Category: Texas Children News

It was early July 2001, and Trish Virgil was going to make a lemon meringue pie. “In our family, 12 years old meant that you get to finally learn how to make homemade pies,” she says now, smiling.

The state’s track record for its Child Protective Services is a tumultuous one. A couple of months ago, a series of stories were circulating around a massive federal lawsuit filed against the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees foster care, adoption and daycare licensing in Texas.

Houston police found the 16-year-old foster child in a park in early November 2013, just a few days after she ran away from a residential treatment center in northwest Houston.

Last month a federal judge ordered Texas to clean up its foster care system. U.S. District Judge Janis Jack’s findings were scathing. She said that children in Texas’s long-term foster care have been subjected to “years of abuse [and] neglect.” She added that they had been systemically denied their civil rights,reports The Texas Tribune. In response, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has appealed the reforms ordered by the federal judge.

It was early July 2001, and Trish Virgil was going to make a lemon meringue pie. “In our family, 12 years old meant that you get to finally learn how to make homemade pies,” she says now, smiling.

Attorneys for an Irving mother whose three children drowned in a swimming pool have filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court against the Dallas County Child Protective Services Unit of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Service.

The final weeks of 2014 were a stressful time for Jasmine Johnson, then a 20-year-old expectant mother who was moving to Conroe after attending business management school in Brenham. Unbeknownst to Johnson, they were also the final weeks of her Medicaid health coverage.

Norman Nickelberry doesn’t know how his baby granddaughter died.