A report is critical of the program's implementation, but a child and family expert with an Austin-based public policy foundation is supportive of an expansion of the state's current community-based foster care model.

"Over the last several years, a considerable amount of work has gone into addressing systemic deficiencies that have long plagued the Texas foster care system," Texas Public Policy Foundation Child and Family Policy Senior Fellow Andrew C. Brown said. "This work is bearing fruit, and the 87th Legislature has a unique opportunity to build on the successes already achieved by reform efforts."

Brown urged the Legislature to carefully coordinate expansion and improvement of the community-based care system.

Texas Public Policy Foundation Child and Family Policy Senior Fellow Andrew C. Brown | linkedin.com/in/andrew-brown-780b603/

"Data from the four regions of the state currently operating under community-based care show that the model is doing exactly what it was intended to do," he said.

The model should be allowed to continue, Brown said.

"Community-based care is the future of foster care in Texas, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation fully supports its expansion statewide," he said.

Brown's comments were part of four pages of his testimony before the Texas State Senate Finance Committee late last month. Brown also provided the committee with his research paper from last summer that offers a more-detailed analysis of the Family First Prevention Services Act than he could provide in his brief testimony. The research paper also includes recommendations for expansion of the state's community-based care system.

The nonprofit Texas Public Policy Foundation describes its mission as "to promote and defend liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise in Texas and the nation," according to information on the about page on its website.

In his testimony, Brown referred to the state Legislature's response in 2017 "to ongoing problems within our state’s centrally managed foster care system" with reforms intended to move Texas to a community-based model. Under that model, local private and nonprofit charities took on primary responsibility for watching out for local children in foster care.

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

The report, issued in November, found the implementation by the Department of Family and Protective Services and Children's Protective Services has been "random, chaotic," overly centralized and "lacking an overall implementation strategy" with a clear need for greater transparency and accountability.

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

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

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

Despite the report, Brown said the current foster care model is working very well.

"Data from the four regions of the state currently operating under community-based care show that the model is doing exactly what it was intended to do," Brown told the Senate Finance Committee members. "Local providers are producing positive gains in key performance indicators such as child safety, placement stability, and placement in the least restrictive setting. Community-based care is working, and Texans are taking notice."

Brown also referred results from a Texas Public Policy Foundation survey issued a couple of weeks before his testimony that found 76% of those surveyed support the community-based model for foster care in the state. That was a dramatic increase from 62% who expressed support for the model in March of last year.

"As we analyzed the poll results, we found that the largest increases in support between March 2020 and February 2021 came from regions of the state where community-based care is operating," Brown said. "This suggests that Texans not only support the model on its own merits, but that their support increases when they see it in action in their own communities."