From dangerous overtime shifts watching children in motels and office buildings to political drama to problems with their supervisors, workers say the agency has lost its mission — and in the end, it’s Texas kids who suffer for it.
File photo from the Children's Shelter of San Antonio. Social workers statewide say they have been stretched thin for more than a year, which has led many of them to quit.Nearly 2,300 employees have left the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services since the beginning of the year, stressing an agency that has already experienced some of the highest turnover rates of any large state department.
Of the 2,267 employees who left the agency by Aug. 3, about 83 percent of them had quit — the highest voluntary exit rate the department has seen since it became an independent agency in fall 2017. Most of the departures have affected Child Protective Services, the division responsible for ensuring the safety and health of Texas children. In the 2021 fiscal year — a period that coincided with the “Great Resignation” spurred by COVID — more than 3,000 employees left DFPS; nearly two-thirds of them were CPS specialists.
DFPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins said the agency is addressing the high turnover by ramping up recruitment efforts “to a level not seen before in the agency.” DFPS posts 20 job listings a month on social media, hosts statewide job fairs, invests in LinkedIn recruitment and advertises the department at events hosted by other state agencies, he said.
Brandace Mata, the former Galveston-area DFPS employee who left after defying her supervisors by picking up her children from the closing daycare, said she knows of at least two incidents in which a child was accidentally placed in a clearly dangerous environment because employees were too bogged down with work to thoroughly vet the caretaker. Both workers involved in those cases still work at the department, she said.
Their struggles have been well documented: These are dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of high-risk, high-needs foster children who do not have a permanent placement. Instead, the state lodges them in hotels and churches, tasking caseworkers with supervising them. “CWOP has been the worst issue that has hit us in the 15 years that I've worked here,” said a current San Antonio-area worker. “I have never been so overwhelmed, overworked, exhausted — mentally, physically — defeated, deflated. I can just go through the list. This has been the worst experience.
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