On March 14, a baby with big brown eyes and dark brown curls died in a Dallas hospital days after spending her first birthday on life support.
Athaliah Leilani Silva Bernal, whose family said she was hospitalized with head trauma, died from what the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services called “intentional injuries.”
The fate of Athaliah was the breaking point for a child welfare system already under scrutiny. At 2 months old, she was removed from her parents for suspected child abuse but was later returned and not regularly checked on, according to DFPS. Four days after her death, a judge placed the private contractor in charge of managing all Child Protective Services cases in the Dallas area under state supervision.
The judge’s receivership ruling is the first of its kind in Texas since legislators nearly a decade ago implemented a statewide “community-based care” model in which private contractors handle the management of child welfare cases. Empower, the contractor over Dallas and eight surrounding counties, is currently under review for failures to keep kids safe.
In the request for receivership filed by DFPS, which administers the state’s child welfare system, the agency laid out a biting assessment of Empower’s performance since it began managing CPS cases two years ago. The petition called out “systemic failures” that place children in “imminent danger,” such as a lack of in-person visits with kids and case files missing critical information. It said exhaustive efforts to address those failures — including more than a dozen quality improvement plans and two corrective action plans — were unsuccessful, warranting the “extraordinary” step to request receivership.
North Texas’ at-risk children have been at the center of such concerns before.
Ten years and a day before Athaliah died, when the state was still managing all CPS cases, the same failures were laid bare after a Dallas County 4-year-old was tortured to death by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Leiliana Wright’s death was one of the worst cases of child abuse first responders said they had ever seen. Her CPS case file was full of missed warning signs that spurred a reckoning of the child welfare system.
The caseworker assigned to the girl’s case failed to check on her, according to documents obtained at the time by the Dallas Morning News. Additional records revealed an agency plagued by high employee turnover, ballooning caseloads, and repeated failures to visit children under its supervision.
Just three months prior to Leiliana’s death, a federal judge declared the state’s foster care system unconstitutional. The crisis was twofold: The state couldn’t keep at-risk kids safe, nor was it able to adequately oversee the children already in its care. The Texas Legislature in 2017 chose to privatize the system.
Much has changed about the state’s child welfare system since Leiliana’s death. But Athaliah’s case and the mounting concerns that preceded it, including the death of another baby in 2024, called into question not only the competence of Empower, but the efficacy of the community-based care model still being implemented across Texas.
Through internal company records, dozens of court proceedings, and interviews with seven current and former Empower employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, The Lab Report found chronic, alarming failures to protect Texas’ most vulnerable children. An investigation into the practices and procedures at Empower unveiled a system riddled with dangerous gaps in preparedness and accountability.
Empower leadership declined to answer key questions about their handling of child welfare cases but told The Lab Report via email they have taken steps to address concerns and that child safety remains their top priority.
Lost in the Cracks
Empower has struggled to hire, train, and retain staff since it was awarded the contract in 2023 to manage more than 2,000 child welfare cases in Dallas, Collin, Ellis, Fannin, Grayson, Hunt, Kaufman, Navarro, and Rockwall counties.
In an April meeting of the Dallas County Child Welfare Board, George Cannata, the CPS regional director who was appointed receiver over Empower, cited staffing issues as a top focus of his examination of the company’s performance.
“Workforce is obviously a priority,” Cannata told the board. “You can’t accomplish safety without a good workforce, period.”
Current and former Empower caseworkers and supervisors described an environment in which children were put at greater risk due to underqualified and insufficiently trained staff.
“I was shocked and almost disgusted with some of the candidates that even made it through the hiring process,” a former Empower training supervisor said. “We were almost forced to just push them through training because we needed the numbers. We needed them to be able to get case-assignable. I felt that we were doing the families and these children a disservice along with the workers.”
In an email to The Lab Report, DFPS representatives said they have “noted concerns about training at the worker and supervisor levels within Empower.”
Empower leadership did not respond to questions regarding whether inadequate training endangered children, but said caseworkers must complete a 13-week training program and meet additional milestones before they can be assigned cases.
In the petition for receivership, DFPS referenced “transporting children inappropriately without proper car seats” as the basis for at least one of Empower’s 17 state-mandated quality improvement plans. A former Empower training supervisor told The Lab Report car seat training for new caseworkers was inadequate. In one incident, the former employee said, an Empower staffer drove to a foster home with an infant, still too young to hold its own head up, strapped into a car seat designed for toddlers.
When asked about this specific case, Empower leadership said only that they have revamped car seat safety instruction to include hands-on training.
Every current and former Empower employee interviewed by The Lab Report cited incomplete background checks as a point of concern. Several of them recounted instances of people being hired and permitted to work with children prior to their background checks being completed.
“Instead of Empower waiting for background checks to be cleared, they were retroactive,” a former supervisor said.
Empower did not respond to questions about employees working with children prior to their background checks being completed; its statement said the agency follows federal and state requirements. DFPS said all community-based care providers are required to obtain background checks and to ensure staff do not work with children and families until those are conducted.
A revolving door of employees has also endangered the children in Empower’s care, according to the state. The petition cites staff turnover as a contributing factor in the hospitalization of a child who was given incorrect medication last year. In the eight months between the boy’s initial medical diagnosis and when Empower authorized a hospital to administer him the wrong medication, the child’s case had already bounced among five caseworkers who failed to properly document his medical needs.
Frequent turnovers in caseworker assignments, the petition said, “impede proper monitoring, follow-up and relationship-building, all of which are essential to ensuring successful outcomes for families and safeguarding children.”
Empower staffers said a perpetual reshuffling of assignments often left caseworkers and their supervisors appearing in court to speak on cases for which they had little to no time to review. They complained their case files sometimes did not include critical information.
“It was hard to keep up with everything because of retention,” a former Empower caseworker supervisor said. “Children were getting lost in the cracks.”
Empower leadership said in an email that 32% of their employees voluntarily resigned or were terminated between May 2025 and April 2026, “which is in line with national child welfare workforce trends.”
The Lab Report observed more than 60 court hearings in the past two months that involved children placed in temporary or permanent custody of the state. Appearing before the judge, Empower caseworkers and supervisors were frequently unprepared and unequipped with basic information about the children for whom they were responsible. In one case, a caseworker did not know whether a child was enrolled in Medicaid. In another, the caseworker was unable to clearly answer the judge when asked if the child had been prescribed psychotropic medication.
“It was hard to keep up with everything because of retention. Children were getting lost in the cracks.”
A former Empower caseworker supervisor, quoted anonymously for fear of retaliation.
During a March court hearing, an Empower caseworker and supervisor spent five minutes looking through their phones for information on a child’s case before Judge Delia Gonzales halted the proceeding and ordered them to “take this out to the hallway and sort this out.”
“Just do what you need to do,” Gonzales said, “because the kids can’t get what they need.”
The employee turnover means workloads for Empower caseworkers have crept above guidelines put in place by a federal district court in 2019. Those standards established a threshold that employees be assigned no more than 14 to 17 cases each.
“We were promised lots of stuff. We would never have the high caseloads,” said a current Empower caseworker. “Instantly, that did not exist.”
DFPS representatives told The Lab Report all community-based care providers, including Empower, are required to adhere to no more than 17 cases per caseworker.
In last month’s child welfare board meeting, Randy Neff, a senior vice president of Empower, said 70% of Empower caseworkers were in compliance with a caseload of 17 cases. Five months ago, Neff said, that number was 30%.
Internal Empower records obtained by The Lab Report show caseloads often above the DFPS requirement. In a December report, there were dozens of caseworkers with more than 17 cases assigned to them. In reports issued after the receivership was put in place, those numbers declined.
Empower leadership did not answer specific questions about employee caseloads but said they have “taken intentional steps to stabilize the workforce” and improve caseload management by implementing retention incentives, filling support roles, and hiring more caseworkers. As of May 6, Empower had 215 caseworkers on staff, the agency said. In a November report presented to the Dallas County Child Welfare Board, they had 166.
“There were supervisors who had more than 100 cases under them and up to seven direct reports,” one former Empower caseworker supervisor said. “There have been caseworkers with up to 25 cases under them. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”
As Empower employees grappled with a shortage of caseworkers and high caseloads, an audit published March 25 by the Texas Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General found children were sometimes going months without anyone checking on them. Their case files were also missing critical information. Of the handful of cases reviewed in the audit, 70% of children had not been visited by a caseworker on a monthly basis. One child was not seen by a caseworker for four consecutive months. Another was not seen for five consecutive months.
“There would be foster parents as well as kinship placements that hadn’t seen workers in months and literally thought their cases were closed,” a former Empower supervisor said.
Because of high workloads, staff could only focus on the most immediate problems, the supervisor said. “We never had the time to really give anyone what they needed.”
All seven Empower workers interviewed by The Lab Report said heavy workloads have created a culture of rushed, incomplete work that they believe has made kids in North Texas’ foster system less safe.
“A lot of us very experienced workers feel like these kids are getting moved back home before they should,” said a current Empower caseworker. “We’re putting kids, I think, in risky situations.”
History Repeating
While Empower is a new player in Texas’ foster care system, its deficiencies echo the problems that pervaded the system under the state’s management.
As far back as 1998, state district Judge Scott McCown filed a data-driven analysis on behalf of “the forsaken children of Texas,” which tied shortcomings in the child welfare system to a lack of resources. Six years later, in a summation of her department’s investigation into foster care, Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn wrote, “The heartbreaking truth is that some of these children are no better off in the care of the state than they were in the hands of abusive and negligent parents.” Both McCown’s and Strayhorn’s efforts led to increased funding from the Legislature, but subsequent budget cuts and hiring freezes undermined improvements.
In 2011, a federal lawsuit alleged the system violated the constitutional rights of children under its care and, in December 2015, U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. “Texas’ foster care system is broken, and it has been that way for decades,” Jack wrote. “It is broken for all stakeholders, including DFPS employees who are tasked with impossible workloads.”
More importantly, Jack said, the system is broken for Texas’ children “who almost uniformly leave state custody more damaged than when they entered.”
As the system repeatedly broke down, with too few workers managing too many cases, lawmakers would spring into action with increased dollars, reorganizations, and reforms. The recommendations were always the same: Better training, less turnover, more accountability, and more funding would result in safer kids.
The Legislature decided in 2017 on a new direction — transfer the day-to-day responsibility for monitoring abused and neglected kids to community-based contractors. So far, about a quarter of the children in state custody are under the supervision of private contractors. The privatization effort continues to roll out in stages across Texas.
While lawmakers have approved additional funding for community-based providers in recent sessions, they also have made efforts to increase the contractors’ accountability. In 2025, they put into place a receivership provision that, less than a year later, was used to gain control over Empower. DFPS, which is up for its regular legislative performance review this year, highlighted in its recent self-evaluation that the community-based care model continues to face challenges.
Tymothy Belseth, a coordinator with the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing at the University of Texas at Austin who was in the foster system as a teen, said just as the legacy system had its share of problems, so does privatization. “But I don’t think community-based care is going to go anywhere, not for a very long time,” he said.
Proponents of the new system say it keeps kids closer to their homes and gets them resettled more quickly. Belseth said the increasing number of kinship placements under the community-based care model is a step forward. “It’s something to celebrate if we can keep kids out of foster care completely and have them with a relative, or have them with somebody that is comfortable and familiar to the kid,” he said.
Under both the old and new systems, the work is arduous, Belseth said. “The child welfare system is probably one of the most ambitious things that we have undertaken from a public policy standpoint.”
‘Caring is Not Enough’
When Cannata, the state’s appointed receiver over Empower, updated the Dallas County Child Welfare Board at its April 15 meeting, he said this of his work thus far: “A lot of it right now is getting back to fundamentals.”
Among the changes he is implementing is transferring Empower’s staff to the IMPACT record-keeping software used by DFPS. “That’s just the case management system, but that is a big move,” he said.
More innovative changes can follow, “but we’ve got to get the basics right,” Cannata said.
“The child welfare system is probably one of the most ambitious things that we have undertaken from a public policy standpoint.”
Tymothy Belseth, a coordinator with the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing at the University of Texas at Austin.
In an April 30 email to Empower staff, Cannata said the move to IMPACT will aid in safety and risk assessments, reunification readiness, and evaluations of family strengths and needs. His email also said DFPS is developing targeted training for employees in supervision, documentation, and court preparedness.
The receivership, which Empower did not contest, allows DFPS to remain in charge for up to 90 days and to petition the court for multiple 60-day extensions. DFPS is required to provide “an assessment of Empower’s ability to ensure child welfare” by May 15, then file a similar report in 60-day increments for the duration of the receivership.
Rhonda Hunter, chair of the child welfare board, said the two years since Empower took over have been rocky. “The state was not a good parent for children,” she said, “it turns out private entities weren’t better at doing it. In fact, they had a lot of problems.”
Staff turnover and poorly trained, inexperienced caseworkers have left too many families to suffer without services the last two years, she said, speaking to The Lab Report based on her experience as a former Dallas County district judge and litigator, not on behalf of the board.
Hunter described the receivership as a last resort after DFPS’ corrective-action plans failed to improve the private contractor’s performance. “We know the department is coming in and doing a lot to assist Empower,” she said. “At some point, the receivership will be over and something will have to be decided.”
Hunter ticked off the options: Empower stays in charge. Another private company takes over. The state continues to work alongside Empower.
Regardless of who does the work, at stake is the lives of children like Leiliana and Athaliah. Better training and better accountability, Hunter said, must be enforced.
“People who do this business care about the children and their families,” she said, “but caring is not enough.”
Claire Ballor is a staff writer for The Lab Report. claire@labreportdallas.com.
Sharon Grigsby is the co-founder and senior writer of The Lab Report. sharon@labreportdallas.com.