Texas’ foster care system is more likely to move children away from their communities

By Terri Langford and Dan Keemahill, The Texas Tribune
April 23, 2026

In 2017, Texas lawmakers offloaded foster care services to private companies on the promise that these contractors will keep foster children closer to home and send them onto a better future.

Today, the state and its contractors are more likely to move foster children out of their communities — one in three children placed in foster care is sent to a different region, sometimes hundreds of miles away, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of state data.

“Community-based care contracts say the contractor was supposed to keep children within a 50-mile radius of home,” Vikki Spriggs, the chief executive of Texas CASA, the association for advocates the court appoints to children in abuse cases. “Based on what we are hearing from local CASA programs, that’s not happening.”

Despite the state’s efforts to dramatically reduce the number of Texas children moved into foster care, the state and its contractors say they must move higher percentages of foster children out of their communities. They are seeing a far more traumatized child than ever before, requiring more intensive hospitalization and monitoring that certain parts of the state are better equipped to handle.

Meanwhile, the child welfare workers’ unions and some foster care advocates say the privatization of foster care hasn’t done enough to build more treatment facilities or recruit more foster parents to care for more high-acuity children across the state. About 54% of the state’s 16,000 foster care children are located in 10 of the state’s 16 foster care regions served by a private contractor.

Advocates say moving these vulnerable children out of their communities erodes the likelihood of their reunifying with family members and challenges caseworkers and other providers from monitoring these children’s progress, resulting in inconsistent care and the potential for dangerous outcomes.

In 2016, the year before the state approved a major ramp-up to the privatized foster care model, also called community-based care, 22% of foster care children were placed outside of their foster care region. In 2025, that rate increased to 34% — or 3,183 foster children. Of those out-of-region placements, 67% of them came from DFPS regions served by a private contractor.

As of December, 48% — more than 1,300 — of those children sent to other regions were placed in region 6, the territory DFPS has assigned to Harris, Montgomery and Fort Bend, the most of any region. Many of them came from privatized regions that include Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar counties.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees the foster care program, said the Houston area has better services for high-needs children.

“This is largely due to a combination of factors that have made it more feasible to develop and sustain specialized programs in that region, including a higher concentration of behavioral health service providers and access to local workforce,” according to the statement.

The state’s private contractors insist they are doing their best to transform what some have seen as a threadbare statewide machine into a more localized care system they’re building from the ground up. Of the 10 private contractors, seven have taken over the complete care of foster care children for their region, some of which are extremely rural and sparsely populated.

These state contractors admit moving children outside their region is never an easy choice but because Houston’s easier zoning regulations have allowed more larger facilities to be built there, they must outsource until they can recruit more foster parents or build more foster beds in their regions.

“We inherited a system that was historically built to operate statewide, not regionally, and with that came an existing shortage of foster homes and specialized placements,” 4Kids4Families, the foster care contractor in East Texas’ region 4 said in a statement. “The lack of capacity in our 23 East Texas counties didn’t begin with Community-Based Care, and it’s not something that can be resolved overnight.”

But the persistent and historic reliance on foster care homes and intensive psychiatric facilities in the Houston area illustrates that despite the $700 million a year poured into a private system caring for abused children in Texas, the state’s contractors continue to struggle with an age-old problem of finding adequate intensive care and a workforce closer to children’s homebases.

That’s in addition to the $300 million the state has spent on various improvements as part of a 15-year-old federal lawsuit over the unhealthy and often dangerous conditions of Texas’ foster care program between 2019 and 2025.

The whole idea of redesigning foster care, said Myko Gedutis, organizing coordinator and vice president for the Texas State Employees Union, which represents DFPS foster care workers, was to create fewer disruptions for a child in state care. Both advocates, the agency and their contractors agree that foster care children and their families do better when oversight by caseworkers is nearer.

But Gedutis said Houston caseworkers have had to visit children sent from other regions on top of their local cases.

“We did hear that from our folks, that they have children that have not been seen … even though they’re from [other] regions,” Gedutis said.

A more traumatized child

Private contractors came online as DFPS worked to reduce the number of children in foster care. For years, most of the cases that resulted in a child’s removal experienced neglect, not abuse. Then in 2021, state lawmakers increased the bar for removal by allowing the state to take children from their homes only if they are in “immediate danger,” instead of “substantial risk” of harm.

The result is that DFPS has removed far fewer children from their homes, and those that enter the system have more serious problems, Spriggs said. “When you look at the record, you have multiple calls on a family before a child is removed.”

Today’s child is more medically fragile and traumatized than previous generations of Texas children entering into foster care. At the same time, many parts of the state do not have a sufficient number of foster beds. In a November 2025 report to the Legislature, DFPS noted the state has lost 598 foster care providers since 2019.

Without sufficient specialized foster beds in communities, the state and its contractors place many children in a different county or administrative region than their original home.

“Removal from home is a traumatic event that, in most cases, places a child in an unfamiliar setting with unfamiliar people,” Spriggs said. “Compound that with going into a new school, having to make new friends and learn all the new ways of the new environment and you are expecting a lot from a child who has already experienced extreme abuse and the trauma of removal.“

The Texas Tribune reached out to seven private contractors now managing a foster care caseload. Many of them acknowledge they have challenges in expanding the number of foster care homes, but they also point to how large their service areas are and how rural areas have very little specialized care for high-needs kids.

Saint Francis Ministries, the foster care contractor for the 41-county Texas Panhandle region, has invested $8 million to expand local capacity.

“We remain focused on matching children with safe, supportive placements, recognizing that in some rural areas this may mean accessing resources outside their immediate community,” said Denny Marlin, a company spokesperson.

A statement issued by EMPOWER, the largest contractor in the state serving Dallas and eight other counties in region 3, noted that in-region placement is always a priority. But other factors including a child’s safety and level of care can necessitate a higher level of care elsewhere in the state.

“Many EMPOWER youth placed in Region 6 (Houston area) require specialized services that necessitate placement outside their home region,” the statement reads. “Despite this, EMPOWER remains committed to building local capacity to keep youth connected to their home community, whenever safely possible.”

April Molina, spokesperson for SJRC Texas/Belong, said region 6 has Houston, which has more favorable zoning regulations that make it easier to place residential facilities there than in her area.

“Historically and across much of the state, higher-level residential treatment capacity has been concentrated in Region 6,” said Molina, whose foster care region stretches from Del Rio to just southeast of the Houston area of region 6. Because of their proximity to region 6, some of their children don’t have to travel as far if they’re placed there.

Contractors addressing legacy foster care issues

In 2010, DFPS launched a so-called foster care redesign and at the direction of the Texas Legislature in 2017 accelerated the shift away from an entirely state-run operation to a privately contracted one.

In this “community-based care” landscape, everything — where a child would live, what services a child and their existing family members would get to improve that home life as well as a plan to either reunify the child or place them with an adoptive family — would be in the hands of a community-based contractor. The agency would maintain custody of the child while in care and handle legal proceedings, but it would place 90% of the child’s care in the hands of a private contractor.

The state pushed the concept as a way to give control to a local contractor who knows the area and can build better relationships with foster families and health care providers, so that abused children can stay in their community.

“Where [communit-based care] fell short is not having the community-based services that communities need,” Spriggs said.

But since community-based foster care launched 16 years ago, it’s been a rocky road to complete. To date, the state hasn’t yet rolled out privatized foster care in six DFPS regions and of the 10 that do have a private contractor, three are still in a start-up phase and haven’t started taking in children.

And there’s been failures. In 2014, Providence Services Corporation, the contractor for a large swath of West Texas, called it quits after one year. Two years after taking over services in Bexar County, Family Tapestry pulled out and canceled its contract with the state in 2021.

Then last month, DFPS asked a judge to put EMPOWER, the contractor in charge of Dallas and adjacent adjacent counties, back under agency oversight for at least 90 days after performance had declined to a point the contractor found to have “systematic failures” that created “an imminent danger to the children under conservatorship.” EMPOWER declined to comment about the receivership petition.

“Community-based care, it was not made to improve outcomes,” Gedutis said. “It was made to pass accountability so when contractors fail, like they have, kick ‘em to the curb, we’ll just get a new one in.”

Texas still working on expanding foster beds

DFPS and their private contractors all say they are working together to create more specialized services and beds for children who have serious behavioral, medical and substance abuse conditions.

In DFPS’ 2026 annual plan, the agency discusses generally how it has prioritized building more capacity for higher needs foster care children and references how it secured more money during the last legislative session to “to develop strategies addressing high acuity youth needs” but the report does not offer a specific plan to do that.

The agency insists that building out bedspace is a priority and is working with its contractors in particular to build out better services for older foster care children and those with high needs. .

“By strengthening provider networks, supporting workforce development, and creating more therapeutic and community-based options, DFPS is working to ensure that every child in its care has access to a safe, stable, and supportive environment,” the plan said.

From the contractor perspective, it’s going to take a lot more than funding and regulation changes to bring more intensive services to local communities.

In a state that has faltered on certain regulatory oversight, some Texas communities don’t want residential treatment centers in their neighborhoods because they fear these homes bring more crime. The foster care system can better serve foster children if the public can sympathize more with these children’s often tragic backstories and the services they need.

“Foster children have experienced significant trauma and instability, and the staff who care for them are doing complex, high-risk work,” said Molina with SJRC/Belong, the contractor for region 6 that now includes San Antonio. “It’s important for communities to understand who these youth are and why this level of care is sometimes necessary to develop the appropriate capacity.”

Part of the battle is getting buy-in from community leaders to support the state’s privatized contractors in the numerous steps they have to go through to build one of these specialized facilities, which includes finding a property, completing the licensing process and training staff, she said.

Local health officials can also help reduce the dependence on larger residential treatment facilities by expanding a county’s mental health infrastructure that prioritizes early intervention and a reliable crisis response.

“Many youth enter higher levels of care because they lacked timely access to trauma-informed services earlier, or because local systems are not equipped to support them consistently through crisis and recovery,” Molina said. “The results will take time, but the momentum is moving forward.”

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.