If you want to foster a child in Texas, your home will be verified either by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services or by a licensed child-placing agency, so choosing a foster care agency in Texas starts with knowing what the two routes actually are. The state has already published most of what you need in order to compare agencies. Every licensed agency carries a public inspection record, and Texas law sets a floor that every agency has to meet regardless of what its website promises.
This post covers the record you can read before you apply, the requirements that are identical no matter who verifies you, and the questions only an agency's own staff can answer. None of it is legal advice. If a lawyer's question comes up, ask a lawyer.
Who verifies a foster home in Texas?
A foster home in Texas is verified either by DFPS or by a licensed child-placing agency, and a child-placing agency is a private organization the state licenses to do that work. DFPS describes its own route in its published steps to become a foster or adoptive parent, where prospective families meet with DFPS staff and are assessed by them. A child-placing agency has to complete a foster home screening before it verifies a home, and the screening includes interviews with household members and reference checks, under sections 749.901 and 749.903 of the Texas Administrative Code, set out in the HHSC Minimum Standards for Child-Placing Agencies.
Both routes lead to the same thing, which is a verified home that can take a child in the state's conservatorship. The difference families notice is who is on the other end of the phone after a child arrives.
There is a third thing worth understanding, because it changes who holds the contract in some parts of the state. Senate Bill 11 codified Community-Based Care in section 264.151 of the Texas Family Code, and under that model DFPS contracts with a single lead organization in a community area, called a Single Source Continuum Contractor. DFPS subdivided its regions into 16 community areas and rolls the model out in three stages, with the contractor providing foster care placement services in Stage I and adding case management, kinship and reunification services in Stage II. DFPS also states that under the No Eject, No Reject requirement a Single Source Continuum Contractor must accept every child needing placement from its community area and cannot expel a child because of behaviors or mental health. Child-placing agencies still verify and support foster homes in these areas, often as part of the lead contractor's network.
How do I check whether an agency is licensed and in good standing?
You can look an agency up yourself, free, in the state’s own database at Search Texas Child Care, which HHSC runs. Chapter 42 of the Texas Human Resources Code requires the Health and Human Services Commission to regulate child care and child-placing activities in Texas and to create and enforce minimum standards, and HHSC Child Care Regulation is the department that does it. If an agency is not in that database as a licensed operation, stop there.
The record shows more than a license number. HHSC Child Care Regulation conducts unannounced inspections at licensed operations at least once per year, and more often depending on an operation's ability to comply with the standards. Every inspection evaluates supervision of children, the child to caregiver ratio, obvious fire, safety or sanitation deficiencies, serious incident reports, permit conditions, caregiver responsibilities and background checks.
Two limits on the record are worth knowing before you read it. The public page shows a five year compliance history, and HHSC notes that Child Care Regulation began collecting its injury and employment data on April 26, 2020, so nothing before that date appears. A short clean record can therefore mean a careful agency or a new one.
HHSC also publishes the enforcement steps it can take, which tells you how serious a pattern was. An administrative penalty is a fine for a deficiency of a standard carrying a high weight, such as a background check requirement. A corrective action comes when an operation has a pattern of deficiencies, or one single serious deficiency that endangers children, and HHSC inspects more frequently while it is in place. An adverse action can close an operation or add permanent restrictions to its permit. Heightened Monitoring is a separate program that applies to 24-hour residential child care operations holding a DFPS or contractor contract that have shown a pattern of contract or minimum standard violations during at least three of the last five years, compared with operations of the same care type and size.
How do I read a deficiency without panicking?
A deficiency is any failure to comply with a Child Care Regulation statute, administrative rule or minimum standard, and it is not by itself evidence that children were harmed. HHSC assigns every minimum standard a weight of high, medium high, medium, medium low or low, based on the risk a violation presents to children, so a late piece of paperwork and a supervision failure do not read the same. A deficiency is posted to an operation's online record only after the operation has had the opportunity to dispute it, and HHSC publishes both the narrative of what happened and information on how the operation corrected it.
HHSC tells families what to weigh. Its own guidance names four questions.
| What HHSC says to ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Which standard was cited, and what weight was assigned to it? | A violation of a high weight standard presents a greater risk to children than a low weight one. |
| Have deficiencies been repeated in the last two years? | A repeat says something a single citation does not. |
| How long did the operation take to come into compliance? | Speed of correction shows how the agency responds when it is told something is wrong. |
| How often is the operation inspected? | Monitoring frequency changes with permit type and with an operation's compliance history. |
HHSC's advice is to evaluate the deficiencies carefully and then raise any concerns or questions with the agency's director or administrator directly. An agency that walks you through its own record calmly is telling you something useful about how it will handle a hard phone call later.
What does Texas already require of every agency?
Texas sets minimum contact between an agency and the families it verifies, which means part of what an agency offers you is not a feature but a legal requirement. Under section 749.1105 of the Texas Administrative Code, child placing staff must visit the foster home at least every three months for supervisory visits, and those visits must happen inside the home. Within a 12 month period two of the visits must be unannounced, one visit must have all household members present, and both foster parents, where there are two, must be present for one visit every six months.
Contact with the child is set separately. Under section 749.1213, child placement staff must have monthly in-person visits with each child in care, and at least half of those visits must occur in the foster home. Our longer post on Chapter 749 minimum standards for Texas foster homes goes through the rest of the standards that apply once a child is placed.
The baseline requirements for you are also set by the state rather than by the agency. DFPS states in its requirements for foster and adopt families that prospective foster and adoptive parents may be single or married and must be at least 21 years of age, financially stable and responsible mature adults, provide relative and non-relative references, agree to a home study that includes visits with all household members, and allow a criminal history and abuse or neglect check on every adult in the household. Foster parents must additionally have adequate sleeping space, allow no more than six children in the home including their own, agree to a nonphysical discipline policy, permit fire, health and safety inspections, vaccinate pets, maintain CPR and First Aid certification, obtain TB testing as required by the local health department, and attend annual training as required by their child-placing agency. Our foster care requirements page lists what that looks like in practice.
What training will an agency put me through?
Pre-service training is largely fixed by the state, so the question is how an agency delivers it rather than whether it is required. DFPS states that CPS requires prospective foster parents to attend the National Training and Development Curriculum, a 19 hour program in Texas covering attachment, loss and grief, discipline and behavior intervention, the effects of abuse and neglect, and the effects of trauma on children and families. State minimum standards require prospective families to complete several trainings that are not part of that curriculum, which DFPS lists as psychotropic medication training, certification in First Aid and infant, child and adult CPR, medical consent training, training on preventing and recognizing sexual abuse and victimization of youth in foster care, and AS+K? suicide intervention and prevention training.
Training does not stop at verification. DFPS states that annual in-service training requirements for verified foster homes range from 10 hours per family to 30 hours per foster parent, depending on the number of foster parents in the home and the needs of the children placed there. Ask an agency when it holds those hours, whether they are online or in person, and whether childcare is available while you attend.
What will the process cost me?
DFPS does not charge a home study fee to prospective families, and it publishes estimates for the ancillary costs families do carry during verification. DFPS lists a fire inspection at $0 to $100 or more depending on city and county, an FBI fingerprint check at $38.54 per person, and CPR and First Aid training at $25 to $50 or more per person depending on the trainer, alongside smaller items such as medication lock boxes, smoke detectors, TB skin tests and pet vaccinations. Ask any agency which of these it covers, reimburses or schedules for you, because that varies and the published figures do not.
What should I ask an agency before I apply?
The useful questions are the ones the public record cannot answer. These are about how an agency works day to day, and you should expect specific answers rather than reassurance.
| Question | What you are listening for |
|---|---|
| Who will my caseworker be, and how many families does that person carry? | A name and a number, not a department. |
| Who answers the phone at two in the morning? | Whether after-hours help is a person on call or a voicemail box. |
| How does respite work here, and who approves it? | State rules require management staff to approve respite and to check it will not create a conflict of care for a child already in the home, so an agency should be able to describe its own process. |
| Which counties do you place from, and how far might I drive for visits and court? | Travel is the cost families underestimate most. |
| How do you support a placement that is heading toward reunification? | Reunification is the state's first goal, and an agency that treats it as a failure will not support you well through one. |
| What happens if I say no to a placement? | How the agency handles a limit tells you how it will handle a crisis. |
| Can you walk me through your inspection record? | HHSC specifically advises raising questions about deficiencies with the agency. |
If you want a fuller picture of what agency support should include, we wrote separately about what support foster parents can expect from a Texas agency. You can also ask where to send a complaint. DFPS states that its Office of Consumer Affairs continues to take complaints under Community-Based Care, and the HHSC Foster Care Ombudsman takes complaints from children and youth in care.
Does the agency I choose change the plan for the child?
No. The permanency plan for a child in state conservatorship is set through the case and the court, not by the agency that verified your home. DFPS lists reunification among a foster parent's responsibilities, describing foster parents as team members working with the children's caseworkers toward reunifying children with their birth families. Reunification is the state's first goal, and fostering is not a path to adoption that an agency can promise you.
Adoption does happen from foster care. DFPS states that nearly half the adoptions of children in DFPS foster care are by their foster families, and that when termination of parental rights is in a child's best interest and adoption is the plan, foster parents who have cared for that child will be given the opportunity to adopt. If you are a relative who has just been asked to take in a child, the route is different again and starts with kinship care.
Where Angelheart Fits In
Angelheart Kids is a licensed child-placing agency in Texas, contracted with the Department of Family and Protective Services, and we run three programs and nothing else: foster care, kinship care and adoption. We are in the same public database we have just told you to search, and we will walk through our record with you if you ask. Our offices are in Round Rock, North Richland Hills, Temple and San Antonio, which is also the shape of the area we serve.
If you are deciding between agencies, call the Round Rock office at (512) 310-9857 and ask us the questions in the table above. We would rather you ask them of several agencies and pick the one that fits your family than apply to the first one that answers.