How Could You? Hall of Shame-KC case-Child Death UPDATED

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.

From Austin, Texas, “The recent death of a foster child in a treatment center in Fort Bend County and allegations of restraints being used on foster kids at another Houston-area facility have prompted the federal judge overseeing Texas foster care to demand records to be turned over to her special masters.

U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack also flashed with anger Friday that, according to her masters, her order for 24-hour awake supervision in large foster homes and institutions continues to be ignored by some providers.

That may lead to another contempt hearing, Jack warned, according to a transcript of a Friday conference call that was released Monday.

The hearing was called after Attorney General Ken Paxton asked Jack to unseal the invoices of her two special masters, or monitors, to the state.

Jack did so but defended the monitors’ work as essential because of state failings.

Paxton spokesman Alejandro Garcia, however, said Paxton is disappointed Jack didn’t agree to make the monitors detail more about their “exorbitant” charges so the state and the court can “limit fees to those reasonably necessary to carry out the monitors’ duties.”

Jack, though, dressed down state lawyers Friday, saying the state will have an opportunity to challenge the monitors’ findings “at the appropriate time.” But their methods and movements will be known — at least, in advance — only to the court, said Jack, who has accused the state of recalcitrance in doggedly resisting her orders.

“You’re not monitoring the monitors,” she said. “I am.”

The disclosures of a death in foster care, under circumstances that are being probed, and alleged misuse of restraints and slapping and punching of children centered on the Houston region. But events there are of keen interest to child advocates in North Texas.

Severely traumatized foster children from the Dallas-Fort Worth area often are sent to the Houston area — as well as Austin and San Antonio — because there are few residential treatment centers in North Texas.
Child fatality

On Feb. 9, a 14-year-old girl in state custody who resided at the Prairie Harbor Residential Treatment Center in Wallis collapsed from a pulmonary embolism and died, according to an order Jack issued Friday. Among other things, it required the state within 24 hours to provide to her two court-appointed monitors all paperwork on the girl’s death.

Jack also demanded officials instantly turn over all records of any investigations since last summer, when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals finally upheld certain of her findings, overturning others. The state didn’t appeal.

Jack said she and plaintiffs only learned of the girl’s death because of special master Deborah Fowler’s “diligence.”

In an interview, Paul Yetter of Houston, a lawyer for about 11,000 children in long-term foster care, said court monitors and plaintiffs’ lawyers have questions about whether the girl’s life might have been saved if outcries she made about pain in a leg were heeded.

About two weeks before the girl collapsed, she and one of her roommates separately reported her discomfort to two different Prairie Harbor staff members but nothing was done, Yetter said.

Prairie Harbor owner Rich DuBroc, chief operating officer Anthony Hurst and executive director Alexandria Pritchard did not respond to requests for comment.

“I can’t comment,” said Department of Family and Protective Services spokesman Patrick Crimmins. “Each abuse-neglect investigation is thorough and any relevant information is considered, including from witness interviews.”

Yetter, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said Fowler learned of the fatality while scouring high-priority tips to the child-abuse hotline in Austin.

“She was reviewing ‘P1s,’ and this popped up,” recalled Yetter, referring to a Priority 1 designation the state’s hotline gives to the most urgent reports.

In 2017, Prairie Harbor was twice cited for failing to provide prompt medical care to foster children, according to the state Health and Human Services Commission’s website on residential child care providers’ history of compliance with state minimum standards.

Last year, the center had 12 high risk standards violations, including a staff member — since dismissed — having sex with a child in care. Other citations alleged kids were ridiculed by staff members, caregivers were on their cellphones and not watching the youngsters, and “a child obtained a lighter from an unattended bag and started a fire in the restroom,” according to the commission’s website.
Restraints

Several children at A Fresh Start Treatment Center in Houston complained to monitors — who made an unannounced visit at nearly midnight one day last week — of use of unapproved restraints, Jack’s order said.

They “included holding their arms over their heads with arms crossed causing their heads to be forced forward, which the children reported result[ed] in at least one child passing out,” the judge wrote. The unapproved technique made it hard to breathe, she quoted the children as telling the monitors.

The youngsters also spoke of being slapped, punched and slammed against a wall by the center’s staff members, Jack wrote.

In the past five years, A Fresh Start Treatment Center has been cited for 28 high-risk violations of minimum standards, including several for improper use of restraints, according to the commission’s website.

Jack questioned the treatment center’s operations, saying “it took approximately 15 minutes for someone to answer the door and allow entrance. This delay bolsters the children’s reports that nighttime staff sleep, they are not awake.”

Attempts by email and phone to reach Angel Vanterpool and Reginald Minnieweather, administrators at A Fresh Start, which has two campuses, were unsuccessful.

Last fall, the state paid $150,000 in fines after Jack held the department in contempt for not requiring large foster homes and institutions to have 24-hour awake supervision. On Friday, Jack said that may change.

“It has now come to my attention through the incredible efforts of the monitors that many of these facilities … do not have 24-hour awake supervision even subsequent to the contempt hearing,” the judge said.

“The public should know that these monitoring expenses could have been used to provide services to these children but instead are necessitated by the defendants’ refusal to safeguard these children,” Jack said.

Since July 31, the masters have billed the state for nearly $3.2 million. Master Kevin Ryan and his firm Public Catalyst of Iselin, N.J., have been paid almost $1.83 million. Over the same period, the protective services department paid Fowler and her Austin-based group, Texas Appleseed, nearly $1.36 million.

They soon will have 31 full- or part-time employees or consultants, Jack noted. They’ve visited 24 facilities, interviewed more than 150 children and are doing an “incredible job,” said Jack, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton.

She excoriated state protective-services officials for “gross negligence,” “indifference” and “lack of care and attention for these children” for many years.

Crimmins, the department spokesman, declined to respond.

Paxton spokesman Garcia, though, said the state’s top lawyer, a Republican, will keep watching out for taxpayers.

“We are disappointed … that the court rejected the state’s request to obtain additional information about the bills and limit fees to those reasonably necessary to carry out the monitors’ duties,” he said in a written statement. “Both are required to protect Texas taxpayers and the integrity of the process.””

Judge in Texas foster care suit wants all state records on teen girl’s death in care, restraints

[Dallas News 02/25/2020 by Robert T. Garrett]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Update:“Texas officials will no longer send foster children to live at a rural facility where a teen girl died this spring in what a federal judge described as an apparently “avoidable death.”

The decision by child welfare officials to cut ties with the Prairie Harbor residential treatment center in Wallis came to light Thursday during the first day of a two-day hearing in which state officials argued that they had made significant progress toward reforms ordered by U.S. District Judge Janis Jack in a nearly decade-old class-action lawsuit brought by foster children.

An obviously skeptical Jack, who at one point quipped that she took state officials’ testimony “with a grain of salt,” threatened several times during the hearing to hold the state in contempt of court for not adequately implementing new policy.

The hearing comes nearly five years after Jack first ruled that Texas had violated long-term foster children’s constitutional rights by leaving them in unsafe homes and three months after court-appointed monitors published a scathing report arguing that state officials remained out of compliance, permitting the foster care system system to pose “substantial threats to children’s safety.”

The hearing is scheduled to continue Friday, and Jack is expected to decide whether to hold Texas child welfare officials in contempt of court for the second time in less than a year.

On a video call sometimes interrupted by the pings of computer alerts and a hiccuping internet connection, Jack lobbed fiery questions at her iPad screen, such as why state officials hadn’t asked lawmakers more quickly for emergency funding to address systemic failures.

“I’m not understanding the state’s reluctance, and actually refusal, to abide by these orders,” Jack said. State witnesses used “circular speak” to avoid answering her questions, she said. And at one point she scolded Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters for turning off her video camera, saying she wanted to make sure the commissioner was present.

State officials described their efforts as a work in progress and resisted the sweeping terms Jack used to criticize the system they oversee. But given the opportunity, they declined to name any perceived inaccuracies in the court-appointed monitors’ June report detailing 11 recent child deaths. At one point, Masters told the judge, “Your Honor, I’m concerned by what I’m hearing as well.”

Jack and attorney Paul Yetter, a partner with Yetter Coleman in Houston who represents more than 10,000 children in the class-action lawsuit brought against Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas’ health and human services leadership, paid particular attention to the death earlier this year of a 14-year-old girl, referred to as K.C.

On Feb. 8, K.C. woke shortly after 10:30 p.m. to use the restroom, according to the monitors’ summary of Prairie Harbor staff testimony. A staff member supervising the girl noticed that she limped but assumed it was because her leg was asleep.

The staff member heard the girl fall and found her collapsed on the bathroom floor, lying on her back. Over 10 minutes, the girl’s condition reportedly deteriorated and she lost consciousness, though she continued to breathe and had a pulse, according to the summary of staff testimony.

Staff waited to call 911 until 11:08 p.m., more than 30 minutes after K.C. had collapsed, the monitors wrote. K.C. was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, and a forensic review found the cause was a pulmonary embolism associated with a deep blood clot in her right calf.

The court-appointed monitors described K.C. in their report as obese. She was approximately 5’3” and weighed just under 300 pounds, with medical records indicating she had high blood pressure and blood glucose levels. And they noted that daily progress notes signed by Prairie Harbor staff in the previous month documented the girl’s complaints of leg pain, but her last doctor’s appointment was in October 2019.

State officials said an investigation into K.C.’s death was ongoing. And they revealed during the hearing that they were terminating their contract with Prairie Harbor and would no longer place foster children in the residential treatment center, which works with traumatized children with complex behavioral needs. State officials cited the facility more than 60 times for minimum standards violations between February 2017 and December 2019, according to the monitors’ report.

Jack said it was “unbelievable” that state officials had continued to place foster children at Prairie Harbor for up to seven months after K.C.’s death. And after officials testified that they had this week ceased placements there, Jack said that she discovered in a simple internet search that the home’s owner and executive director have a new facility in Corpus Christi that is poised to take new foster placements.

Prairie Harbor officials could not be reached for immediate comment Thursday.

It is “stunning,” Jack said, that the Texas Health and Human Services Commission does not have “any stipulations that the owners of these facilities are not allowed to open under another name. That to me is also a problem that needs to be addressed.”

Children enter the foster care system after they are found to have suffered abuse or neglect at home. But Jack’s 2015 ruling, which state attorneys fought back against for years until it was ultimately weakened by an appeals court, found that foster children regularly become victims of sexual abuse and “often age out of care more damaged than when they entered.”

In November 2019, Jack held the state in contempt of court after a similarly fiery hearing for failing to comply with her orders. At the time, she made clear that based on initial information from the monitors, she no longer found the state’s child welfare agency “to be credible in any way.” She fined the state $150,000 at the time.”

After a teen’s death, Texas cuts ties with a rural foster care facility, then gets a tongue-lashing from a federal judge
[Texas Tribune 9/3/2020 by Edgar Walters]