How many horrible tales of children harmed in foster care will it take for Texas to fix it?

If you’re looking for a measure of how bad things are in Texas’ child protection system, consider this: Officials believe employees at a private facility hired by the state merely took nude pictures of some of their charges but didn’t engage in sex trafficking.

What a relief.

That’s about as much as we can hope for when it comes to Texas and foster care. Despite a federal court’s relentless oversight, increased budgets and repeated vows of commitment from state leaders, Texas simply cannot handle caring for some of its most vulnerable children.

The story began March 10, when state officials told the federal judge overseeing the system employees at The Refuge, a Central Texas facility that serves victims of sex trafficking, may have trafficked some children again.

It’s almost something out of a bad detective novel. Yet it was plausible to anyone who’s been following Texas protective services’ problematic record.

A Texas Department of Safety investigation found no evidence that the worst had happened. But investigation continues into the photo-taking and whether employees gave children drugs or alcohol.

And at a state Senate hearing Thursday, a familiar pattern emerged: An abuse investigator raised several concerns about the facility, which housed children ranging from ages 11 to 17, but mid-level state employees didn’t act. Two have been fired, and leaders vow to review how such a management failure could have occurred. The facility itself has fired several employees. Outraged lawmakers pledge to get to the bottom of it.

We’ve heard it all before. A contractor fails and everyone is very, very sorry. But improvements in oversight never quite get it right.

U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack declared more than six years ago that the Texas foster-care system was violating children’s rights by endangering them. Many hearings, admonishments and fines later, the state Department of Family and Protective Services remains insufficient.

Many states struggle with how to care for foster children. There’s an unending cycle: Outrageous abuse cases prompt regulators to ramp up investigations, so more children are removed from their parents. But there aren’t enough reliable family members or volunteers to help abused kids. Well-meaning contractors, many of them faith-based nonprofits, do their best. But capacity remains an issue, and children end up sleeping in CPS offices.

Into this mess, Gov. Greg Abbott tried to inject investigations of transgender medical care. A court has blocked his order, but does this look like a department that needs such a distraction from trying to save abused kids’ lives?

Thursday’s Senate hearing was before a special committee that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick created to address the problems. To be fair, it’s not the first effort. Lawmakers have nearly doubled the state portion of the protective service department’s budget in the last few years.

But the Refuge case indicates that the department still has significant management and communication failures. Gov. Greg Abbott has talked a good game about improving the system, but it’s going to take sustained attention from lawmakers, along with more investment in front-line workers and supervisors, to improve.

Recruitment and oversight of foster-care providers will always be a challenge. More money will help. But lawmakers need to grapple with whether the privatized regional system that the state is trying to implement can really work. And if not, they must look to other models and move fast.

Democrat Beto O’Rourke is trying to make the CPS failures a campaign issue. It’s not the kind of thing that generally moves a lot of voters, even as part of O’Rourke’s broader argument that Abbott has mismanaged the state.

After all, the case that led to Jack’s oversight has been going for nearly a decade. How many children have suffered while the same problems occur again and again?

And how many more will it take before the Legislature has had enough?

This story was originally published March 18, 2022 at 2:10 PM.