DFPS Plans ‘A Way Forward’

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has published its fiscal year 2024 annual plan.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) has formulated a comprehensive strategy called “A Way Forward” to enhance the quality of life for children, families, and vulnerable adults throughout the state. The plan has three primary goals: child protection evolution, strengthening families and communities, and supporting and retaining the workforce.

The first goal, child protective evolution, aims to address the need to improve the child protective system. This will be accomplished through several initiatives, including expanding community-based care across Texas.

Steps will be taken to enhance the overall well-being of children in foster care. For example, the plan seeks to keep children in foster care closer to home and connected with their communities and families. It also intends to increase the number of children and youth who find permanent homes and access contractor fiscal incentives and remedies.

Another initiative to address the goal of child protection evolution includes the implementation of a new foster care system called “Texas Child-Centered Care,” or T3C. This system includes many steps, such as conducting an evidence-informed universal assessment of child needs, providing service packages customized to meet each child’s specific needs, and introducing a new foster care rate methodology that aligns payments with the actual cost of care.

The second goal of the plan targets strengthening families and communities by addressing such things as the improvement of screening functions and meeting the increasing needs of vulnerable adults, children, and families.

The plan includes several initiatives to achieve this goal, like expanding the exploitation units’ capacity to investigate financial exploitation. Additionally, this goal will look to improve the collaborative relationships between field staff in Child Protective Investigations and Residential Child Care Investigations to enhance communication and knowledge of changing policies and procedures.

The final goal of the plan is supporting and retaining the workforce. This involves developing and implementing strategies that will help attract, retain, and support a competent and diverse workforce that serves Texas’ most vulnerable communities.

Some of the key initiatives of this goal include an agency-wide recruitment drive aimed at attracting the best talent to serve the community, retention programs that aim to keep existing employees engaged and motivated, and wellness programs that focus on employee health and well-being.

To this end, the DFPS has implemented a unique training program called “Training While Working” that enables employees to receive on-the-job training. This helps employees develop new skills and ensures they are better equipped to serve the community.

To complement these efforts, the DFPS has also set up a Retentive Initiative Steering Committee that focuses on identifying and addressing the factors that contribute to employee attrition. This committee works to create a positive work environment that fosters employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention.