Troubled Texas CPS gets familiar face as new No. 2 leader

AUSTIN — A veteran of Texas’ social providers coverage debates of the previous quarter-century is being tapped to assist steer the state’s foster care and protecting providers applications previous a bunch of challenges.

Anne Heiligenstein, a high-ranking official beneath two current Republican governors, has been an unofficial adviser to Gov. Greg Abbott’s chosen leader of the Department of Family and Protective Services, Jaime Masters, for a lot of the previous 2 ½ years.

Now, the association’s being formalized.

On Wednesday, Abbott moved to quell legislators’ privately voiced criticisms of Masters by having her announce that Heiligenstein will serve as the division’s government deputy commissioner for the following 12 months.

Currently, Heiligenstein, who was commissioner between 2008 and 2011, is senior director for Casey Family Programs in Texas. The nonprofit Seattle group develops and funds mannequin little one welfare applications throughout the nation.

In late January or early February, Casey was retained to “increase the capacity” of the division’s management workforce by offering a advisor “with direct experience in child welfare systems” to provide “technical assistance” as it tries to repair the issue of youngsters sleeping in Child Protective Services places of work and inns as a result of no foster care placement is on the market. The technical-assistance advisor was Audrey Deckinga, who led CPS when Heiligenstein was commissioner – and who’s doing the work beneath a contract with Casey.

Heiligenstein remains to be employed and paid by Casey. She is being “loaned” to the division beneath a one-year settlement that goes by way of subsequent 12 months’s common legislative session.

Masters additionally demoted the affiliate commissioner for CPS she introduced along with her from Kansas, Deneen Dryden. Dryden’s being changed on an interim foundation by Erica Bañuelos, a 25-year CPS worker who got here up by way of the ranks. Most just lately, Bañuelos was “director of field,” or overseer of the company’s 11 regional places of work that embrace the frontline workers.

Masters introduced two different promotions and the sidelining of Sergio Gamino, a veterans’ affairs bureaucrat from the Pacific Northwest who’d simply been employed as “interagency lead,” and who was to cease Texas’ longtime follow of bunking down foster youngsters in state places of work, motels and makeshift amenities such as church buildings.

The choose in a decade-old, federal class-action lawsuit over long-term foster care had questioned the credentials of Gamino. He’ll be a particular assistant to Masters, Heiligenstein and Corliss Lawson, deputy commissioner, whom Masters additionally introduced along with her from Kansas.

‘Good move’

“These are deep, well thought-out leadership and organizational changes, and I am confident in the abilities of each of our professionals to fulfill the duties and responsibility of these new appointments,” Masters wrote her government workforce on Wednesday.

Former state District Judge Scott McCown of Austin, who’s tracked CPS and the foster care system because the Nineties, praised Heiligenstein’s choice.

“The last time the department was performing well, Anne was the commissioner,” stated McCown, who till 2013 ran an Austin-based, center-left suppose tank now known as Every Texan. “It’s a good move to bring her in.”

Before she ran CPS’ dad or mum company, Heiligenstein was the deputy government commissioner over eligibility and social-welfare applications on the Health and Human Services Commission, one other publish she held beneath former Gov. Rick Perry.

In the early 2000s, she labored on the White House as director of coverage and initiatives for First Lady Laura Bush. That was a number of years after she served on the Texas Capitol as a high well being and human providers coverage adviser to then-Gov. George W. Bush.

The Heiligenstein-Masters duo has its work minimize out.

Big duties

Not solely is the division beneath a microscope within the federal go well with, during which the state’s provision for abused children has been labeled poor.

It’s additionally reeling from turnover charges that Masters described Monday as hovering between 30% and 40% a 12 months for front-line workers members.

Influential GOP lawmakers have grown exasperated with the division, citing what they see as a glacially sluggish rollout of “community based care,” a new, regionally run mannequin for foster-care contracting. In 2010, Heiligenstein devised this system, which places one vendor accountable for all of the subcontracting for an space, as a possible treatment for grave imbalances that harm youngsters.

For occasion, for a few years, severely emotionally disturbed foster youngsters from Dallas have needed to be positioned by CPS within the Houston space or close to San Antonio or Austin as a result of North Texas had nearly no residential remedy facilities.

Masters, a wedding and household therapist with expertise at Kansas’ child-welfare company, was named commissioner by Abbott and commenced work in December 2019, simply months earlier than the coronavirus outbreak.

As COVID-19 impeded CPS staff’ makes an attempt to guarantee youngsters have been protected and strained foster-care suppliers’ funds, Masters struggled to maintain her staff’ morale from plummeting.

A capability disaster in foster care pressured her to order all palms on deck: She made even staff who don’t usually work with foster youngsters pull nighttime shifts as caregivers for “children without placements.”

The division’s first try and stage group primarily based care in a big city space – in San Antonio – misfired. The subunit of a revered native nonprofit, The Children’s Shelter, was chosen as the one supply continuum contractor. But after U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack’s screens forged a highlight on mayhem at a facility run by the contractor, Family Tapestry, Masters ordered placement holds and different punishments. Family Tapestry pulled out.

Judge vital

After a short honeymoon in her relations with Jack, Masters has drawn disapproving seems and barbs from the choose in hearings through Zoom for the previous 12 months or so.

At a Monday listening to, Jack caught Masters off guard on how an inattentive foster mom, whom the choose blamed for a five-year-old foster boy’s drowning loss of life final July, and her husband have been allowed to undertake the boy’s older brother.

“This is the first that I’m hearing this,” Masters stated.

Jack retorted, “I’m going to have my law clerks go through the record and find out how many times you have said in the course of your tenure, Commissioner Masters, ‘This is the first time I’m hearing this.’”

Masters additionally has been beneath hearth since allegations of workers misconduct at The Refuge, a remedy middle for sex-trafficking victims in Bastrop County, surfaced within the federal foster-care lawsuit in March. Several staff in her division’s Child Care Investigations arm resigned or have been fired.

Heiligenstein, 70, helped Perry and the newly elected Republican majority in each homes of the Legislature perform a significant consolidation of safety-net applications and bureaucracies after 2003.

The subsequent 12 months, she was on the newly enlarged Health and Human Services Commission, overseeing CPS and foster care, when Perry ordered a significant assessment of the child-welfare company’s failings. Several abused youngsters in South Texas and Dallas died from brutal assaults and near-starvation. Despite being on CPS’ radar, they have been left with beginning households. Heiligenstein was credited with serving to enhance bodily and psychological well being care providers for foster children.

She additionally oversaw a troubled privatization of eligibility providers for susceptible Texans signing up for money welfare, meals stamps and Medicaid.

Nearly 5,000 state eligibility-determination positions have been minimize by state lawmakers, who anticipated that an Accenture-led consortium would wring efficiencies out of the public-private association launched in 2006. But the Texas Access Alliance’s name facilities had lengthy wait instances. Thousands of low-income households complained of abruptly cancelled well being protection for his or her youngsters.

Dozens of work-around orders and the including again of greater than 1,000 state staff whose positions had been focused for elimination put doubtful the plan’s ambition to avoid wasting the state $646 million by way of 2010.

At the protecting providers division, Heiligenstein in 2008 oversaw the raid that led to CPS removing of greater than 400 youngsters from a Schleicher County ranch in West Texas run by a polygamist sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

She later stated her fundamental remorse was not separating the kids from their moms, who obstructed caseworkers’ makes an attempt to study which of the teenage women had been sexually abused by way of “spiritual” unions with older males.

In 2010, she confronted offended protests from foster-care suppliers who complained of “perverse incentives” attributable to state reimbursements that dropped after youngsters of their care improved. Heiligenstein named a blue-ribbon panel that included suppliers and proposed “foster care redesign,” the forerunner of at present’s group primarily based care.

Heiligenstein’s one-year “loaned executive” settlement, signed May 27, says she received’t have managerial and decision-making duties. Her project is to “assist DFPS with an operational review of agency functions and work with agency management on the implementation of approved practices,” it says.

In her e mail, Masters wrote: “Anne will be supporting me in guiding the work of Child Protective Services, Adult Protective Services, Child Protective Investigations, Prevention and Community Well-Being, and Statewide Intake, and under the direction of the Chief of Staff [Julie Frank], will also oversee Government Relations.”

Under final winter’s settlement between the division and Casey, Deckinga, who was assistant commissioner for CPS till she retired in late 2014, was retained by Casey to assist the state perform suggestions by a three-member professional panel on “children without placement.”

(*2*)Related:To ease Texas foster care disaster, specialists say psychological well being, dependancy providers are wanted