth and really needing the right capacity in our system to meet those needs,
including the capacity that we're working to develop through t3c, but that really is an incredibly important area of focus for us going forward.
third is highlighting the dependence of our system on other systems,
particularly on the behavioral health system, and just an acknowledgment that we do not provide behavioral health,
so we are not the provider of behavioral health services for the state. We are reliant on other systems to provide those services.
that's not only related to behavioral health, it is also for things like parenting classes.
there's lots of different areas where we refer out to services and knowing
those services are going to be there and that they're going to be easy to access in whatever area of the state that we need them,
particularly in rural areas. This is a challenge remains an ongoing area of focus for us.
fourth, but certainly not the least important of them
is our focus on maintaining a highly qualified workforce by recruiting,
supporting and retaining staff agency wide.
always an area of focus rest that was actually a major area highlighted in our last sunset report,
and we've made lots of progress since then. But this is very hard work,
and it will always be a very big challenge to the agency to recruit,
equip through training, fairly compensate and then retain those staff by supporting them and they're very difficult jobs.
as we were just discussing earlier, hb 500,
which we talked about at the last meeting does that's the supplemental appropriations bill.
I'm sorry, shouldn't refer to it by its number. It funds a new case management system for dfs.
it is the first phase of funding for a new case management system,
so it only funds what we anticipate needing in the first finance.
that does mean that next finance we have to go back and request funds that we'll need in the next finance and so on and so forth.
we do I believe we have shared. I know at least upon request,
we've shared the case management system report that we published last december, we're more than happy to share that with anyone who would like to read it.
again, it's a manageable but dense read.
the supplemental bill plus the writers and
the appropriations bill do require that case management system be used not only by dfps,
but also by our sscc partners so that we are all using one comprehensive case management system.
planning is underway. It has really been underway for over two years now.
I will say, I think this is really an area where we are fortunate that
many states have gone before us and that has given us an opportunity to learn from their experiences.
we are working towards implementing that system. It will take a number of years and the first phase, of course,
like in any government system built is the procurement phase,
we are working through that phase now. We are looking forward to partnering with agencies, including ssccs,
but also we have other partners that utilize heavily our case management systems such as our cosa partners.
we are working through really understanding the business needs for all stakeholders,
including, of course, all of our programs at dps, including aps, and how they'll use that system.
we have also started. We really wanted to be focused on automating solid efficient processes,
and we started last finance, a process called business process redesign,
where we look at function by function, key functions with the agency to make sure that from a process perspective,
we have as efficient and effective a process established as
possible so that then what we are automating is that refined process.
we're just completing right now our statewide intake business process redesign and
a business process redesign for our residential childcare investigations,
and we'll be moving forward with other areas of
the agency as we get a little bit closer to case management rollout for those areas.
I do expect that we'll share information with you all certainly going forward and probably
a presentation in the next couple of meetings around case management system planning.
t3c, it has been less than six months since we began credentialing providers and t3c,
as you all may remember, t3c is our texas child centered care is what that stands for.
is really the complete overhaul of
the foster care system for how we deliver and pay for foster care services.
it takes us from a service level system where children and youth are classified into essentially five service levels.
into a system that is really designed to meet the individual needs of each child or youth.
as of now, I want to get the number. We do have 24 available service packages,
and as of today, we have providers credentialed and 22 of those available service packages,
including all available service packages and foster home settings,
which is really important because we really want to see children served in home environments whenever possible.
I will just note that it is really critical our work with providers around t3c.
we can stand up a really advanced system that's really thoughtful about the needs of youth,
but without providers coming alongside us to ensure that they are
designing services that really deliver for children in youth,
this would not be a success. We are very excited that we've seen a lot of provider response.
we've got providers from all of niche environments.
we've got lots of gro providers, lots and lots of child placing agencies,
some residential treatment center providers, including residential treatment center providers,
really targeting a higher level of services for children and youth with our highest needs,
including behavioral health needs. As of august 31, 2025.
I will share that when we started this process, we had a plan for how quickly we thought the provider community would become
credentialed and then how quickly we would be able to move children and youth into unique service packages designed to meet their needs.
when we did that, we anticipated that at the end of the first year, we thought we would have around 17% of
youth receiving services through that service provision, and I should first say,
there is basically a 2.5 year period. Of transition where children move into
t3c and providers are credential to provide t3c services. We were very, very excited when on august 31,
we had almost 30% of children in the foster care system receiving services through a t3c placement setting.
yes. This includes packages designed for kinship foster homes, as you all know,
providing care in a kinship environment is the preference when children cannot be safely in their homes.
it includes providers serving youth with behavioral health needs and as I said,
and providers with human trafficking history. Children with human trafficking history, me.
speaking of human trafficking, you might be familiar with hb 451.
I think we briefly discussed this at our last council meeting.
hb 451 requires dfps to assess for the risk of commercial sexual exploitation in children,
using a tool called the cse-it tool that stands for commercial sex exploitation identification tool, cse-it.
it is a very quick. It's designed to be a very easy to use tool.
it takes about 5-7 minutes to administer the tool. It's an information integration tool that uses information from
intake from case files from professionals,
including caseworkers and colleagues, from volunteers, csa advocates.
to score and assess the risk of child commercial sexual exploitation.
in 2019, dfp has implemented this tool in the five largest counties,
harris, travis, bear, dallas, and tarrant, in specific circumstances.
this legislation expands the tool to use across the state for all eligible children and adults.
we are working to implement that legislation and we anticipate a presentation on this in our december council meeting.
today, we are going to have a presentation from kristin harris on our transition age youth,
and I just wanted to acknowledge that last meeting, we talked quite a lot about the needs of transition age youth.
I think today in her presentation, you will see that there are some signs of growth,
but there are still a lot of challenges, and there is a long way to go to meet the needs effectively of youth,
particularly youth aging out of the foster care system. We're excited. This is really a starter to the conversation,
and I'm sure I anticipate you'll have a lot of questions for kristin [laughter] I do imagine that this will be a point of conversation going forward.
I do want to share so that kristin is not the bearer of bad news that we did
learn since the last council meeting that we have received a significant reduction in haf funds,
which are the funds used primarily to serve transition age youth, that's a federal funding source.
that reduction is strictly related to the decline of children in the foster care system in texas, and basically,
there is an available pi of haf funds, and since we've done the very important work of trying
to right size our system so that if fewer children are entering foster care,
we are entitled to a smaller slice of that pi is how it works.
that was a 23% reduction that is a huge reduction in federal funds for us.
kristen's team is working very hard to absorb that cost in
a way that has minimal impact to services for youth as possible.
in conclusion, we have lots of very important work ahead of us.
we are working very hard to implement lots of legislation passed in the last legislative session,
and to implement additional supports passed by the legislature.
I think last time we talked with all of you about a number of additional supports that were funded to support kinship caregivers,
including expanded daycare for kinship caregivers, which we really believe will be
a critical resource for potential caregivers to care for relative children.
lots of other implementation work going, and I'm happy to answer any questions.
>> no, I just have a comment. Thank you. It seems like you've been so busy since you joined in this position,
and I thank you for all the information and keeping us abroad.
>> thank you. >> I also just want to make a comment regarding chafee.
I understand that's a tremendous issue that's affecting not just our state,
but other states as well. I know that chafee's re-authorization process in the federal government.
I work with foster club. I'm on their board and they've been doing a lot of work in this area.
there's still a long way to go, but I totally understand how
that how the reduction in chafee dollars is really going to impact a lot of services,
especially since chafee funds were set a while back and
everything got more expensive and then trying to do more with less,
and then that's reduced while everything's cost is very difficult.
hopefully, we can talk a little bit more about what we can do about that.
>> thank you for that very thorough report.
I think it's fantastic that actually you're up to 30% of
the youth now involved in the t3c.
>> challenging. >> the whole process is challenging.
but it's also encouraging to see that you are
getting providers and that you that continuum of care,
including that residential treatment, which we think we've all struggled with,
making sure that these especially our children with a higher needs have appropriate services and placement.
that's so encouraging. I think the sunset review,
it's great that you've started this process, but obviously, that's also an additional burden,
requirement on the agency in terms of devoting,
having staff to really be able to focus on this. Can you just talk a little bit more about the timelines
and are you provided with additional resources to be able to do that.
>> we don't receive additional resources to be able to do that.
however, we do have some standing teams at
dfps and part of one of these teams is actually a team requested
and funded by the last legislative session that really enables us to focus
on strategic work and so we have a really outstanding leader of our strategic initiative sitting in the audience,
a yesenia rodriguez, and she has spearheaded our work along with her team on sunset.
really, it certainly is a lot of work. It's a very important process for an agency to spend time
reflecting on where it needs to grow, and I think it's very unique to texas state government that we have this process,
but I do think it really is a great opportunity for the agency to force you to set aside some strategic time,
and we have a strategic planning process anyway that this really just folds into.
but the timeline looks like the first step is the self evaluation report.
the next step is what's called the staff review, and that staff review is,
I would say akin to an audit it's not brilliant audit, but it's similar to an audit.
I just can't help it, jennifer [laughter] but it's a really in depth
review by neutral eyes who really gather lots of information.
they will talk with stakeholders. They'll have extensive conversations with staff.
they've already started talking with us. They collect a lot of information,
and then they will work with members of the sunset commission, which is generally as a legislative committee appointed by
the legislature and there are filled positions and some vacant positions right now that will be filled in the coming months.
then ultimately that report I believe it
will be finalized over the next year and a half in advance of
next legislative session and that will result in a filed sunset bill that will address challenges of the agency.
it may address some of the challenges we identified. It will certainly address other challenges that
the sunset team identifies in their review. It won't really be complete until two years from right
now when that new sunset legislation is effective,
and that's what the whole process looks like. >> thank you. No other questions.
we'll move on to our program updates, and as commissioner already mentioned,
our next presentation will be by kristin harris from cps and vincent ryals from cpi to give updates on the dfps programs,
specifically, children without placement and the alternative response. Thank you.
>> good morning. Can you hear me? Hi. My name is kristin harris.
I'm the director of transitional living services, our foster adopt division here at state office,
and also icpc, which is the interstate compact for the placement of children across state lines when they're involved in the system.
>> I'm vincent rios. I am the deputy director of family and investigations and alternative response.
>> good morning. Thank you all for having us. We are here to provide some general programmatic updates.
we're going to be sharing with you all some updated numbers for our divisions.
also, I'll be talking to you more about our children without placement.
then mr. Rayls will be talking about alternative response and providing some updates related to that.
first of all, you'll see numbers for statewide intake,
and you'll see that the turnover for our statewide intake staff has reduced since fiscal year 2024,
and all of the data on the right hand side, as you'll see, is data that was collected on july 30th of 2025.
we're about a month behind, but you'll see that the turnover is reduced as has
the call abandonment rate reduced from 22.8%-18.2%.
the hold times have also reduced from 6.2 minutes to 4.5 minutes.
this is just really a reflection of the great work that they're doing at statewide intake to address turnover,
to address the hold times and to make sure that the statewide intake staff are able to really get on
the phone and get connected with people who are reporting concerns so that those concerns can be addressed.
also for adult protective services, you'll see that the turnover rate has also reduced as has the average daily case load.
their case initiation, timeliness continues to look really good at 98.6%
of cases being initiated timely by our adult protective services workers.
>> for child protective investigations, we're really proud of the reduction in turnover rate that you can see from,
I think the first bar should show fiscal year 2022.
we were at 45.5% and over the last three years,
we have reduced our turnover to 30.3, which is still high for what you would call a normal organization,
but what we do is not normal, so 30.3 is really good for us considering where we were.
you can also see that there's a direct correlation between the turnover rate and the average daily case load.
not only has turnover helped us, or lack of turnover helped us reduce our average daily case load,
but changes that have been made to culture, changes that have been made to hiring practices,
changes that have been made to how we train our staff and how we honor our staff have helped us to
reduce our caseload from 17.1-8.5 cases,
which really helps us when you have a case load that is manageable,
it helps you to be able to protect children and do the things that you're
supposed to do in order to make sure that children are safe. We're really happy that we've been able to do those things.
priority 1 and priority 2, face to face contacts,
actual and attempted have even during crisis, we did a really good job with our priority 1 contacts.
we have 24 hours to make contact with families and try to see those children.
we're now at 91.6% of all of our cases,
we're able to see those children, see those families within time frames.
also on priority 2 contacts, we have 72 hours, and we have been able to see those families and make contact
or attempt to make contact with those families in 92.4% of our cases,
which is very good. Also, our average time for closure,
we have been able to reduce that from 45.5 in 2022 down to
29.9 days in order to be able to complete an investigation.
again, those things are correlated to having staff and being able to train
staff and being able to give staff the tools necessary in order to be able to do the job well.
>> excuse me, vince, before you move on. Maybe I missed it.
can you give a little bit more clear clarification on p1 and p2s what it stands for?
>> sure. >> can be a little bit clear in that. >> sure. A priority 1 investigation,
when we receive referrals from the community,
they go to through statewide intake, statewide intake gathers all of the information and they have criteria by which
they determine whether this is a priority 1 or priority 2 investigation.
in other words, how much time this is a serious situation based on a number of factors,
age of the child, the seriousness of the allegation, the history of the family.
there are several determining factors that would cause them to state wide intake to say okay,
we need to see this family within 24 hours. That's what a priority 1 investigation would be.
they send that to the field, the field assigns that case and that case worker gets that case.
when you think about the whole process, that the referral comes to us, it goes to statewide intake,
it goes to the region, it goes to the program, it goes to whoever's unit that's supposed to get the case.
now then then that worker still has only 24 hours from the time that it was called in to go out and see that family.
that's what priority 1 would be and when you look at the process, workers have done a really good job,
staff have done a really good job of taking those changes, those transitions and still being able to make contact with families.
same process happens for a priority 2 investigations. It is just that we have 72 hours because there may be factors in those cases
that allow statewide intake to look at those cases and that criteria and be able to say okay,
we have a little bit of time, maybe the child is a little older.
maybe the situation is not deemed as critical as you would say a priority 1 investigation
would be and you have 72 hours in order to be able to make initiate contact with that family.
>> kristin, real quick, on call abandonment.
I'm guessing those are concentrated on the public lines and not law enforcement and so forth that they're calling in.
>> I'm going to pitch that one to mss. O'neill. >> this is to the statewide, a hot hotline.
there is a prioritization that comes into that hotline, but this, I believe,
is just for the hotline as a whole so it wouldn't include any of our help lines or anything like that,
but it's for the statewide intake hotline. >> but the hotline is used by law enforcement and the medical and education?
>> it is, but there is a law enforcement. We have stephen here he can address this if he needs to.
but they're like most of those calls are just prioritized so for example, a health professional,
they do not have a separate number to call so they would be included in the same abandonment rate.
I believe that same is true for law enforcement, they're just prioritized in the que, is that right, stephen?
it does not include the law enforcement hotline. >> then the second question,
when we say call abandonment, there's a big difference between I waiting too long, something came up.
I'm going to have to call back later and they hang up. We don't know why they hung up versus they're in the middle of the conversation and they're like,
well, for whatever reason, I'm just hanging up. Do you see a lot of the call abandonments during the call,
or is this while during during the wait time? >> it's during the wait time. It's considered abandoned if they hang up during the wait time.
>> if they get a hold of them on the phone, they're not hanging up during the call, typically? >> typically not. It happens periodically.
I don't think that would be considered an abandoned call. It's considered an abandoned call if they hang up when waiting.
>> perfect. Thank you so much. >> sure.
>> moving on to the next slide, we're going to share some data related to child protective services ongoing services.
you'll see that in fiscal year 2025 as of july 31st,
the number of children in care was 16,137 children,
which is slightly higher from the prior fiscal year, but we're still seeing overall that trend of the number of children in care
overall since fiscal year 2022 and really even before that.
conservatorship caseworker turnover has improved over the past three fiscal years,
it's down to 27.1%. You'll see there on the slide that this percentage does not include our cbc areas.
we do track that very closely, but for this particular data point, we're looking at conservatorship case workers,
caseworkers who are working those ongoing services with children and families who are in our legacy regions.
you'll also see that our average daily caseload for conservatorship workers continues to improve.
we're really happy with the 13.8 average daily caseload
for these workers because obviously when you have fewer caseloads,
you can spend more time with children and families and really work to meet their individual needs.
our fpss average daily caseload has also decreased since fiscal year 2024.
it's currently at 8.9 average per case worker.
we also track very closely children who are able to achieve permanency within 12 months.
this is a really important data point because, as you know, overall children tend to fare better if they're not
lingering in the system for long periods of time and so we are happy to see that
that particular data point has improved since fiscal year 2024,
and it's currently well, as of july, it was at 29.6%.
we'll talk a little bit more about the children without placement a little later on in this presentation.
but you'll see that we did increase slightly the average number of children in
placement on any given day to 20 children from last year,
it was 16 children. Then I know that you all have been updated on
the various kinship initiatives that are occurring across the state.
we continue to prioritize placing children with family or with a known family friend when at all possible.
you'll see that children in kinship settings has improved to 43.1% as of july 31st.
our goal for september 1st was to be at 45%, we don't have that data yet,
but we do believe we will be very close and we will continue to watch this data closely.
children with kinship at first placement. This is an initiative that child protective investigations and
our family based safety services workers have really been working hard on and they've been
collaborating with ongoing programs regarding children with kinship at first placement and you'll see that we
have improved there as well in placing children immediately upon removal with somebody that they're familiar with,
with the most recent data being that 39.1% of
children are placed immediately with either family or a very close family friend.
>> interrupt you for one second. >> yes. >> I just want to give them a shout out.
the national average for kinship placements, I believe is between about 37 and 38%,
so that our investigator staff have matured
their practices to place 39.1% of children in kinship placements at removal,
which exceeds the national average for kinship placements in total is
a huge accomplishment and you'll see that this will be a real area of intensive focus for us going forward.
>> I'll just add that the goal is 40% by january.
we're still trying to make even more strides,
it is different as we look at the data in different regions and different areas,
there is room for improvement because there are some regions that are much better at making sure we do this than others.
but the goal as commissioner o'neill has stated,
we're very proud of the work that we've done, but there is room to make this of paramount importance.
>> then lastly, on this slide, is just a snapshot of some data related to community-based care.
this data is as of august 31st, so this is very recent data.
48.5% of all children in care across texas
are currently being served through an sscc catchment area.
we're working in various regions to continue implementing cbc statewide.
currently, we have one region as of september 1st, which is in stage one implementation,
and there are four regions across the state in stage two and stage three.
that's just a brief snapshot. I know the office of community-based care will give more updates in just a bit.
>> I have a question before we move on. >> yes. >> going back to the children without placement,
the increase was 20 children. What is the age that increase was for?
was it teenagers? Was it more youth? >> right.
any adult? I mean, young children. >> we have a slide in a bit that will show a little bit more data related to that,
but by and large, the majority of children who are without placement are generally 16 and 17-year old,
but our 14-plus population really makes up for the majority of
the children who have an episode of being without placement.
okay. Overall. Dfps census, as you all know,
it's a high priority for our agency to keep children and youth in the least restrictive and most family-like home setting possible.
of the 16,137 children in care at the end of july,
82.1% resided in a family-like setting.
that's good. But when you look at this, it just gives you an overview of where all of those children are placed.
you'll see on the left, 41.7% of all children are placed in a foster family home.
so that's considered a family-like setting because they're in a foster home that mimics a family setting.
then on the right-hand side, you'll see 39% are in unverified kinship care.
we discussed the kinship rate being a little over 43%.
the reason that says 39% is because the remaining 4%
are licensed and verified homes that would fall under that foster family home percentage,
if that makes sense. Then the other thing that I just want you to note on this slide is
that we're going to be talking more about our children without placement.
it's really important that we continue to focus on those children in youth and their needs.
they do make up 0.1% of the total number of children in care.
children without placement. Between february 1st of this year and august 31st of this year,
410 youth experienced two or more consecutive nights in child watch.
and approximately a third of those, or 33.2% experienced a subsequent episode.
so we were able to find them placement. But for a multitude of reasons,
those placements broke down those children or youth returned to child watch.
on average, a youth who has experienced child watch has experienced
a subsequent child watch episode, averaging 2.98 episodes.
this just really is a reflection of the population of youth that
we're seeing in child watch because they are higher acuity youth.
what we found is that for our higher acuity youth, oftentimes we are able to find them a placement.
we're working with providers who feel that they're able to meet their needs,
but after the child is placed, they realize that the needs are really more complex than what they're able to meet.
and so those children are often returning to child watch. >> can I just add something there real quick, kristin?
I think this really just underscores our reliance on the behavioral health system and
the services and supports that are available in that system. Because, as kristin just said,
we are able to find a solution, but if that solution,
even with a provider who is working very hard,
cannot access the behavioral health services that they need,
the youth is not going to get the treatment they need. Which means they are likely to find themselves in this pattern over and over again.
and you all are aware that there was a lot of discussion,
and the department really drove a lot of discussion in the last legislative session around
the absolute critical importance of being able to access behavioral health services for these youth.
there have been efforts by the legislature to address those gaps.
this just remains a really critical area
of need for our children and youth with the highest needs possible.
kristin is absolutely right that typically these are older youth.
I will note, and I think we may have shared previously, that we are seeing an emerging trend of younger youth
with co-occurring intellectual and developmental disabilities,
where we are really not able to find appropriate placement resources to meet their needs.
there are specialized packages in t3c to address all of those needs,
both the high behavioral health needs and co-occurring idd needs.
but the reality is, there will probably still be this challenge
with our children and youth with the very highest needs, and really making sure that there is a safety net
available for those children is a high area of focus for us.
>> okay. And so here is another snapshot of our child without placement data.
this is really tiny. I hope you all can see it. For the line chart on the top,
from the left are the numbers from july of 2021,
and on the right is as of august 31st of this year.
you'll see that for total unique children in blue who
had been in a child watch episode at some point since july of 2021,
we have been trending downward overall, which is good. Then also, I believe that the red or orange line
is the average daily census of children who are in child watch,
and that's also been trending down, and we're trending in the right direction for both of
those data points as of august 31st of this year.
for the total unique children that were in child watch, there were 95 unique children in child watch
over the entire course of the month of august, and then the average daily census was right at 21% to 22%.
then you'll see below the child characteristics. The two main characteristics that we're seeing in children who are experiencing
episodes of being without placement are physical aggression and psychiatric hospitalization.
meaning that they have some mental health needs that we're
struggling to find providers who can adequately meet those needs.
then, to the right, on the bottom, is the census looking at the age breakdowns as discussed earlier,
and then also male versus female for august of 2025.
as acting commissioner o'neill indicated, we do see 29% of the zero to nine,
and largely those are younger youth who have some complex needs.
but for the most part, over 56% are 14 or older.
that's just a general overview of the census.
do you have any other questions about any of that data?
>> thank you for the data.
it's excellent information, and I have so many questions, and clearly, there's so much progress.
but I'm thinking about these youth and the behavioral health needs,
and the co-occurring intellectual developmental disabilities. We're seeing this not only in the child welfare system,
but also, unfortunately, in the legal system.
do you have further data in terms of these children without placement?
when do they come into the system first? I'm sure you might not have that readily available.
these children who are coming in very young and what is their age of entry when we first get involved?
and then also, I'm assuming a lot of these children have multiple placements.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but I'm just trying to figure out the trajectory.
>> they do have a higher number of placements, and we don't have that data in here,
but we do absolutely have that data. I will say one thing we have done over the last 2.5 years
is try to dive into this data every way we could think of because we really wanted to understand what all the root causes are.
it's not included here, but what I know historically is that roughly 38 to 42% of
children who experience episodes of being without placement have been in the system for less than one year.
that was surprising to us. There are certainly children who
have been in the foster care system for a very long time.
but there are also a number of children who are relatively new,
and there is a significant portion of those children who come to
us with a removal reason of refusal to assume parental responsibility,
which we just try really hard to talk about. That means that family was so at their wits' end
that they could not access the resources they needed to access to support their children in their home,
and in some cases, those families end up coming to the child welfare system for solutions.
we are really focused on making sure that we do not just build solutions into the child welfare system
because a parent should never have to surrender their parental rights in order to receive behavioral health services.
>> thank you.
>> all right, alternative response. I thought there was another slide.
let's talk about alternative response.
we were just talking a little bit earlier about traditional investigations
and priority one and priority two investigations. Another way of looking at how we investigate cases is an alternative response.
one of the things that we have been looking at is making sure that we meet the needs of the family and keep children safe.
in traditional investigations, normally, there is an alleged perpetrator.
there is an emphasis on making sure that there's a disposition,
whether a case was a disposition, meaning, whether we found that it was reason to believe that abuse and neglect occurred,
or it was ruled out that abuse or neglect occurred, or unable to determine.
in alternative response cases, we are still emphasizing keeping children safe
and but we're working with the family in a collaborative manner, and one of the things that we do in order to work with the family
is that there are no alleged perpetrators.
there are no dispositions, and there is no central registry to which an alleged perpetrator
might be added if they found reason to believe.
I like to look at it as not taking away those things,
but focusing on the solution. We can talk all day about who did what.
but at the end of the day, if we have a case and we determine how we go forward with the case.
how do we move forward with a solution that helps children stay in homes and keeps children safe?
that, in some cases, can be our focus. So in our alternative response cases,
one of the things that happens is, because we eliminate the fault,
we end up with parents who are many times more
willing to engage us in working on the solution to the situation.
we end up with parents who focus their efforts
on services that we can provide that can help them with this situation.
you end up with caseworkers who are able to focus on locating resources and locating area stakeholders,
or people within the community who might be able to help that family improve their family functioning.
now, this isn't appropriate for all cases. As we mentioned earlier, priority one cases are not
necessarily appropriate for alternative response.
but there are priority two cases that we would look
at and view as appropriate for alternative response. One of the things that we don't talk about in this slide is that,
as we're expanding alternative response, we will have screeners who will screen almost all of our priority two cases,
and we will have more cases that will start going to alternative response.
hopefully, we'll get up to 40%. The goal right now is that up to 40% of our cases will end up in alternative response,
and we'll be able to work collaboratively with parents to ensure that children are safe and to work with them on their solutions.
>> the regions that are currently in the expanded area of alternative response are region four out in tyler,
region five in baum, actually region 45 are together and they work together.
region 10 in el paso is also
an area that has been working and is working with expansion of alternative response.
because expansion is so large in the state of texas, and I think there's another slide where we'll show the progression.
there's a lot of training that has to go on for all of our staff, and so we have decided as opposed to trying to roll it out and say,
here, everybody, take this and go work with it. We're working it so that every region has a stage that they're in and
progressing toward getting to the point where everybody is up and running and fully functioning in the expansion of alternative response.
I don't think I mentioned, but the expansion of alternative response would mean in these cases for us because
so many of the program priority two cases would end up normally in alternative response,
they were cases that were the children were 6-years-old and older and and there was limited history.
in order to expand alternative response, we are taking those age ranges away and 0-5 will be considered.
that's why they will be screened. They'll be considered for alternative response,
and some of the history will also be considered.
it will hopefully get us to the point where we're able to expand alternative response and be able to
have more cases that will go down this area and help us work with families.
the statewide training is in completion and it will continue until region 8 is done.
I think region 8 is the last region that we have that is going through cross training. Right now, all of our investigators are not
cross trained to work alternative response cases. It is very different. Is a very different way of
working investigations and many of our traditional investigators who have been here quite a while,
it is a shift for them. It working with them it's like pulling teeth sometimes,
trying to get them to move to this different way of doing it.
but everybody is in the mode of we're doing what's best for children so they're learning.
our last region that we will be working with is region 8, which is san antonio/bexer county,
and their cross training will happen in 2025.
we are also up up dating policies and practices and the training manuals,
and that is happening now between now and september and october 2025,
in order to make sure that all staff are trained we have training models that have been introduced into
the training academy so that when new staff come on, they are already trained and they're already cross trained.
they have traditional investigation training and alternative response training.
we also have updates to our internal and public websites about alternative response,
and that is set to release in october. There will be testimonial videos, resources,
and more information on expansion that will be available on our website.
also, we have to track how successful this is.
there will be data points that are being developed right now so that we can look at recidivism,
how many alternative response cases are we working and those families come back for an investigation.
we're hoping that this method allows us to reduce recidivism.
we're hoping that this method allows us to decrease removals and alternative response real referrals.
if you do your job successfully, and if this works successfully with the family being involved in helping us do it,
then hopefully we should have fewer real referrals. We're looking at where we're asking workers and surveying workers and
surveying families to find out what their satisfaction level is with
alternative response in this new way that we're working cases. We're also working with referrals to services and we're tracking,
how many new referrals now are coming into alternative response as opposed to in the past.
our pilot region from february of 2024 to august of 2024 was region ten el paso.
all of the proposed changes were tested and yielded in el paso alternative and
we looked at data for how everything worked in el paso,
region 10 from april 2023 to january 2024.
during that time, 20% of all investigations that were worked worked alternative response.
once the pilot started, 41% of all investigations that we were worked worked in alternative response.
that was once the criteria was changed. We saw that we were successful in increasing
the number of investigations that went to alternative response.
the next set of numbers, didn't necessarily we hope that it works this well in all other regions,
but there are so many factors. It's not a laboratory. There are many other factors that can be in place but in our pilot program,
during the 10 months before alternative response criteria changed,
there were 59 removals. In the ten months after alternative response criteria change,
there were 32 removals, a 46% decrease in the number of removals.
again, if we had a 46% decrease in the number of
removals across the state, that would be great. But we can't say that. But we're hopeful.
we're hopeful that it helps us to be able to work with families, and we're hopeful it should help us to
be able to decrease removals and work with families and hopefully this model will allow us in many cases to have better outcomes.
the roll out plan for alternative response, we have already started in el paso,
which was the pilot region. It has already started in regions 4 and 5, beaumont,
and tyler, and in region 9, midland. 2026 fiscal year, we will focus on rollout,
and this is full rollout in three west and three east.
that's fort worth and dallas, and region 11, which is corpus christi area.
fiscal year 2027 will be regions 1 and 2 region 7 and region 6b,
and our last two regions in fiscal year 2028 would be region 6a and region 8.
we just show you this to show that again, we are trying to do this slowly and correctly.
many times we can with any agency, but I've been here a while and I've seen us implement
something really fast and there ends up being a lot of confusion. But in this case, what we're really trying to do is implemented slowly
and correctly to make sure that we have the best chance for good outcomes.
I think that's it. Questions.
>> thank you so much. Do we have questions? >> I do. I want to say seeing
the rollout and development of alternative response has been something that I'm very grateful to see.
it was more than ten years ago when I was working across the street at winters, working next to the people that were developing alternative response,
at that time, I thought it was brilliant and I'm really glad to see that this is something that stuck around.
I think at its core, alternative response removes some of the adversarial elements that exist between families and the system.
I think that by addressing that, you can have people have fundamentally different experiences.
it doesn't surprise me one bit to see that in the pilot that there was a 46% reduction,
because if people feel that they can work together and that in a collaborative way that's not punitive,
I think that you're going to get safer families and a stronger system.
being able to see that is really helpful and it's inspiring for the future.
I just think that if that carries forward, every other state in the union is going to be like,
let's do that because I think any child welfare agency would be 50% reduction in removals.
yeah, we're going to do that. Kudos to you all and ktc agency for sticking with it.
I agree the roll out, having it go slow and incorporating cqi in this process to make
sure it's done well will result in a much better system.
>> I'm glad you mentioned that alternative response as been stated,
it's not a new thing. My first alternative response training was probably 2014.
we've been doing this and moving toward it
and ramping it up for quite a while so it's not something that we're new at,
it's just something that we're in the process of expanding.
>> my only comment was, thank you for piloting this in el paso,
and I'm hoping that you found a lot of adaptability within the staff and the willingness to
shift to changes whenever that's needed because I always like to see things getting piloted in el paso.
>> I'll just say that we went to el paso.
our leadership team went to el paso two months ago.
the nicest people in the world are in el paso. I was shocked.
I'm not shocked, I didn't know anything but it
was very nice and then the staff were also.
>> I can at least agree that enrique is one of the nicest people.
just for someone who may not understand how alternative response would be an appropriate solution,
are you able to share a p2 case example, just high level that would be more appropriate for alternative response,
and then I have something another question when you're done. >> a 7-year-old comes
to school dirty and hungry and says,
we don't eat at home and there's not a lot of food
and I don't know if there's food there's going to be food at home when I get home.
the school calls that in, we get the referral, it is referred to alternative response.
alternative response would call the family. Set up a family session,
not go in and talk to the children individually first. They set up a family session with the family to sit down and talk and say, hey,
this is what we got, this is what the situation is that we understand,
tell us how we can help or tell us what the issues are, what the concerns are,
and how can we work together so that if there is a problem with your children eating,
how do we fix that. Then you're able to work with the family,
and they don't look at it like, you're going to rtb me for for physical neglect of my children.
they say, well, I need this and I need that and I need this. We go and help them find community resources that can help them
with this situation and that situation and whatever their situations are.
we would also talk to the children and make sure that there aren't any other areas that we need to be concerned about.
but when we're able to work with that family and address those needs,
then we close their case. >> can I add just a couple of things to that?
I think that the unique thing about the pilot is previously,
I think a 7-year-old would have met the criteria for alternative response or an 8-year-old. I'm not sure if it was up to seven or over seven,
but a 5-year-old would not have. If there was a 5-year-old in the home,
it would have automatically had to be routed as an investigation in our policy.
this enables us, we really want to use the least intrusive tool.
I think there was a story out of el paso that really stuck with me where we had I think a 3-year-old who
mom was a single mom and just struggling to keep all the things going.
the child was particularly adventurous and he got out the front door and onto the highway.
of course, that's a very serious safety concern.
it properly required response by the department but we would have
previously had to route it as an intake and we would have investigated negligent supervision.
that doesn't necessarily mean we would have substantiated negligent supervision, even if the child did get out into the street.
that happens without a parent demonstrating gross negligence,
and that's the criteria for negligence supervision. However, this enabled us to just have
a family team meeting and there were that mom had supports that were available and we
were able to connect her with community resources and it was really as simple as installing locks higher up
on the door and just connecting that family to each other and to some resources that would allow her to safely parent.
>> I appreciate those responses. I think sometimes in our fear based culture,
not having examples when we're talking about concepts that seem really scary and people aren't always willing to ask the questions,
really helps them understand how this more collaborative approach will be best for everyone.
one of my favorite words is pilot. I use it all the time and I pilot things all the time.
what I've found though over the years, so I'm just really curious about y'alls approach to the slow rollout is in the pilot,
the reduction of removals is really impressive. I wondered what you're going to be doing to continue to track
those cases over time to ensure that the ar was the proper response.
if you have anything in place yet, you may not, but it has it been in consideration.
>> yes. That's part of what the research team is
working on and putting together data points that would allow us
to determine if that family comes back into has another re referral or comes back into and then we have another case with them.
they're they're working on those things to try to track those. Again, you're dallas, I'm dallas so
I don't expect 46% in dallas but I expect it to be better.
there are certain areas- [overlapping] >> we're el paso. I need you to do better. [laughter]
>> I think there are things that happen in rural and urban communities they are just different.
>> yes. But to answer your question, yes, we are working on right now,
figuring out how to track all of those as we expand and how to track the differences too.
how it will be different, how it may be different. In el paso as opposed to houston,
and tracking whether 46% remains 46%.
>> well, thank you for that. It was really helpful. >> I'll just note about the 3-year-old escaping the house.
unfortunately, that's fairly common.
sadly, it takes the intervention of either law enforcement or cps,
because usually what happens is, the mom goes to the says, I need to move the lock up and no,
that's violation of the lease will evict you if you modify or whatever.
my kids getting out. No, that's the rule you can't do it. It takes one of us just being present to say,
sure, we'll change a lock, which it could have done from the beginning, but for some reason, they don't.
it shouldn't be like that, but I have found that's the standard and not the exception when it comes to modifying anything.
putting that lock up higher is often all that really needs to be done. It's not that expensive, it doesn't take that much.
unfortunately, we have to get involved to get other people to do what they should have done to begin with.
>> the bigger part of it for our families is we have a situation like that.
the mother's a teacher. If she's root reason to believe for that,
she's on the central registry, now it may affect the job. Now you have a whole different problem.
>> yes, there's no more questions. Thank you so much. That was an excellent presentation.
your data over time and your comparison data is just very impressive,
even know how we compare to other states and national data. Thank you.
>> thank you. >> with that, next,
we'll have holly mims to give a cbc update from the department and then randy neff,
who's the senior vp from empower, to share with us an update on the community based care in their region. Thank you.
>> good morning. I'll try again. Good morning.
my name is holly mims, and I am with the community based care operations division,
and I'm excited to give you an update on community based care today. On our first slide, we give you an update on implementation of cbc as of september.
on the right, you'll have the updated map of our catchment areas. Each catchment area is notated with the sscc that covers that area.
recent news since the last time we were able to give you guys an update is on september 1st belong,
our sscc and region 8a moved to stage 1.
very exciting, took a lot of work between dfps and
our sscc partner and it was very successful transition to stage 1.
they moved immediately into stage 2 readiness on that day.
also, of note, region 6a and 6b depelchin is our sscc provider in that area.
they moved into stage 1 readiness. Kickoff was late last month.
it's exciting. You saw the stats a couple of slides ago.
cbc is at that point where almost half the youth in texas are covered by cbc and in sscc.
on our next slide, I want to bring to your attention our current procurement activities and our future procurement plans.
speaking of pilots, senate bill 513 was passed in the 89th regular legislative session.
it gives dfps an opportunity to pilot with entity
to design and build a model for community based care in rural areas.
we are in the quiet period right now for our procurement. We're very excited to see what comes of that pilot.
our interagency contract with the university of texas at
austin is our final report will be received from ut on the 31st.
as a reminder, this contract was for our cbc process evaluation to see what has
worked as we've moved cbc forward and what we can improve on.
we hope to incorporate those findings and recommendations to better our services to families across the state.
last but not least, our agency was funded to expand
community based care to four more regions in the coming biennium.
region 7a, 7b, 11a, and 11b.
we are in the procurement planning for those areas and hope to release those rfas later this year.
they will be staggered, and our implementation will be staggered, as you've seen in the recent years.
we've talked about lessons learned, so that was definitely one of them. Also, our region 2 re procurement is underway.
we'll be releasing a procurement for that, an rfa for that area in fiscal year 26.
we are planning for that now because our sscc contracts are five years with an optional one time five year renewal.
to engage our sscc provider out there and dfps, utilize that optional renewal and we're getting toward the end of that period.
those are my updates for you, but I did want to share that all of these items,
any new happenings, any legislative reports are on our cbc website.
it's communitybasedcare.org, no hyphen. Then also on the site,
you can sign up for our gov delivery list, or any of these updates will come straight to your inbox.
with that, I thank you for your time and I'm open to questions.
what was the website again?
communitybasedcare.org, no hyphen.
>> thank you. >> thank you. No questions [laughter] thank you so much.
>> next, randy. Yes. I'm in power. Thank you.
>> thank you. It's a honor to be here today. When I received the invitation to, I misread the email.
I thought it said I had 2 hours, but it's only 20 minutes. Just kidding, but I do feel like the information I want to share,
there's a lot of stuff going on community based care. I'm honored to be a part of the community-based care model.
in fact, what holley was presenting, actually I started my career when I was 20,
and I was at dfps for about 18 years. As community based care implementation started,
from region 2, so to engage, and I actually made the decision to move over to work for
tfi and implementation to engage and was part of stage 1 and 2 there.
to hear how long it's been, I feel like wow, I've actually had the unique experience of being a part of
implementation of stage 1 and 2 and in the rural area with to engage,
and then I started helping with empower in june of last year.
you got to experience another implementation in the urban area.
there's a lot of work going on, but I'll tell you the impact that we are making in the community it's measurable.
that's what I'm hopefully to communicate with you today to tell you the journey we've been on with empower and where we're headed as well.
empower, as you can see, we have the dallas county and eight other counties.
we have grayson, fannin, colin hunt, rock-wall, kaufman, ellis, and navarro.
that's the nine counties we serve with dallas being obviously the largest.
empower, as we prepared for our implementation,
we developed some really strong relationships with providers and actually have a collaborative and that's ck family services,
jonathan's place, bar foundation and pathways. They are at the table with us as we look at service delivery,
what is it that we need to focus on and make some key decisions. We appreciate their partnership in this and all the providers that we have,
community providers and residential providers with empower. What I wanted to just talk through is where we've been and where we're headed.
on the next slide, I just want to highlight some of the early challenges that we had in the progress that we've made.
the first one is workforce. I want to go over that. We launched stage 2,
the case management piece in march of 2024. On march 1, we felt really good about the resource transfer,
the staff that transferred to us. We felt really good about it until about march 15,
and then we felt pretty uneasy about it. What we saw is a lot of dfps staff that transferred over.
we're planning to do this work and then change your mind pretty quickly.
I don't know that it was really the 15th, but it was pretty quickly. You can see that the numbers dropped there and we started going in the wrong direction.
as we recognize that, in the impact that has on your workforce,
we decided that we're going to have to really overhire, because as commissioner o'neill has said,
the workforce is critical to your ability to be successful.
unfortunately, what you see early on in the transition is you see a lot of your experienced staff that don't come over,
that you lose some of that knowledge too. There's just a lot of new staff and staff that are new to child welfare
and that can create some challenges,
some challenges that it just takes time to work through because you've got to build experience and train your new staff,
mentor them and in child welfare. It takes time to learn how to do this work and really learn how to
be efficient with all the different demands that are involved in the child welfare system.
what you'll see is, again, the reflection of our increased numbers there is we overhired,
because we knew that we were going to have turnover. You're going to have staff that join your organization and feel like this is the work for them and some,
they're going to be like, there's no way I can keep doing this work and they're going to pursue other opportunities.
but we have stabilized our workforce, and on the next slide, you'll see some progress there.
we were again, reflective march 24, august is some of the staff that some of those never even got out of training.
they figured out during training that work wasn't for them. Some of them did, but recognized pretty quickly
that child welfare just wasn't the field for them. But what we've seen is the progress of our resignation.
we were seeing almost, we've cut it not quite in half, but we've reduced it significantly as far as the turnover.
that's significant because that's less disruption for children and families because every time you have a staff leave,
if they've got a caseload, you're having to move their caseload to another worker anytime there's a interruption with children and families,
it can cause challenges with their case and progress, all that. We are celebrating that we have reduced that,
and we're very hopeful we'll continue to see that progress in the workforce and reduced turnover as well.
one of the things that want to really emphasize though with the workforce that I can't give you a slide about,
I can't measure is the heart that our staff have for this work. That is very evident as you talked to our staff and
all staff meetings and just hear them present about their cases and we make sure every meeting that we have,
we have heart stories where they share those heart stories, and that's huge. That's a big part of what we're doing is making sure that our staff have
the support and do not lose sight of the impact they're making with children and families in the community.
anyhow, if there's a metric for that, we would be off the charts. But of course, it's hard to measure that.
caseloads. I know that looks pretty busy there, but that's a good slide right there.
[laughter] that's a slide that just helps me sleep really well at night. Because the top bar, march of 2024.
what that means is that 42% of our staff had their caseload under 17 kids.
their caseload we're talking about the number of kids they have on their caseload. In march 24, we were only at 42% had 17 or fewer kids on the workload.
you had over half that had more than that. Of course, we had some with up to over 25 kids,
and as you can imagine, that's pretty tough to keep up with when you have that high of
a caseload and unfortunately, it got worse. We hit all the way down to 15% that were under 17.
but as you saw on the graph a minute ago, we overhired,
we increase the number of staff in training and eventually climbed out of that.
we are holding steady at having about 98% compliance with our staff being under 17.
again, that's just reflective, they have the bandwidth to just be more
effective in their work and just spend more time with children and families.
it's definitely a beautiful slide for me to see today.
>> just real quick. I'm assuming you're measuring the kids because some cases have multiple children as opposed to measuring cases?
>> correct. Each kid counts as a case. For a sibling group of five, that's just still in the same.
>> thank you. >> yes, sir. Again, that was definitely
a process for us to go through having so much transition and building our workforce,
but pretty good about where we are today after this last 18 months or so.
on the next slide, another thing that we are really
pleased with is I don't like to say children without place. I like to talk about let's talk about children in placement.
I know in the dallas area, this catchment area,
before and empower took over, I believe the children without placement was double digits at any point in time,
is what I understand that that was a high number. Next slide, you'll see our progress with that.
you'll see that it's a total number of sscc supervision.
what you'll see is there is a lot of the episodes that we
have you're seeing fewer nights as far as it may be one child,
but there's been just one night. What that is that first column is just the number of episodes of sscc supervision,
and that could be the same child, multiple times or something like that. We didn't break it down like that.
now, you'll see in october and november was pretty intense that period of time.
but we got through that period and got that stabilized again.
what this takes is it takes a really strong relationship with
the community providers to make sure that again that they have the resources they need, the support they need,
and the confidence they need in the sscc to know that this is a collaborative effort,
that we're going to work together to ensure that we have the services for children,
that we have the support, or collaborating on what's best for children.
it's been a tremendous partnership with our residential providers,
child placing agencies gros, residential treatment providers to really just make sure that
we are all collaborating and making sure that they also take ownership for when we are unable to get a kid into placement timely.
again, seeing the single digits is a lot more
comforting to know versus having multiple kids at one night.
again, I guess we want to emphasize on this slide is if you had 20 kids and
then if you times that by a night for each of them and multiple nights,
number is going to be in a hundreds real quickly. On the next slide, you'll see also again,
we measure again the actually episodes of supervision and also the total night.
as you see those numbers match, that just means again, it was maybe for one night and then we quickly got them into placement.
I think that's significant. When we did have that period of time in the october and november,
we did have a youth that was under sscc supervision or our child without placement for quite a while,
and that really took us some time to find the right setting. I think commissioner neal talked about the needs of that child with idd,
autism, some developmental issues there. Is a real challenge, and fortunately,
we had a lot of support from the state to help us secure placement at the state living center,
one of the state supported living centers, but just took some time for all the different processes to work out.
but anyhow, we're just going to move on past that and feel like those days are over and move to our next slide here. Kinship.
>> this is again, something we're really encouraged by to see our growth in kinship on this next slide.
we've increased since march of 2024 from 33% of our kids to being in kinship,
and we are at 40% now. We actually hit 42% in march of 2025.
I feel like our number would be a little bit higher, but we got hit pretty hard over the summer with removals.
I really didn't slow down. A lot of times you anticipate when schools out you may not see as many referrals,
but they didn't take the summer off. It's been busy. But we are really looking at our model,
just really pleased with where we are with our numbers of kinship increasing. We have a model where we have family finders,
a team of family finders. Anytime that a child enters the foster care system,
if they are not in a kinship placement, if they're in paid placement or gro foster home,
they hit the ground run, and they'll do a case review. They'll look and start reaching out to
the different supports that may be involved in that child's life. Just to really start figuring what would it
take if you're not a placement option now? What would it take? What resources do you need? Again, that models really helped us increase our number of kinship.
then also, again, our partnership with investigations and their initiative has just made a huge difference in the community is increasing our numbers.
always something you'd like to see is an increase in children being with their families for sure.
>> let me ask a quick question. >> yes, sir. >> earlier, the previous presentation,
we heard that it was around almost 40% of people were having kinship as their first placement.
what are you seeing in terms of people having their first placement with kinship?
>> that would be a vincent question to get what that community's data looks like.
I know we see a lot of subsequent placements and we see our family finders helping find some subsequent placements,
but I just don't have the data that tells me what our numbers are for the initial placement.
I just don't have it. I hate to give you a number because it would probably be incorrect.
>> thank you. >> but I think it's contributing to our numbers for sure.
I do want to give that credit, but I just don't know what it is. >> I just want to interrupt very quick.
we can get that data for you. We have it by [inaudible], so that's not a problem.
>> thank you. On the next slide, also,
one of the other things we're again, really pleased with is our life skills training.
our model, what we did, is in lieu of contracting that out. We brought that in house as far as the responsibility for life skills training.
the requirement is that youth before they turn 18-years-old need to have a complete the curriculum of life skills,
which gives them an overview of budgeting and how to advocate
for their health needs and job berating, all those things.
we have that curriculum. We have a team that delivers that curriculum, as you can see in quarter 1 of this year. We were 100%.
we didn't have one youth miss their life skills requirement.
we did have a few that we've missed this quarter, but our compliance is pretty high.
it's in the high 90s. Again, I think that what's really significant about this is
our staff have the ability to meet the youth where they are. If it needs to be a one on one because of what's going on in their life,
we can get out there and do that. If we need the traditional classroom, we offer those quite often and also virtual trainings as well.
we again, just really appreciate our staff's diligence
in making sure our youth are receiving this training, just another thing that we have been pretty pleased with as far as our progress on life skills training.
the future is bright. What I just went over is reflective of
a 18 months or so that we've been at this because we went live with stage 1 in september of 2023,
and here we are about to celebrate a two year anniversary of stage 1 and we launched stage 2 in march of 24.
we just celebrated our one year anniversary just recently for that. The transition is tough.
again, having the unique experience of being through that twice now.
when you take a system and move it from the state to the private entity,
there's just a lot of turbulence that happens, but as you can see, you work through that,
and then again, this is the exciting times right here, and that's what I'm looking forward to. The next slide I'll tell you about is we
are working on implementation of solution based casework. This is our practice model that we have used in other jurisdictions as well.
dr. Christiansen is the founder of solution based casework'. One of the things he is very clear about is if you follow the fidelity of this model,
you're going to see an increase in reunification outcomes and families being engaged in a higher level,
and it's built on the foundation of early engagement. We want to get to those families just as quickly as possible.
I think, like chair amedia said, just earlier on, the interaction with families is huge.
it is huge to build that partnership, and that's what solution based casework does. It gives our staff the framework to
really engage families as quickly as early as possible, build that relationship and that port,
and start sorting out with them. What got them in the situation? What were the daily patterns in their life
that maybe allowed this situation to happen that required the need for intervention.
as we figure that out, then we move on to building some action plans, and what are we going to do differently and focus on
behavioral change to make sure that it doesn't happen again so we can get the kids back to them
and there's not that recidivism that will happen. As we make that progress,
documenting celebrating change and doing that alongside families in that partnership.
I'll tell you one of the things that my experience at dfps,
and being a part of implementing solution based casework in the past.
there's a lot more. I was started to get
some calls from families and they were calling me not to complain, but to praise a caseworker.
I thought this is not normal. It's just different.
because again, I was in the role at dfps as a problem administrator, I got a lot of complaints about case managers.
but when I start hearing the praise and seeing that I'm like, man, this is great. What we've seen as we've implemented this is after the implementation,
staff start getting certified in their solution based casework. You start to see the increase in reunification outcomes.
I'm really excited about that. We just actually finished the initial training for all of our staff.
now they are on the path of using the tools and becoming proficient and we'll be handing their certification.
again, just a preview if we come back, maybe this time next year, I might have a slide that shows you that increase
that doctor christiansen assured us that we'd see and we have seen in the past. Another thing we have.
this is, again, as timothy was talking earlier, something that I'm really looking forward to next week,
week from yesterday, and we'll call it next chapter life after foster care.
what this is is we recognize that our youth,
they need opportunities and resources to first keep them in the community.
just because of lack of resources, lack of capacity, it's sometimes a big challenge to keep them in their community as we'd like to.
we have worked in partnership with the dfps state office transitional living team has been a huge support to us,
and lots of just community providers. But we have invited a lot of our residential providers,
child placing hcgros those that serve youth in their programs.
then also, we've partnered with trac that offers our after care case management contract.
we also have invited the local school districts, the education service center, that work with foster care liaisons, housing authorities.
we've invited just as many as possible to come to this meeting here,
and let's talk, let's review our data. But the thing that we want to do is going to be a call to action.
it's going to let our folks know hey, here's the data, here's what we're seeing as far as trends for our youth that are
14 and over and where they are. Let's change that. Let's get these kids back in the community,
and what can each of us do to make that happen. When we started this, I thought,
I'd be pretty content if we could have about 30 or 40 people show up and last time I saw we're worried,
we're going to have about 100 and we're worried about the space because we're doing this at dallas college.
but we're going to figure that out. That's a good problem to have. My hope again, this is just the start of seeing some big movement there.
it's pretty unique when we had a conversation with several providers about this and the word started spreading and like,
hey, how do I get to come to this meeting, you guys are having all that. Usually you don't get folks trying to come to a meeting,
but they want to be a part of this. The committee is on fire for this, and I'm really excited.
I'd be thinking about a week from yesterday as we get ready to start this journey.
again, my hope is if we come back a year from now, you're going to start to see some more exciting things
after we have this meeting and start to work together on this collaborating. We've also launched another initiative.
again, as you guys have heard, capacity is a challenge.
we just need more of it and we need more foster home beds.
that's one of the things we've been focused on is keeping siblings together. Too often, we just don't have the number of beds we need to keep our siblings together.
a few months ago, we launched our sibling bond campaign.
what that is is we have 10 sponsor directors and we
asked them to submit a sibling group that is currently separated that we want to get back together.
we bring all of our providers together, and we present those sibling groups.
we ask them to think about capacity that we don't have today,
but we'll have very soon. That meaning maybe some upcoming discharges that will create
an opening or families they have that are very close to being licensed.
again, capacity that we don't have access to today, but we'll have very soon. I'm super excited to say that we've had,
I believe four meetings because we do these every month. We've had four meetings and out of the four meetings,
three of them, we've been get siblings that are separated back together.
that's huge to be able to say that.
I think the other thing it's done is created that culture of our providers being really diligent
and just thinking about how do we expand our beds or as we engage families,
how do we really just communicate the need to increase the number of siblings we're taking.
I've asked our providers to take that tape measure, double measure, make sure is that room big enough for more than one child.
I really let families know this is a huge need, and we're starting to see again some movement there moving the needle on that as well.
those are a few of the campaigns that we have, initiatives we have.
I think on the next slide, the next slide is wrapping up.
as I close, I just want to say this. The opportunities working in a community based care model are significant. It's not easy.
there's a lot of challenges, but that's why it's called community based care because we're not in this alone.
it's not empower based care rather it's the community. We just need each and everyone to come together,
help us figure out solutions. I think again, what's unique is if we find something's not working,
let's go back to drawing board and do something different. I just appreciate all the community support
we have and their willingness to work alongside us on this. I'll pause there and open for questions and see I could have went for two hours,
but I did my best to ring that in. >> I'm sorry, your name's not written on here. What is your name again?
>> randy neff, n-e-f-f. >> thank you.
>> yes, sir.
>> no question. That was an excellent presentation.
in focusing on the siblings, I don't think we talk enough about that,
but I'm so glad that you mentioned that and that is partly what you're doing,
very collaborative approach again, keeping children together and siblings together when you can.
I do have a question about the data. I noticed april was zero. If you go back.
>> let's go back to the slide. >> go back to your slides. It's the one on the out of children without placement.
I think it's that one.
do you know why it's zero? >> I'm looking.
>> april 2024. >> I don't know. I don't want to say that's accurate.
that can be an error. I'm going to say probably it's an error.
>> was it a zero? >> may be when I emailed the slide deck because I'd be surprised.
but I'm going to suspect it's an error, but I need to double check that make sure.
I do know we have actually had lots of streaks of no sscc supervision and no cwap.
we put together streaks, but I'm not going to say that's accurate.
>> it could be. It just stood out, so I was just wondering.
>> I'm glad you caught that. >> thank you so much. I don't have any other questions.
are there any other questions? Great presentation. >> thank you so much. I appreciate it.
appreciate you guys having me. Thank you.
>> I think we're going to have kristin harris
back to talk about transition age youth. Thank you.
>> good morning again. >> thank you.
>> again, my name is kristin harris. I am the director over transitional living services here at state office,
as I stated earlier, one of a couple of divisions that I work with.
I just want to say that working with our youth is one of my favorite things.
when you meet with them individually, they're just so inspiring and so resilient.
I think that I'm just very gracious to be here today to talk about transition age youth,
how we're working with them. Where maybe some of our deficits are where we need to continue to focus,
and here if you all have any ideas or answer any questions you might have.
thank you for having me. This presentation, I will warn you,
it is very data heavy. But data tells a story.
I'm going to be walking you through the data, sharing information with you and feel free to just
ask questions along the way because it is data heavy. This first slide here,
this shows you the trend of the population of our 14+ youth in care since 2018.
we talked earlier and I know that you all have been updated probably many times about how
the population of children in youth in foster care has been decreasing significantly over the past several years.
in 2018, in that year, we had about 30,000 children in foster care,
and in 2024, as you'll recall, just earlier today, we talked about how we're just over 16,000.
our fiscal year has ended. We don't have those final numbers, but we were 16,100 and something as of july 31.
but you'll see that the trend for our transition age youth,
and when I use the term transition age youth, I'm talking specifically about any youth who's in foster care who's 14 or older.
the trend has been that even as the total population has decreased,
the percentage of children of youth over the age of 14 has continued to increase.
as of fiscal year 2024 about 22.3% of all of the children in youth and care were age 14 or older.
you'll also see this slide demonstrates where our 14 plus population was residing.
we like to look at this information because it gives us a depiction of,
well, first of all, are they living in the least restrictive setting, or are they in more restrictive settings?
if they happen to be in more restrictive settings, that may give us some idea of what their needs are.
in 2018, 2018 is noted by the blue,
and 2024 is the yellow. In 2018, you'll see that there were
significantly more 14 plus youth who were
residing in a non relative foster home or a kinship placement.
then there also were some residing more in emergency shelters and residential treatment facilities.
this basically tells us that as those numbers have decreased for the less restrictive placement,
then we see the numbers increasing for the more restrictive placements. Our basic childcare went up by 4%.
those are congregate care settings. Mostly, the youth placed in those settings do have more basic level needs,
but it is congregate care, so it's not family like. Then in our other foster care and
our other substitute care settings there on the far right. Those have increased pretty significantly by 5% and 3% respectively.
>> those are capturing. It's a catch-all for our placement.
it's capturing children and youth who are in a psychiatric setting,
children and youth who are in texas juvenile justice department,
are missing or runaway youth are captured in those two settings, and so psychiatric hospitalization.
generally, those are higher acuity youth. This slide again, just really demonstrates that as the years have gone by, again,
our transition age youth population is increasing percentage-wise,
but it's all they're also generally having higher acuity needs.
>> I do have a question on the other foster care,
would that include treatment foster care? What is included in other foster care?
>> other foster care is the texas juvenile justice department facilities and hospitals.
your rtc settings or your treatment settings.
>> thank you. >> this slide also shows the way in which our transition-aged youth have exited care.
you'll see that a larger percentage of our 14+ population are exiting care by way of aging out at the age of 18.
that's the blue line on the top. You'll also see that there are slightly fewer youth who are leaving
custody of dfps because the custody is transferred to a relative.
that's the red line, and slightly fewer who returned home to their parents.
we track this information because we do want to see the trend in population of the youth who are aging out of care.
but it's also interesting to see are these youth able to be returned home to less restrictive settings,
and are they exiting that way, or are they lingering in foster care longer.
>> kristin, can I interrupt you for just a second? I think this is a good time to highlight that we
talk about changes to the population of children in foster care,
and those changes skew the level of need of children is what we're seeing,
and we're seeing that across the foster care system. A child who is removed today into foster care,
I can just anecdotally tell you, has more serious needs, whether they're two or 10 or 15,
than they did five years ago. That is a transition that has happened in the system as we ensure that we
are only removing kids who absolutely need to be in foster care.
but it does impact these numbers. I just think it's really important to keep the context in mind.
I think about this a lot with kinship to where we cannot just compare 2018 to
2024 because the makeup of the population and
the needs of that population has changed so very much over the years,
and that does not in any way mean that we should accept that that blue line is increasing because that's the opposite outcome that we want.
it means that we need to hyper focus on additional services
and supports to help those youth get the treatment they need,
whatever that need is, it's not always a treatment need, whatever the need is to ensure that they are achieving permanency before they age out,
or if they absolutely must age out to ensure that we are equipping them to be adults.
>> absolutely. Keeping that in mind,
we're going to move to talking about the services and supports that are available to our transition-aged youth.
again, we're also going to talk about some of the gaps and things that we know that we need to work on.
this is a list of the services that transition-age youth are generally provided.
up at the top, it talks about how we have specialized staff at both the department agency level and also at the ssccs in our community-based care areas,
who really serve as the subject matter experts for all things related to transitional living services.
all of our youth have a case worker who's working their legal case and working with
their parents and working with their support system in order to identify the best form of permanency
for them and urgently work towards that permanency plan.
but they also have a subject matter expert in the legacy areas, we refer to them as pal staff,
preparation for adult living. These are really our people who are
the experts in knowing the services that are available to our transition-aged youth and making sure that
those services are adequately executed for the individual youth on their caseload.
I'm going to run through these and just give you a very brief overview of what the service is.
first, you'll see we have the life skills assessment. This is an assessment that is done with youth beginning when they turn 14.
they have a pre-assessment that just gauges where they're at in terms
of their ability to respond independently to things.
it might gauge their ability on their understanding of financial management,
their understanding of obtaining housing and signing leases and taking out loans,
those things, as well as your daily life skills of cooking, cleaning, all of that stuff.
they're given a pre-assessment beginning at age 14. They're also given a post assessment after they
complete their life skills training classes, which mr. Neff spoke briefly about,
our life skills training classes, our classes for youth,
with youth, with hands-on discussions about all of the things that they need to know in order to be a successful adult.
they complete a series of classes that addresses six core competencies in the area of independent living.
then after they complete those classes, they also take a post assessment to see what did they learn from those classes,
and where do we still need to help them to move the needle further for their ability to be a successful independent adult?
we also have transition and financial support services.
this is a contracted service. We have contracted providers in every region across the state.
mr. Neff mentioned one, he mentioned track. Track is our provider in the dallas-fort worth area.
these contracted providers they provide case management services.
they can provide for youth who are preparing to age out of foster care,
but largely their case loads are for youth who have already left foster care and continue to need some case management services.
they also have financial support services through them. If a youth is needing some funds in order to set themselves up in an apartment,
or if they need groceries to be paid for, there's some assistance for them through that.
the aftercare room and board financial assistance is through the transition and financial support services,
and it's up to $3,000 that they can receive,
and it's provided in $500 increments so just to give you an overview on the financial assistance.
then there's also the transitional living allowance, which youth access through their pal worker.
the transitional living allowance is up to $1,000 to assist a youth or
young adult with whatever they might need in order to successfully transition out of foster care.
then we have a lot of events. I know mr. Belsef had spoken on some that he's been engaged with and involved with.
we have our statewide team conference that has occurred the last several years at ut,
and timothy has been amazing to collaborate with because he and his team pull off such an amazing event for our teens.
but all of these events that are listed lower on this slide are intended
to provide youth with a forum to come together as a collective.
it's really important that our young people feel that they're not alone and
to come in community with other youth who are experiencing similar things.
also, while they're there to really give them some of those extra educational tidbits that they
need in order to successfully transition out of foster care.
we do hold several statewide events. We also work with and support our regional teams and
our sscc teams so that they can host similar events on a smaller scale for youth in their own communities.
then this just gives an overview of some other things that we're really
focused on helping youth who are transition-aged youth with.
we know that obtaining personal documents for youth in foster care can be a challenge.
when I mean personal documents, I mean like their birth certificate, their social security card,
and their state id or driver's license. We know that that can be difficult.
we also know that, as they move, sometimes things get lost.
our pal staff and our sscc equivalent staff work with
the caseworker in their areas in order to help obtain those documents.
at state office, my team helps with ordering birth certificates for every youth in care who's over the age of 14.
we do those in batches, and that's just one way that we help to make sure that they have their birth certificate,
because you really have to have that in order to get the social security card or the state id.
that's a good start, and then the regional staff work with the caseworker again to get the other documents as well.
the state office team also assists by conducting annual credit reports for all youth who are over the age of 14.
we know that our youth sometimes are targeted for identity fraud, identity theft.
we just want to keep a close eye on that because we want to make sure that, especially as they're transitioning out of care,
bad credit that was not something that they did,
that that's not held against them. We run these annual credit reports,
we provide them to the regions. If there are any concerns or discrepancies that are noted,
then we work with the credit bureaus to help get that cleared up. We also work with the regional teams
to ensure that they're engaging youth employment readiness activities.
we have a partnership with the texas workforce commission. We work with our local areas to make sure that
they have partnerships with their local workforce boards, and our regional teams are really great at coming up
with activities to help youth with interviewing skills,
to get them what they need in order to successfully apply for or interview for a job.
I know a lot of regions do clothing drive so that youth can go to
a clothing event and leave with an outfit that's appropriate for an interview.
suits and ties are nice, slacks and dresses, that sort of thing.
then another service that we provide, and I'm sure that all are aware of it is extended foster care
for youth who are over the age of 18; they can elect to,
it's a voluntary program. But they can elect to remain in paid placement beginning at age 18,
if they're still in school, if they're 18 and they're still in high school or working towards a ged,
or if they're in higher education, maybe they're in vocational school or in college,
but they want to stay in their paid placement they can do that. They also, over age 18,
can remain in extended foster care if they're working at least 80 hours a month or
working towards an independent activity that will help them to gain employment in some way.
when they hit 20 years old, they can stay until they're 21 if they're
still in high school or working towards their ged.
then we also have return to care. Sometimes we have youth who feel like they really are ready to be independent.
a lot of times, they're just done with being in foster care,
but there is a return to care option. We also work on homelessness prevention planning.
I have a youth housing specialist on my team as state office who is very familiar with housing resources across the state,
and he works with the pal staff and the sscc equivalents. Then I know you're also aware of our post-secondary education support services,
which includes our tuition and fee waiver and our education and training
voucher for youth to provide them with some additional financial assistance.
>> excuse me before you move on. I want to thank you so much for all the work you'll are doing and all the services and
resources that are out there for these students that are going out, especially for education,
and I never thought about credit report, that annual report that you do with them,
because you just never know, like you said, but I want to thank you for all these resources that are
very useful for these young adults going out. Thank you and thank you to your team.
>> absolutely. They're so important. Thank you. This just gives a quick snapshot.
four out of 10 youth who exited foster care aged out,
and about 25% of young adults age 18 opted to participate in extended foster care.
now I'm told I only have a few minutes, and I really want to get through this.
extended foster care. This slide really depicts all of the hard work that's been going on
across the state to really ensure that youth understand what extended foster care is.
we're not trying to micromanage their lives. We really want them to see extended foster care as an added optional support for them.
you'll see that in 2020, 655 youth opted to enroll in extended foster care,
and then we had a peak in 2021, but then it started to decline,
which you would maybe expect that,
because the total number of youth in care is declining.
but then you see this increase, and that's largely because we realized that we needed to remarket extended foster care,
and particularly our supervised independent living program. Because young people don't necessarily understand that
supervised independent living is not actually supervised. They're not being watched 24/7.
there's not somebody there watching them and everything that they do.
there's not an on-campus or on-site support person there 24/7,
but there is a person who is a resource for them, and they still have their caseworker who's working with them to make
sure that anything that they need is addressed when they're in a supervised independent living program.
I'm happy to see that youth are taking advantage of extended foster care.
educational outcomes are next. When measuring successes with the general population,
we generally look at educational outcomes. This educational data is pretty important,
and we realize that we still have work to do in this area. You'll see on the left that youth who graduated from high school,
this is youth who graduated from high school in the same fiscal year as their 18th birthday.
we're trending in the right direction for that. We do have more youth who are graduating timely.
the right that you'll see youth enrolled in higher education following the fiscal year of their 18th birthday.
we had a decline in 2020, but again, we're starting to trend in the right direction.
we really are working to try and make sure that youth are able to graduate from
high school timely so that they can move on to other things.
>> national youth and transition. This is a data collection system.
we report to the federal government on this. The way that it works is that youth who are in foster care are surveyed when they're 17.
then a subset of that group of youth that were surveyed at
age 17 are surveyed again at age 19 and again at age 21.
this data comes from that data, which, again, we do report it back to the federal government,
and the government does use it to inform our chafee grants, which acting commissioner o'neill mentioned earlier.
what we're seeing in texas fiscal year '20 through 2024 is in the yellow,
and what we're seeing in texas is that we're doing slightly better in terms
of full-time employment for our 19-year-olds and slightly better also for our part-time employment.
but high school graduation and current employment in
an educational program has remained stagnant.
then on the right is the outcomes for the 21-year-olds.
again, we're doing a little bit better in all of those areas,
but we would like to see those numbers continue to improve.
>> may I ask on the current enrollment in education program?
is this high school and also college or vocational certification that you're measuring?
>> yes. The top one is your high school diploma or your ged.
then the bottom one is, are they currently enrolled in any educational program?
if they didn't finish high school, are they still enrolled in high school? If they did complete high school,
have they moved on to either a vocational program or a college?
>> thank you. >> then this is using the nytd data
and looking at the national versus the texas comparison,
texas is in yellow, national is in blue.
you'll see that overall, our youth are slightly behind the national trends in all of these areas.
what we're doing to address this is we have education specialists,
we have one at state office, and we have multiple throughout the state. They've really partnered with our k through 12 school districts.
they hold educational consortiums to address things that are
going on with youth who are in dfps custody and also things
that we might not be aware of as an agency that the k through 12 system sees
as trends and patterns for them and have a meeting of the mind with these things.
they also liaison with staff and we'll talk to staff specifically about youth who are struggling in school.
they're resource, they can attend rd meetings. They can contact the school if there are concerns that maybe a caseworker
doesn't know enough about the educational system to really address,
but they're really a resource for them the caseworkers.
also, recently, our education specialists have been working with our data team to really drill
down the youth who are should be nearing graduation,
where are they at in their education and how can we target approaches for youth who are
struggling so that we can address those struggles earlier on and help get them to graduation.
then also, again, we're collaborating with our extended foster care programs, our sills,
because we know that they continue to provide these important supports
for youth to move them along in their education and on their independent journey.
we're including them in conversations about education as well.
this slide shows the nytd data when comparing those in
extended foster care to those who are not in extended foster care. This really just reiterate some of what I've been saying.
you'll see that the youth who are in extended foster care are faring better in terms of high school graduation or
ged completion and also in current enrollment or attendance in education as a whole.
this is a chart that shows financial support for youth and higher education.
this is utilization of our tuition and fee waivers. On the left, you'll see the utilization for
the adopted students who are utilizing the tuition and fee waiver.
on the right, you'll see the utilization for former foster youth.
we recognize in looking at this that for whatever reason,
and we're not sure of the reasons yet. But for whatever reason,
the tuition and fee waiver usage has declined, and we really plan to dig into that
more because we feel like this is an area where we need to focus.
>> these waivers, are these just state schools or who participates in tuition waivers?
>> tuition and fee waivers are available to youth to utilize at a state-supported school,
technical college or university. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. This is a visual of
the chafee deductions that we've seen since fiscal year 2022. You can see that as stated earlier today,
it is pretty significant. I will say, and I have so much appreciated the support of our executive staff,
acting commissioner o'neill included because when we received our chafee allotments earlier,
it's been a couple of months now for fiscal year 2026, we panicked.
it really took a lot of communication and collaboration
from the entire agency to determine how to tackle this in a way where our youth will feel the least amount of effect from the reduced amounts.
we were able to re-allocate some funds. I will say that our contracted providers for
life skills training classes are seeing a bit of a reduction. They are training fewer youth because the overall population is decreasing.
but they also have overhead. They have to pay their trainers. They have to develop the materials.
they have to update materials when there are changes that are made either because of our policy or because of legislative requirements.
they do have a significant amount of overhead. We're working with them to support them in any way that we can.
we also as just a general plan, we do plan to reduce some of our statewide events.
we will still be having the ut conference because that is just a huge support for our youth.
we're not going to hold a statewide college conference this year.
the purpose of that really is because we know that our regions and sscc areas are holding similar events out in their local areas,
and because it's local to where the youth live, honestly, more youth can participate in those local events.
we felt like that was one area where we could cut back.
we're just going to continue to really monitor how things are
going with the providers who are experiencing cuts and make adjustments as needed.
this outlines our life skills training completion
for the population of youth who are aging out of care. I will say our target is at least 95 percent of youth who age out of
care should have completed life skills training before they leave care.
as you can see for fiscal year 2025, when the data is pulled,
we were at 93.7, and we do have some work to do in that area.
but we monitor this very closely and we work with our regional teams.
we send out what's called a hot list of youth who are about ready to leave,
and if they haven't completed life skills training, what can we do to support the regions to make sure that they get it done?
I will also say mr. Neffet had talked about working with the youth to meet them where they're at,
if they can't complete an in-person class for whatever reason,
do it on an individual basis. Our state office team recently updated our independent living study guide,
which does take the place of the in-person classes if a youth needs to do it independently.
they walk through those courses with the youth, so it's not done totally independently,
but we updated the guide so that it would be more current and provided that to staff
in both the sscc regions and in the legacy region so that they could utilize that with youth.
>> real quick. If I remember right the chafee formula that they have is not tied to inflation, is that correct?
>> no, it's not. >> it's still based on 1999 numbers?
>> I am not absolutely sure if it's tied to that. I think that's the f map,
and but if it is that, it's 96 numbers. [laughter] many of our title iv funds
are tied to that 1996 poverty level, which is problematic.
I am not totally sure if chafee falls into that category, but we can find out.
>> well, there it's '99 or '96, it's not tied.
every year, we're losing ground just from funding because of the inflation.
>> I think the really unfortunate thing about this formula is
that it's not based on the size of the youth in care.
it's based on the size of the population of children in care.
it's not exactly tracking with the makeup of texas youth,
and there's no consideration given to the needs or the individual circumstances.
what does the demographic look like in texas versus another state?
>> that's typical for the feds. Thank you. >> I will just add to there has been a lot of
conversation occurring at the national level about the chafee funds and the chafee allotments.
we were contacted by an organization recently that is
engaging in conversations with our federal government about the chafee allotments.
I feel like there are conversations occurring at the national level,
and we hopefully might see some changes in the way the allotment occurs.
we're going to be watching that closely as well. Just quickly, this slide here,
this does show you the number of youth who are accessing these services.
fiscal year 2022 is in blue, fiscal year 2023 is in yellow,
and fiscal year 2024 is in red. We are seeing a trend downwards in the number of youth accessing these services.
although we're not happy about the cuts with our funding,
this does show that fewer youth are accessing services.
>> I just want to clarify one thing on this slide, kristin, which I should have asked you about before right now,
the educational and vocational bars, that does not include youth who are accessing
the tuition waivers through the higher education coordinating board, is that correct?
>> that's correct. >> the educational and vocational funds here is speaking
specifically to the funds that we allocate to the regions to address if they need a computer because they're doing online coursework,
then those funds can be utilized for that or any other need like that.
just to summarize, overall,
we've seen a decrease in funds and we're working diligently to increase
our engagement with our youth at the most critical points in their case.
we talked about engaging with youth earlier on before graduation to make sure that they're on track to graduate,
engaging with them earlier on to discuss what are your housing needs?
let's get a plan down on paper because we don't want to reach the point where you're ready to leave care,
but you don't have anywhere to go. We're being very diligent about those things.
but we are seeing a decrease in funds while we're also
seeing an increase in the percentage of youth over the age of 14 who are in care.
we're working with our community partners, our sscc stakeholders.
we're paying close attention to the data, and we're using that to inform our strategic plan moving forward because we do recognize
that youth who have experienced foster care do have some unique struggles compared to their peers,
and so we just want to make sure that we're meeting their needs.
I'll take any questions. >> yes. Thank you for the presentation.
I wanted to let you get through everything before I ask questions.
I want to share real quick. I lived in foster care in 20 years ago at this point,
and I aged out of foster care 17 years ago.
when I learned about these things, these things put me on the right path, really.
it's one of the reasons, if not, the main reason why I'm sitting here today as a college graduate and doing all these things.
I know the resources are real. I know that they're impactful and I know that they're transformative.
but there are also things that as we started to talk about with inflation and things like that.
when I accessed the education training voucher in 2008, it was $5,000 a year.
in 2025, the maximum amount is still $5,000 a year.
$5,000 a year back then could pay for a lot. Today, doesn't really pay for much.
that being said, seeing some of the data here is actually concerning. Seeing that through the education training voucher like utilization,
seeing the numbers go down, I work with students all the time every semester at ut,
and the first thing we do is apply for etv. Sometimes they're not even eligible to get
even any award because of the way things are calculated now.
there's been a lot of changes that have happened over the years that have occurred,
sometimes at the federal level, sometimes at the state level or both that don't
factor in how these programs were intended to run,
and therefore leads to reduced support on the students' behalf.
it's something that really needs to be considered and examined closely. I'm happy to have students meet who are experiencing
this firsthand about why this is significant and why this is important.
the question, I just wanted to share that, but the question that I have for you is I've already heard one thing that dfps will have to
reduce as a result of the loss chafee funds to reduce one of the college conferences.
I know you all are working really diligently to find the funds to really minimize the impact to our population.
but what are some other things that are potentially looking to be cut as a result of the loss of these funds?
>> thank you for the question. It really was the pal life skills training classes.
again, we're working with the contracted providers to make sure that they're still able to
provide the same level of services to the youth that they're serving through those.
then also the reduction of the statewide college conference,
those were the two main things that we reduced. In addition to that, though,
the allocations that go to the regions for educational vocational services,
we reduced that pretty significantly.
we didn't feel comfortable doing it. I'm going to be honest, but we also know that youth are able
to reach out to their transition and financial support providers that is another contracted service that did not receive
cuts to tap into their financial resources.
>> we felt that that was an area where although we didn't love cutting,
it was an area where we could utilize the resources that were in place in other areas to help offset that.
then we also are making sure to work with our regions and
ssc areas to see what community supports they have available in their areas to meet those needs,
because a lot of times there are community nonprofit organizations that can also help to fill that gap.
I think it's really just a matter of working even more diligently than we
already are to identify community resources and explain to them what the need is,
and why we might be asking now for more funds than we have previously.
>> thank you, I have one more and I'll make this one quick, I promise.
one of the things I'm also seeing with students is that as you've presented,
the transitional living services team is one of my favorite groups of people at dfps,
I've loved working with them over the years. I loved working with them when I worked at cps,
and I still love working with them today. One of the things I'm seeing and I've seen this already with a number of students at ut,
there's people that are achieving permanence or even reunification, which is great.
however, they've been put on a path working with people starting at age 14,
working with a transitional living services worker, working with a power worker,
going through the life skills curriculum, training, and being assured that they're going to have all of these resources to help
them achieve social mobility once they've emancipated and gone on.
well, as it turns out, with the push for permanence, these folks are achieving permanence, and some of them,
a couple of my students, I'm thinking about, did so literally a couple of weeks before they turned 18.
as a result of that, the path that they were on no longer applied,
that all the resources that they were hoping to look forward to and access, they were no longer able to access these things.
I'm curious, and I understand there might not be an answer here right now,
but is this something that the agency could look at and see is there something
that we could do if if this is something that's impacting people,
because it really does cause a lot of stress, anxiety, and honestly just resentment from young people that have been told, yes,
you can go live in a supervised independent living arrangement on campus or you
can access the transitional living allowance or this side or the other,
but actually now you can't. I get it, nobody should have to choose between benefits
and having a family, but at the same time, I think that if we put people on a certain path,
we owe it to them to deliver on the promises we've made. >> thank you for that. I have heard of similar situations,
and I do agree, I think it merits further conversation to see what we can do,
because as things are set up now, in a case where they reached permanency,
sometimes just weeks before they turn 18, that does change what they're eligible for.
I would welcome additional conversation about that for sure.
>> I think we may need to do some exploration about what we have.
what, if anything, we have flexibility to change? It is a really good question, and I don't know how much flexibility we have so we'll do some research on that.
>> I just had a quick comment, and thank you for this, it's just so timely.
in el paso, we've been having a lot of conversations with concern anecdotally hearing that
adults or transition age youth are starting to hit the adult system and the justice system and we don't want that.
we're looking at everything we can to address this and understanding better how these programs work
and individuals may not be taking advantage of the will help us with trying to connect folks in a timely manner.
we appreciate that very much. Thank you. >> thank you.
>> thank you so much. Appreciate it. >> thank you.
>> we were talking about possibly taking a break, but before that,
we do have amy franks from the management consulting group who will come
out to present the commissioner's award of excellence. >> good morning. It is my honor to introduce to
you the recipients of the commissioner's award of excellence, an award that represents the highest level of recognition,
honoring individuals who exemplify dedication, excellence,
and an unwavering commitment to serving children, families, and communities across texas.
today, we celebrate those whose leadership, compassion, and perseverance inspire us all to do more,
to do better and to serve with greater purpose. It is a privilege to recognize
these two remarkable individuals in the extraordinary difference they make every day.
our first recipient is the honorable aurora martinez jones,
judge martinez jones oversees all travis county, cps cases as the presiding judge for the 126 district civil court.
her court is also responsible for hearing cases relating to juvenile clients,
and she oversees other specialized courts in the district. She consistently looks to partner with
community mentoring organizations to help support the emotional and mental needs of children and youth,
including piloting a career day initiative where organizations and individuals from
across sectors share personal career experiences with high school age youth.
judge martin jones is a community advocate on several social issues
a judicial processes and community needs and is a founding member of a local collaborative,
looking for solutions to disparate outcomes in the child welfare system.
your dedication to protect our most vulnerable population
is a beacon of excellence across the department and the state of texas.
[applause]
our next recipient is misses laura christopherson. Miss christopherson served as the president of
the aps silver star board of el paso for the past ten years now retired.
during her leadership tenure, she planned and executed more than ten crimes against the elderly conferences in el paso,
which often in about 500 attendees.
the adopt a senior center events held each spring that provide lunch and
invite local agencies that serve rural communities to educate them about available resources.
the county attorney's office, christmas blessings project, which distributes donated gifts to the elderly and to veterans,
often the only gift that our aps clients receive during the holiday season.
aps is grateful to have had such a wonderful advocate helping create a better community.
her dedication to protect our most vulnerable population is a beacon of excellence across the department and the state of texas.
mrs christopherson was not able to join us in person today, but she is watching our live stream
and will be receiving her certificate through the mail. Thank you. [applause]
>> do we need a break or we have one more.
>> we will continue. >> I can talk fast.
[laughter] good morning. Rachel deer the director of faith based and community engagement.
actually, I can talk through one of the slides, because julie gave a great assist in talking about the upcoming aps conference,
but cheryl, we're coming into october, which is financial exploitation month I've provided a couple of graphics.
we actually have a very robust toolkit on our partnering to protect website that has all these graphics.
they have twitter feeds, they have facebook posts so that if you want to in your community,
get the word out about financial exploitation, that tool kit is available to you in the public
to use that in your organizations, cheryl. Then this is the partner to protect web page.
this is the new web page that aps launched as part of their partner to protect initiative.
this really has a lot of great in depth information,
on how you can partner with law enforcement, how to partner with hospitals,
how to partner with those nonprofit organizations to promote abuse, neglect,
and exploitation, awareness in your community and it has also information about financial exploitation.
it's a great resource for a website for everyone to go and look at.
then as julie talked about, the conference coming up here in austin, october 14th through 17th.
in addition to the wonderful workshops that we have, we do have the awards dinner,
which we will honor those board members that julie discussed, as well as staff that do outstanding work for aps during the year.
I hope that you can all come to the conference. It's a wonderful conference, and it will be the 42nd this year and I will put a plug in.
I talked to kes about this before. He's actually just now coming back from
the national adult protective services conference. Next year in austin,
there will be a joint aps and napsa conference here in austin so be ready for that next year as well.
for those who may not know, napsa actually started out of texas aps.
the national adult protective services conference started here, so it's going to come back next year and we'll have a joint conference together.
then looking ahead to november, we turn towards adoption month.
we'll start off on sunday, november 9th with stand sunday.
I know I've talked about that before. That is an initiative that bishop blake with
harvest family life ministries and dallas started several years ago, where we encourage faith congregations to stand
for youth and families who are in the foster adopt system.
the message is, everybody can do something, even if it's praying,
but you can up to foster adopt. We will have more information to share with you all on stand sunday coming up.
in addition to family caregivers month is in november, this website is a great website to a national website that
has wonderful resources about caregivers across the spectrum from youth and
children to adults and elderly care giving so that's a great resource.
then of course, national adoption day is going to be celebrated on november 22nd this year.
we'll be working with the ssccs, and then our legacy partners on adoption events across the state.
of course, we will send all the information. We're still gathering the information on financial exploitation activities that we'll send out
in the next newsletter for you so that you can attend all those events that we have planned around the state,
which will include both in person conferences, as well as webinars and other events.
[laughter] any questions?
no. Thank you so much.
>> thank you so much. The next item on the agenda is public testimony,
where we welcome input from the public and stakeholders on the topics laid out on the agenda.
we always appreciate hearing from the public and we value your input.
please know that the counsel, audre o'neal and vicki k,
our general counsel are unable to comment or respond to statements or questions during public testimony.
this is your opportunity to share information with us. If you plan to talk about a specific case and would like to
have someone from the office of consumer affairs call, please sign up at the registration table in the back.
we observe a three minute time limit for all speakers. Our time keeper will keep of the time for you and
indicate when you have one minute left by flashing the yellow light on the podium.
when your time is up, the red light will come on, and the time will beep.
please clearly state your first and last name in the agenda item you will be presenting on.
our first speaker is valentino valdez.
>> hello. My name is valentino valdez,
I'm a behavioral therapist and a former foster youth with over a decade in the cps system.
I entered care in 2006, and I aged out of care in 2020.
I begin my point with a question. What kind of help do you think we are entitled to when we go from
foster children to victims and survivors of the system? When we are physically, mentally, emotionally,
and even sexually abused by the caregivers dfps, employed or contracted.
how so dfps make amends to the children it's failed to protect?
all I was given was this crudely put together a list of
community resources with no attempt at apology by director of conservatorship hector ortez,
who then claim dfps is not at fault or responsible for what happened to me or the children in their care, but I beg to differ.
how can we not see that it's dfs responsibility when dfps
is the agency who removed us from our families with a promise of a better future?
when dfps is in charge of oversight of the homes and placements we were in,
truth of the matter is, we were failed. It's time to work towards helping the children,
the system promised to protect, recover from the horrors endured by the people dfps trusted.
I have taken initiative and built a foundation, if you will, for how that can be done.
it will be emailed to the council's email and it will also be sent to the relevant legislators.
this outline covers direct victim compensation, therapeutic, and medical support, education,
housing and stability, as well as administration and compliance. I also have in my possession my cps records.
this is my favorite part, they were given to me unredacted.
which in turn are our burden of proof of negligence, physical abuse, and alteration of records.
I wish to not implicate anyone as solution and healing is my only goal,
but if we victims are going to continue to be ignored and bruss side, I would like to encourage others that if no resolution is reached,
that we all publicly release our own private records to bring light to the darkness we've experienced.
if I as one survivor can document negligence and abuse in my own records,
what does that say about the children currently in dfps care who don't have a voice or who don't live long enough to speak here today?
we will no longer carry the burden of what was done to us. It is time we share the weight with those responsible.
a glimmer of light on an issue that would no longer be tolerated. I hope my presence here has shown that there is one of us willing to fight,
and as history has taught us, never underestimate the power of one. To any more victims within or have aged out of dfps,
the fight for you has just begun. I would like to take the remainder of the time to silence for the victims we have
failed to help and for the ones that we will. Thank you.
>> thank you. We have no other public comment,
or have anybody else signed up. With that, I would like to adjourn this meeting.
>> everybody in favor of that? Thank you so much.