There are no orphanages in Texas. The word has no place in Texas law, there is no licence category called an orphanage, and there is no building you can look up and drive a child to. When a child in Texas cannot live safely at home, the state looks for a relative first, a foster family second, and a facility only when neither is available or neither is right for that child. This is what actually happens, with the state's own numbers, written for someone who typed the word orphanage into a search box because they did not know what else to call it.
The reason the word persists is that it used to be accurate. Texas ran a state orphans' home for most of the twentieth century. It shrank every decade, and the system that replaced it is made of families.
What does Texas license instead of orphanages?
Texas licenses two kinds of residential child care operation and neither of them is an orphanage. The HHSC Child Care Regulation Handbook lists them as general residential operations and child-placing agencies, and the definitions sit in Chapter 42 of the Texas Human Resources Code.
A general residential operation, in the words of Section 42.002(4), is a child-care facility that provides care for seven or more children for 24 hours a day, including facilities known as residential treatment centers and emergency shelters. That is the closest thing in Texas law to what people mean by an institution, and the statute itself frames it around treatment and emergency, not around raising children.
A child-placing agency is the other kind, and it is not a building where children live. Section 42.002(12) defines it as a person or organization, other than a child's natural parents or guardian, who plans for the placement of or places a child in a child-care facility, agency foster home, or adoptive home. An agency recruits families, trains them, gets their homes verified and supports them while a child is placed. Angelheart is one of these.
The home a child goes to is an agency foster home. Section 42.002(11) caps it at not more than six children, and the HHSC handbook says the same thing in plainer words: a foster home is verified by a child-placing agency to provide care for six or fewer children up to 18 years old in the primary residence of the foster parents. The phrase "primary residence of the foster parents" is the whole difference. Somebody lives there. It is their house.
Texas law does still describe one setting that resembles the old children's homes. Section 42.002(10) defines a cottage family home as a family residential setting where each home has at least one houseparent who lives at the home while children are in care, and where each home cares for not more than six children based on the size of the home and the children's needs. Even that definition is built around a resident adult and a household of six.
Where did the orphanages go?
They emptied out over about eighty years, and Texas has a clear record of it in one institution. According to the Texas State Historical Association's Handbook of Texas, the State Orphans' Home was established in 1887 by an act of the Twelfth Legislature and opened on July 15, 1889, housing fifty-four children in its first year. It reached a peak enrollment of 890 children in 1932. Enrollment began to fall during the 1940s, and by 1945 the facility housed 443 children. It was renamed Corsicana State Home in 1957. By 1989 it served sixty-six children.
That decline was policy, not accident. The first White House Conference on Children and Youth, held in 1909 under President Theodore Roosevelt, was themed Care of Dependent Children, and the National Archives records in its magazine Prologue that the conference endorsed recommendations for the welfare of the orphaned and the children of impoverished parents. Its proceedings were printed by Congress as Senate Document 60-721.
By the 1930s the direction was explicit in federal documents. A 1937 report to the Committee on Economic Security, held in the Social Security Administration's historical archive, described the progress of the previous twenty years as assistance to parents caring for their children at home, and care in foster-family homes for children who should have the benefit of life in an individual family unit. The same chapter complained that almshouses, condemned a hundred years earlier as unsuitable for children, were still in use in some localities. The argument had already been settled on paper. The buildings took another fifty years to empty.
Where does a child go the first night?
Usually to a family, and most often to one the child already knows. DFPS publishes the first placement type for every removal, and in fiscal year 2025 it recorded 10,011 removals in its first placement dataset on the Texas Open Data Portal. A Family or Kinship Foster Home was the first placement for 3,650 children. A Non-Relative Foster Home was the first placement for 2,240 children. Those two family settings together account for 5,890 first placements.
Facilities account for far fewer. An Emergency Shelter was the first placement for 1,162 children, a basic-care general residential operation for 269 children, and a Residential Treatment Center for 98 children. DFPS files the remaining 2,592 removals under a category it labels only as Other.
Emergency shelter is the number worth understanding properly. A shelter is where a child goes when a removal happens at two in the morning and nobody has yet been found, and it is meant to be measured in days. It is the gap in the system that a licensed foster family closes.
Where do children in Texas foster care actually live?
In other people's houses, overwhelmingly. On August 31, 2025, DFPS recorded 17,623 children in its legal responsibility statewide in the conservatorship dataset, and 16,866 children in substitute care broken out by placement type in the placement dataset. These are the categories DFPS publishes, as of that date:
- Kinship Care, 6,378 children
- Child-placing agency non-relative foster home, 5,872 children
- Residential Treatment Center, 1,234 children
- Basic Child Care, 827 children
- Child-placing agency relative foster home, 745 children
- Other Foster Care, 560 children
- Other Substitute Care, 536 children
- Emergency Shelter, 324 children
- Child-placing agency adoptive home, 168 children
- DFPS relative foster home, 123 children
- DFPS non-relative foster home, 84 children
- DFPS adoptive home, 15 children
Add the family-home categories together and they come to 13,385 children. Add the three facility categories, meaning the treatment centers, the basic-care operations and the shelters, and they come to 2,385 children. The remaining 1,096 children sit in the two categories DFPS labels only as Other and does not break down further.
The single largest category is kinship care, which means a grandmother, an aunt, an older sister or a family friend. If you are looking for the modern equivalent of the orphanage in Texas, it is a relative's spare bedroom, and kinship care is the name for it.
Why does the law push so hard toward a family?
Because the Family Code requires it at every stage, and the court checks. DFPS states its own reasoning on its kinship care page: children who cannot safely reside with their parents do best, have better outcomes, and feel safer when they are placed with relatives or fictive kin like a family friend, neighbor or teacher. DFPS also notes that the courts are required to consider a temporary placement with a relative.
The requirement is specific. Under Section 262.114(a) of the Texas Family Code, before the full adversary hearing DFPS must run a background and criminal history check on every relative or designated individual identified as a potential caregiver, must evaluate each one, and must complete a home study of the most appropriate substitute caregiver before that hearing. Until a qualified caregiver is identified, the department must continue to explore options, including asking the child, in a developmentally appropriate manner, to identify any adult, particularly an adult residing in the child's community, who could be a caregiver.
If no relative has been found by the hearing, DFPS does not simply move on. Section 262.114(a-2) requires the department to file a statement with the court explaining why the child has not been placed with a relative and what actions it is taking to do so.
The pressure does not stop there either. Section 262.0022 requires that at each hearing the court review the placement of every child in the department's conservatorship who is not placed with a relative or designated caregiver, and include in its findings whether the department asked the child to name an adult and whether it has the option of placing the child with a relative. A child living in a facility generates a question in open court every time the case is heard.
Federal money follows the same logic. Under 42 U.S.C. Section 672(k), beginning with the third week for which federal foster care maintenance payments are made for a child placed in a child-care institution, no federal payment is made to the state unless the setting is one of four named exceptions, the first being a qualified residential treatment program. Congress wrote a funding cliff into the statute to stop institutional care becoming the default.
What about a child who needs treatment, not just a bed?
That child goes to a residential treatment center, and that is a clinical placement rather than a substitute for a home. Texas law treats a residential treatment center as a type of general residential operation, and the federal exception above is written around a program that can meet a child's clinical, emotional or behavioural health needs. The 1,234 children in treatment centers on August 31, 2025 were there for a reason recorded in a case file, with a court reviewing the placement.
This is the honest part of the answer. The system does still use facilities, and the 2,385 children in facility settings on that date are not a rounding error. Nobody at DFPS, in a courtroom or at an agency would describe that as the goal.
What happens to these children in the end?
Most of them go home or go to family. DFPS recorded 9,876 children leaving its custody in fiscal year 2025 in its exits dataset, and family reunification was the largest single exit type at 3,223 children. Custody went to relatives without permanency care assistance for 2,375 children and with it for 462 children. Relative adoption was consummated for 1,201 children and non-relative adoption for 1,741 children. Youth emancipation accounted for 772 children, and 102 exits are recorded as Other.
Reunification with the birth family is the state's first goal, and the exit numbers show it is also the most common outcome. A foster family in Texas is signing up to care for a child who, more often than not, is going home. Adoption is a real path and it is not the expected ending of a foster placement. Where it is the plan, foster-to-adopt is the route, and it begins after a court has terminated parental rights.
Some children are still waiting. On August 31, 2025, DFPS recorded 3,805 children in Texas waiting for adoption.
What about brothers and sisters?
Sometimes they stay together and sometimes they do not, and the gap between those two numbers is one of the strongest arguments for more foster homes. DFPS recorded 2,201 sibling groups placed together in fiscal year 2025 and 1,608 sibling groups not placed together.
A sibling group needs one family with enough bedrooms willing to take all of them on the same day. When no such home is available, the children are split. That is a capacity problem, and it is solved by families, not by buildings.
If you searched for an orphanage because you want to help, what can you do?
There are three real openings, and all of them put you in a family role rather than a volunteer role at an institution.
- Become a verified foster family. A licensed child-placing agency trains you, verifies your home against the state's minimum standards and supports you while a child is placed. The requirements are published, and they are a list of steps rather than a competition.
- Say yes if you are the relative. If you have had the call about a niece, a grandson or a cousin, Texas law already names you as the preferred placement, and an agency can help you become a licensed kinship caregiver rather than leaving you to manage alone.
- Adopt a child who is already waiting. The children DFPS records as waiting for adoption have had parental rights terminated and need a permanent family.
What you cannot do is donate a cot to an orphanage, because the orphanage is not there. The equivalent act of generosity in 2026 is a spare bedroom.
Where Angelheart Fits In
Angelheart is a licensed child-placing agency in Texas, contracted with DFPS, and it runs three programs and nothing else: foster care, kinship care and adoption. It is not a facility and no child lives at its offices. The work is finding families, getting their homes verified, training them and staying with them while a child is placed, from offices in Round Rock, North Richland Hills, Temple and San Antonio.
If you came here looking for an orphanage near you, the nearest equivalent is a licensing process and a home study, and the agency's job is to walk you through it. For a case of your own, meaning a child already in care, a court date or a question about your rights as a relative, DFPS and the court handle that, and a lawyer can advise you on your own situation. For becoming the family, call the Round Rock office at (512) 310-9857 or start with the page below.