New Proposed Texas Bill would Stop Child Protective Services from Falsifying Records

A new bill submitted in the Texas state Legislature by state Representative Gene Wu of Houston would require Child Protective Services (CPS) to increase accountability and prevent social workers from altering case records. What does this say about the current moral status of social workers in CPS when a law has to be passed to stop them from lying and falsifying records? One of the cases that was the motivation for this Texas bill is a case from 2018 that we reported here at Health Impact News where a family court judge ordered CPS to immediately return two children, a 5-month-old baby boy and 2-year-old little girl, to their family and have no more contact with them since they were removed from their home without a warrant and under false allegations. Later, Judge Mike Schneider took the unprecedented action to sanction CPS $127,000 for wrongfully removing the couple’s children and lying to the court about it. Representative Wu who authored the bill told the Houston Chronicle: “We’re talking about taking children away from families, breaking up families — we need to have the utmost transparency. We want there to be integrity in the reporting system.” According to the Chronicle: "The bill would require the department to track who makes every entry in a case and when, and it would require that the electronic records system prohibit users from modifying or deleting information."