What is Texas' plan for kids of polygamous sect?

When hearings begin Monday for individual FLDS families, the state's conditions for reunification will get clearer.

By faye bowers | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the May 19, 2008 edition

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PHOENIX - What will happen to the children?

Beginning Monday, that's the question before Texas courts as the state opens the next phase in determining whether 465 children removed from a ranch operated by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) should be reunited with their parents or permanently removed from their homes.

In the first of a series of hearings, to occur at six-month intervals for 18 months, the state is expected to present a plan for each child that outlines what steps parents must take to be reunited with their offspring. The plans also identify the services the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) can provide to help the family achieve that outcome.

"The important thing to understand is this generally is not an opportunity to relitigate the removal [of the children]," says Scott McCown, a retired Texas judge who now directs the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin. "The child has already been removed, so this is about where we go from here. What's the plan?"

The children were taken from the FLDS Yearning for Zion ranch near Eldorado, Texas, in early April, sparking the biggest child custody case in US history. Two weeks later, state district Judge Barbara Walther ruled there was evidence to indicate the children were at risk of sexual abuse if they returned to the ranch. The sect is known to sanction "spiritual marriages" of underage girls, usually to older men who already have one wife or more. Of 53 girls the state believes to be minors (some girls gave conflicting accounts of their ages), more than 30 have children, are pregnant, or both, DFPS has reported.

Since that first hearing, all 465 children have been placed in foster care, with siblings staying together when possible, throughout the state.

Family reunification the probable aim

Experts expect the DFPS plans will mostly call for children to eventually be reunited with their mothers, but possibly not with their fathers and probably not at the YFZ ranch.

"The mother may have to get a job or enroll in a job training program, or go to parenting classes to learn about problems with sexual and physical abuse," says Mr. McCown. "Then [the plans] will address the needs of the children, such as they may be put in counseling [and] receive an educational assessment."

Attorneys ad litem, representing each child, will weigh in on that child's plan and possibly negotiate changes with the child's social worker. Parents, too, all represented by individual attorneys, will have an opportunity to sign onto that plan.

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