Creating Comprehensive System Reform to Reduce Racial Disproportionality and Disparities: The Texas Community Engagement Model

Texas Senate Bill 6, laid the foundation for comprehensive reform of Child Protective Services (CPS) including disproportionality. The plan to remediate this problem included the development of a community engagement model. It was initially deployed in five sites located in communities where disproportionality and disparity (Disproportionality typically refers to the “proportion of a given group experiencing an event relative to their proportion in the population” (Shaw et al., Child Welfare League of America 87: 23–36, 2008). Disparity refers to “the likelihood of one group experiencing an event compared to another group experiencing that same event” (Shaw et al., Child Welfare League of America 87: 23–36, 2008). Both use the child population distribution as the base rate. In our work we use the distribution of families or children available to experience the event as the base rate arriving at what we call a Relative Rate Index.) appeared the highest. State Representative Dawnna Dukes and Senator Royce West, led the efforts in the House and the Senate, that ultimately led to unprecedented support and resources for the implementation of Senate Bill 6 and ultimately a change in the culture and system reform of the Texas Child Protective Services Program. How that system reform was achieved through the community engagement model is described as is the evaluation of it. Evaluation findings indicated that disproportionate removals for African American families and children were reduced statewide and in four of the five counties where the community engagement model was first implemented. Furthermore, analyses of the Child and Family Services Review Safety Standard indicated that the recurrence rates of African American Families remained below those of Anglo families over the 4 years studied.