Nathan Bernier, KUT News

AUSTIN, TX
(2009-03-11)

Almost a year ago, the state's Child Protective Services removed more than four-hundred children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch outside Eldorado. And a few months later, the Texas Supreme Court said C-P-S overstepped its authority, and ordered most of the kids back to their families. Now a group of state lawmakers is about to take a look at what went wrong. KUT's Nathan Bernier reports.

State Representative Elliot Naishtat - an Austin Democrat- will lead the specially formed subcommittee. The panel will look at what can be learned from the raid on the Y-F-Z Ranch, which some people have characterized as a fiasco.

Naishtat: "My initial reaction was that it appeared to me that the due process rights of the children and the families were violated. That ultimately is what the Texas Supreme Court said."

The panel was formed by Representative Patrick Rose - a Democrat from Dripping Springs. He hopes to glean lessons that could be applied broadly to Child Protective Services.

Rose: "That's what we're going to find out. I think how we coordinate with law enforcement. How we handle such a large group of children coming into the system. How we can deal with particular circumstances like this, an isolated group of folks."

But critics of C-P-S say that while the raid is unique - the practices of the agency are not. Regardless of any charges of polygamy being practiced on the ranch. Richard Wexler runs the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

Wexler: "The FLDS case was not an aberration. Taking away children with little or no evidence. Throwing them needlessly into foster care. Traumatizing them in foster care, and doing all of that harm in the name of children happens far too often in Texas and across the country."

A spokesman with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints told a Salt Lake City newspaper he welcomes the committee's probe. Representative Naishtat says the first hearing should take place in two or three weeks.

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Emphasis added by H4K Editor