Four days after a new company began managing roughly 2,000 foster care cases in Dallas, it was, for better or for worse, business as usual in Judge Delia Gonzales’ downtown courtroom.
In the Dallas County Child Protection and Permanency Court, Gonzales reviews and approves long-term arrangements for kids who have been removed from their parents. During the first hearing that came before her bench on Nov. 4, Gonzales asked the caseworker why, despite it being required for the case, a kinship worker was not present in court. One hadn’t been assigned due to a paperwork issue, the caseworker said.
“I don’t care that you’re a new company,” Gonzales told the caseworker and the case supervisor. “You all know my rules. And so I don’t know why, for the second day in a row now, people are not showing up … You need to talk to your leadership about this.”
In the next case, Gonzales made a determination of “no reasonable effort” after finding that needed therapies had not been provided to the child and adequate attempts had not been made to place the child with a family member. A “no reasonable effort” ruling means federal funding for the case stops until the court finds the agency has done enough to establish a permanent living arrangement for a child.
“How do you expect me to agree to your permanency plan when you’re not taking care of the medical needs of the child?” she asked the caseworker. “And you didn’t go make any contact with mom whatsoever.”
Such courtroom scenes were quotidian under Empower, the company that was in charge of managing foster care in Dallas and eight surrounding counties until its contract was revoked in July after the deaths of two children in its care.
As of Nov. 1, Nederland-based Texas Family Care Network is managing all foster cases in Dallas County, while Fort Worth-based Our Community Our Kids is responsible for cases in eight surrounding counties, including Collin and Ellis. Both nonprofits have managed foster cases elsewhere in the state for several years; TFCN in 15 East Texas counties and OCOK in 10 counties in the Fort Worth area.
The two contractors were brought in after the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services found that under Empower, kids were not being checked on, court files often had missing or incomplete documents, and employees were not adequately trained to do their jobs. In a March petition that landed Empower under temporary state supervision, DFPS said it made more than a dozen attempts to address these issues through corrective action and quality improvement plans before ultimately canceling the contract and splitting up the work between the new companies.
This new chapter for privatized foster care in North Texas brings a complicated meld of relief and trepidation for those who watched the system rapidly fray over the past two years. New leadership means an end to Empower’s hegemony, but undoing the company’s mismanagement could take months, if not years, and patience is thin.
“They’re on a short leash,” Gonzales said in an interview a week before the transition. “When I call a case, it better be ready to go. I’m not going to be doing resets. They’ve had time. They need to show up and suit up.”
Despite the issues that have continued in her courtroom since TFCN took over, Gonzales said there are noticeable improvements. Leadership, she said, has been communicative and receptive to feedback.
“If I compare it to Empower, it is much better,” she said. “I think TFCN did a lot more prep. Getting on the runway was better this time around, but again, it’s the same employees coming over from Empower. If they don’t start doing some intervening acts, it’s going to be the same problems.”
The number of Empower workers who kept their jobs under the new contractors is cause for concern, public officials and child welfare experts have said in public forums and in interviews with The Lab Report. Many of Empower’s problems were due to its staff’s “poor social work judgement” and inadequate case management, according to the state’s March assessment of its performance.
TFCN hired 157 caseworkers and 35 case supervisors — nearly all of its Dallas staff — from Empower, the company told The Lab Report. Two senior directors based in Dallas also came from Empower.
“Our focus is on retraining the staff,” TFCN’s newly appointed CEO Rocky Hensarling said in an interview. “Even though it might be the same workforce, we’re giving them the tools and resources to be better prepared.”
(We sat down with Hensarling to talk about the company’s plan for overseeing Dallas’ foster kids. Read that full conversation here.)
Hensarling said he understood concerns about retaining Empower staff, but TFCN prioritized having enough employees to do the work while minimizing disruptions for kids. The company put additional training in place and reconfigured the employee structure to provide caseworkers and their supervisors with more support, he said.
OCOK, which took over about 700 cases in addition to the 1,800 cases it is already managing, hired around 125 Empower employees. Most are caseworkers, Mike Bryant, CEO of OCOK, said in an interview.
“System stability was a primary concern,” said Bryant, who assisted in Florida’s transition from state-run foster care to a privatized model prior to coming to Texas. To set caseworkers up for success, Bryant said OCOK assigns mentors to staff in training, while peer navigators provide regular support and guidance once employees are in the field.
Separate from workforce quality, policymakers and advocates have raised concerns about TFCN’s increased workload. The company, which manages around 750 cases in East Texas, assumed the lion’s share of Empower’s caseload — 1,700 Dallas County kids, plus an additional 300 placed in the county from other parts of the state.
“You’re getting ready to go up over 200%,” Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price said to Hensarling in a September commissioners court meeting. “The math ain’t mathin’.”
While the jump in caseloads is significant, TFCN’s experience in foster care case management is encouraging to experts like Kathleen LaValle, CEO of Dallas CASA, the local branch of a national organization that pairs foster kids with volunteers who advocate for them in court.
LaValle said she’s been impressed with TFCN’s leadership thus far, and her CASA peers who are familiar with the company’s work in East Texas have also expressed confidence.
“But no one should underestimate the difference between the two transitions,” LaValle said, referring to TFCN’s rollouts in East Texas and Dallas.
Due to its sheer size, Dallas County’s foster care system presents complexities many other parts of Texas do not. Empower’s dysfunction only complicated things further. Since the contractor started managing foster cases in 2024, LaValle said Dallas CASA had to hire 16 additional full-time supervisors who oversee teams of volunteers to keep up with the amount of work created by the shortcomings of Empower employees.
“That’s a huge increase for the organization,” she said.
The ripple effect of Empower’s failures extended north, too, said Lauren Love, CEO of CASA of Collin County. The organization’s volunteers have been the primary keepers of information on each child “because there doesn’t seem to be any accountability for the caseworkers to know anything about a case,” she said.
“I think the selection and training of caseworkers is going to be really critical,” Love added. “The need is high but that doesn’t mean the selection criteria needs to be lax.”
Hensarling with TFCN and Bryant with OCOK have reiterated that the problems plaguing foster care in the Dallas area won’t immediately be fixed under their supervision. They both acknowledged, though, that progress must be swift.
A spokesperson for DFPS said the agency coordinated with TFCN and OCOK for months to prepare for the takeover and deployed a team to review all cases before handing them over to the contractors. DFPS also worked with Empower to fix missing paperwork and resolve other items ahead of the hand-off, and brought in nearly two dozen master caseworkers to provide support and mentorship through the transition, the spokesperson said. Master caseworkers will work in the Dallas area until help is no longer needed.
The new contractors are attempting to amend the transgressions of their predecessor in communities where criticism of the privatized foster care model has grown despite resignation that, at least for now, it is here to stay. Legislators privatized the system in 2017 with a “community-based care” model that shifted case management responsibilities from the state to private companies, and it’s unclear what changes could be made to it in the coming legislative session. Midterm election results could impact those discussions.
“There are a number of us that are not big fans of community-based care. It hasn’t worked out really well for us.”
Judge Rhonda Hunter, chair of the dallas County Child Welfare Board
Also at play is the once-a-decade legislative performance review for DFPS that was released last week. In a 165-page report, the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission said the agency, which is ultimately responsible for every child in state care, has areas for improvement and increased involvement.
Empower’s failed management in Dallas was called out in the report as evidence of the need for DFPS to have expanded oversight of contractors. Among the commission’s recommendations are giving DFPS direct access to contractors’ staffing information, requiring contractors to submit financial reports to the state, and dissolving the Office of Community-Based Care Transition that was created by legislators in 2021 and transferring its work to DFPS.
The Sunset report also said that while workforce stability issues, which haven’t changed since the last Sunset review in 2015, are largely out of DFPS control, the agency can help mitigate them by regularly conducting caseworker studies to develop guidelines and expectations, and by assisting contractors with connecting kids to services.
Overall, the report found an ongoing need for DFPS but said more tailored oversight is necessary because, with the community-based care model, “the state’s foster care system faces a compounding set of internal fiscal pressures and structural risk.”
What happens next under TFCN and OCOK will be another pressure test for the model that vowed to make kids safer in Texas but has yet to deliver on that promise in the Dallas area. A patchwork of community support — from lists of high-priority cases assembled by CASA to persistent questioning from the Dallas County Child Welfare Board — has coalesced to help usher North Texas’ foster kids through the uncertainty, but the responsibility ultimately lies with the companies being paid to do the work.
“There are a number of us that are not big fans of community-based care,” Judge Rhonda Hunter, chair of the county’s Child Welfare Board, told TFCN leadership during the board’s August meeting. “It hasn’t worked out really well for us. We’ve had a lot of fancy talk and we’ve heard it all before … We do have concerns, but we are also here to help. Welcome to Dallas.”
Claire Ballor is a staff writer for The Lab Report. claire@labreportdallas.com.
