Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

Houston Chronicle. Nov. 15, 2016.

One universal way to protect yourself from accusations, blame and disrespect at the office: Create a paper trail. While caseworkers and managers in the Department of Family and Protective Services are keeping bloated and disorganized files - some are more than 32,000 pages long - children are being harmed in the permanent custodial system that U.S. District Judge Janis Jack of Corpus Christi in December observed amounts to “institutionalized child abuse.”

Texas took one step toward cleaning up its dysfunctional child protective programs when a Senate committee recommended last month spending nearly $76 million for emergency pay hikes for front-line workers and to hire 100 additional investigators to catch up on a chronic backlog of abuse and neglect inquiries.

But there’s so much more to do. A long-awaited report by special court masters on the state’s permanent custodial arrangements points to management failures large and small that add up to a system that fails to achieve its primary purpose: protecting children.

The report - which arises out of Jack’s ruling that Texas’ long-term foster care system violates children’s constitutional rights - outlines many logical and doable steps for improvement. But one baseline recommendation stands out as essential to progress on any front: a better and more efficient system of reporting on and tracking children’s progress.

The special masters described the agency’s records as kept at different locations and not consistently maintained in alphabetical order. Many don’t have current photos of the children. Many are missing health records. Without access to good information, it’s hard to see how caseworkers and others can make complex decisions in the best interests of children.

While the conclusion that an agency - which has a turnover rate that can run higher than 30 percent - should keep good records seems self-evident, Kevin Ryan and Francis McGovern, the special masters, felt compelled to point out the need for an integrated, current, complete and accurate case record. Ryan and McGovern noted that the incomplete health records that they examined seemed to mask an even more frightening problem: a failure to obtain medical care for children, even those who have made outcries about abuse.

As a result, the special masters recommended that a medical home be determined for all such children and a health care plan be followed. This basic protocol of tracking children to ensure that they receive adequate and timely medical treatment should be established as soon as possible.

Other record-keeping lapses imperil children’s safety, as well. Child-on-child abuse wasn’t tracked by the state before the court ruling. As a result children who are abused can be housed with other children and can abuse others. In addition to following child-on-child abuse, the masters went one step further and recommended that initiators of sexual abuse on another child should be kept in single-child placements and not with other children.

In response to the report, Senate Health and Human Services Committee Chairman Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, released this statement: “I think we all acknowledge the need to make improvements in how DFPS operates, but ultimately the responsibility for solving this problem lies with the Texas Legislature - not the courts.”

The responsibility does lie with the Legislature. But Child Protective Services has been troubled for decades, and the lack of progress at the agency demonstrates that the Legislature requires outside help.

Agency-initiated fixes don’t seem to get things right. Since much sexual abuse happens at night, the court ordered that the state should immediately stop placing children in foster group homes that lack 24-hour supervision and that house more than six children. The agency reported to the special masters that many foster group homes had reduced their capacity to fewer than six children. But as the special masters noted, it’s unclear who stays up at night in a two-parent foster group home where one or both of the parents works outside the home during the day. When do they sleep?

The special masters were merely given the task of making recommendations to help the Texas system meet minimal constitutional standards; they’re not laying down a blueprint to build a state-of-the-art long-term custody system.

Halfway measures to meet the masters’ recommendations will leave the system short of constitutional standards. More important, a half-hearted approach will continue to leave children at risk of great harm. The special masters have given the state a road map, and Jack will provide the mandate, following a public comment period. Now it’s up to the Legislature to do what’s necessary - rather than what’s expedient - to protect our state’s most vulnerable children.

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The Dallas Morning News. Nov. 15, 2016.

Everyone can use a good story of reconciliation right about now. Especially one that reminds us that bridge-building is not as difficult as people make it out to be.

Along with magnificent meals, Café Momentum in downtown Dallas serves up an oversized helping of good will and understanding, bringing together staffers and guests from vastly different racial, socio-economic and educational backgrounds.

More bluntly, affluent white people and impoverished minority youths come together as equals and engage in conversations that neither has likely had with the other. Along the way, “those kids” become “our kids.”

The nonprofit restaurant, just shy of its two-year anniversary, hires at-risk teens just released from incarceration to serve in all its staff capacities. The restaurant is their classroom, where they learn not only culinary skills but life and social skills. Perhaps most important, the young people learn that they matter, a message new to their ears.

Day in and day out, chef and executive director Chad Houser, 41, is the person who keeps this innovative nonprofit humming.

Over 12 months, the interns work their way through five restaurant stations, each with a curriculum attached.

Houser and his team, which includes case managers assigned to the teens to provide individual support, have hired more than 200 teens since January 2015. The state recidivism average for this age group is 37 percent; Café Momentum’s rate is less than half of that, 15 percent.

What makes these restaurant jobs so different is the understanding that the teens need more than just a paycheck - they need help with innumerable challenges . Too often, these are boys and girls discarded - in effect, thrown out - at an early age; they’ve often suffered severe trauma, grown up with punitive role models and told their entire lives that they are bad.

Consider just this one fact: 60 percent of Café Momentum staffers experience homelessness at some point in their 12-month internship.

A year ago, a prevailing challenge for Hauser and the interns to work through was K2, synthetic marijuana, infiltrating their neighborhoods. Peer pressure to use it; friends and family suffering under its spell.

In January came a big jump in local homicides; a week didn’t pass without at least one intern rattled to the core after the killing of a friend or family member.

In the face of those realities, Cafe Momentum is designed to change the trajectory of the lives of young men and women. But it also changes everyone who comes into the restaurant as a paying guest.

By breaking bread together, so too are stereotypes on both sides of the table broken down.

The story of one recent Café Momentum graduate, a second-generation Mexican immigrant, reflects what Houser’s goal is for all his interns:

The young man’s parents, already barely eking out a living, divorced - a devastating turn of events for the already vulnerable youth. Soon he was moved from a not-so-great neighborhood to a really bad one. Eventually, the teen got into trouble - and then incarcerated.

Now, having finished the Cafe Momentum internship and set to graduate from high school next month, the 17-year-old has an excellent job with benefits at the Hilton Anatole Hotel and a full scholarship to El Centro College’s Food and Hospitality Services Institute.

We’re not alone in recognizing the transformation Café Momentum is making in the lives of its at-risk staff. The Oprah Winfrey Network will spotlight the nonprofit Dec. 10 as part of its 10-part The Hero Effect documentary series.

Thank you, Café Momentum, for an experience in which bridge-building and myth-busting are always on the menu.

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El Paso Times. Nov. 14, 2016.

The El Paso Independent School District took a major step on its journey to recovery this month when voters approved a $668.7 million bond issue to consolidate campuses, rebuild older schools and meet other needs.

Such a step would have been impossible to conceive four years ago. A corrupt superintendent was in federal prison, and the school board that did nothing to check his abuses was stripped of power by the state education commissioner.

It would be hard to conceive of an institution with less public confidence.

But in a few short years, El Pasoans showed it was possible to address our biggest problems. First, a group of five volunteers, including four from El Paso, served for two years on an appointed Board of Managers to stabilize the district and begin the planning to address crucial needs. The board hired Juan Cabrera as superintendent and gave him the authority and tools to change the culture in the dispirited school district.

Then, seven trustees elected by voters took over in 2015. None had any experience serving on a school board, but all were dedicated to improving the education of El Paso ISD’s children.

Twice, the trustees asked El Pasoans for help. In 2015, voters approved a “penny swap” that allowed the board to convert tax revenue from retiring debt to operational issues, providing for crucial pay raises for teachers.

Then this month, EPISD voters by a substantial margin approved a record bond issue that carried with it a record tax increase. It was a remarkable statement of where El Pasoans want our community to go.

It helped that the bond issue was shaped by dozens of community volunteers, who reviewed reams of data and made recommendations that the school board honored.

It is important that this bond issue was approved by voters in the highest turnout ever in El Paso. Traditionally, school districts place bond issues before voters in low-turnout elections, like in the spring or fall of odd-numbered years. EPISD put is bond question to the biggest possible pool of voters it could get.

Now the really hard work begins. EPISD board members and administrators must ensure that this unprecedented investment is completed on time and on budget, fulfilling promises made to voters.

El Paso voters also have a role to play. They must stay involved with the school district. The school board has created accountability measures, but it is up to the public (including the media) to make sure those standards are met. One important step will be voting in the May 2017 election, when four EPISD school board seats will be on the ballot.

We congratulate EPISD on the process it used to create the bond proposal and put it to voters. The level of transparency is a model for other El Paso governments.

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Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Nov. 12, 2016.

A proposal as significant as a merger of the Texas A&M University affiliates in Corpus Christi and Kingsville is bound to face hard questions and no small amount of opposition. That’s a given no matter how bright an idea it may be - and no matter how early or late the public is included in the discussion. Hard questions and opposition are all part of the vetting, and vetting is a good thing.

Or, put another way, not vetting is a bad thing. So, the sooner it can start, the better.

Another school of thought is to keep a plan under wraps until it’s fully developed - the better to shock-and-awe it to fruition. With rare exceptions such as the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, this is a discredited strategy.

The public has a right not only to know but to participate in the discussion and planning of a merger of two public universities 45 miles apart. The residents of these two cities have a huge stake in their hometown universities. Public input can improve a plan, save it from failure — or save the public from it if in the public’s final analysis it’s not such a bright idea. The risk isn’t that public discourse might turn up a silver bullet. It’s that limiting discourse might prevent its discovery.

Unfortunately, the merger planners chose stealth. There were whispers about merger talk but it didn’t become public until the first week of this month, when state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa confirmed it only because he was asked.

Texas A&M regents saw a nice PowerPoint presentation on the proposal at a public meeting Nov. 10. But five weeks earlier, A&M Chancellor John Sharp and A&M-Kingsville president Steve Tallant discussed the merger with a select group of Corpus Christi businessmen and the local legislative delegation, and already the plan seemed far along. It was the classic good-ol’-boy way of doin’ bidness - literally.

All attendees were men. And no A&M-CC officials were present to speak on behalf of A&M-CC.

“While several people may have been working on it for three months, it was the first that I had heard about it,” invitee Philip Skrobarczyk said in written testimony to the board of regents.

The significance of Skrobarczyk being in the dark is that he is president of the A&M-CC Foundation and a member of the A&M chancellor’s Century Council. He also runs Fulton Construction Co., builder of big buildings on the campus. Skrobarczyk concluded his testimony by saying, not in this tone, that they had better be transparent if they want this proposal to move forward.

One measure of the damage done by secrecy is that we’ve said this much about it already and not one word about the pros and cons of a merger.

The proponents say the timing is right because the A&M-CC president is retiring, the two schools together make one sizable university with significant research funding and can qualify as an emerging research university, opportunities for students and faculty will increase, money will be saved over time, and the universities to the north in San Antonio and San Marcos and to the south in the Rio Grande Valley will draw away the students if the two schools don’t merge into one bigger university.

Longtime Corpus Christi residents will recall when A&M-CC was Corpus Christi State University, stifled from growth by not being allowed to enroll freshmen and sophomores until 1993, for fear of siphoning enrollment from the university in Kingsville. According to Skrobarczyk’s testimony, the headquarters for the merged university would be in Kingsville. But Corpus Christi is the much larger of the two cities, a tourism destination, currently undergoing a huge industrial growth spurt. A&M-CC has the larger enrollment, and while A&M-Kingsville has football and A&M-CC doesn’t, A&M-CC is Division I and Kingsville is Division II. Headquartering in Kingsville instead of Corpus Christi smacks of a return to the growth-stifling past.

We can see money-saving possibilities with a merger - represented as lost jobs in administration and coaching, and lost athletic scholarships because there’d be half as many baseball, softball, basketball, golf, tennis and track and field teams. Generally, merging is a strategy for doing more with less.

South Texas has had enough of less. These two universities became part of the A&M System and the university in Corpus Christi was expanded because South Texas had been under-served. We’re not over-served now.

The first hard question to answer is how merging two schools in historically under-served South Texas doesn’t marginalize one or both universities under the guise of achieving economies of scale. The answer will have to be convincing, especially considering the damage that secrecy has done to credibility.

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San Antonio Express-News. Nov. 17, 2016.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff is right. Congestion on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin should be the region’s transportation priority. Something needs to be done about this parking lot that moonlights as a highway. Well, two things should be done.

The highway needs to be expanded to accommodate existing and future traffic. Passenger rail should be developed in tandem with this expansion.

So, in that sense, we are in complete agreement with Wolff, who recently raised the I-35 issue during his State of the County address to the region’s movers and shakers.

Unfortunately, we are tapping the brakes a bit on part of his vision. That would be the double-decker highway.

The argument is that going vertical with I-35’s expansion frees up land for commuter rail. Stack the highway lanes, and let the trains roll down the median. It’s an idea Bexar County Commissioner Kevin Wolff has been discussing for several months as an alternative to the failed Lone Star Rail District.

As supporters of the seemingly quixotic dream of passenger rail between Austin and San Antonio, we will keep an open mind about a double-decker I-35.

We don’t have a choice. Sigh. But, really, this is the best we can do? It just seems so ugly and unrealistic.

Of course, aesthetics are arguably a luxury I-35 drivers can’t afford.

We suppose, then, if a double-decker freeway gets traffic flowing and the Austin-San Antonio choo-choo chugging, no one will have the time to ponder aesthetics.