The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the national child advocacy group Children's Rights cannot file its class-action suit on behalf of all 12,000 youth in Texas' long-term foster care system.

Child Protective Services officials got an earful on Wednesday at a Senate hearing on improving the caseworker retention rates in rural communities. And they got a minor scolding from Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville.

In this episode of Weekend Insider, Claire Cardona explains the rise in the state's need for foster care, and Brandi Grissom introduces us to a family accused of murder.

Anne Heiligenstein, the commissioner of the Department of Family and Protective Services, is retiring from the agency after three years. 

Attorney General Greg Abbott and former first lady Laura Bush are leading an effort to recruit more court-appointed special advocates for foster kids. With 42,000 children in the system, Gretch Sanders of KUT News reports on the growing need for so-called CASA volunteers.

“Dear future son,” the North Texas father wrote in a prospective adoption letter. “I am a single dad who adopted a middle school boy in 2008. Now we are looking for one more kid so he will have a brother.” Instead, the father got shocking news: He would not be allowed to adopt again because his son is on a state registry of people who abuse children.

The Texas judicial system can do a better job handling the cases of kids in long-term foster care, according to a study released today by Texas Appleseed.

The state has shut down Daystar Residential Inc. in Manvel, the facility where The Texas Tribune and the Houston Chronicle revealed that staff had forced young girls with disabilities to fight each other.

Warren Jeffs has made it to Texas. The embattled leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — the polygamous Mormon breakaway sect whose Eldorado ranch was raided by child welfare officials in 2008 — will stand trial in San Angelo for allegedly sexually assaulting a child.

The same Houston-area residential treatment center where staffers forced disabled girls to fight each other — prompting child welfare officials to halt admissions and hire a safety monitor — is now under fire for the asphyxiation of a 16-year-old boy who died Friday after a restraint was applied by a staffer in a closet.

The commissioner of the state's Department of Family and Protective Services talked to the Tribune about the planned redesign of Texas' foster care system — one she hopes will keep kids close to home and connected to their siblings and reduce their time in state custody.

A teenage girl in foster care who collapsed at a Houston-area residential treatment center about a month ago has died.

Young adults who age out of Texas foster care often request their records to reconnect with estranged siblings, to track down biological families or to understand what they endured. But child welfare advocates complain the state routinely denies these requests, saying the records can't be found or will take months or even years to compile — assuming they respond at all. State officials admit they have a large backlog but insist they've beefed up staff and are putting new policies in place to address it.

A Houston psychiatrist who uses clinically controversial brain scans to diagnose everything from anxiety to marital discord. A Plano music therapist who believes his Peruvian pan flute tunes cure mental illness. And a Beaumont child psychologist reprimanded for continuing to prescribe to a proven drug abuser. These physicians have written more prescriptions for potent antipsychotic drugs to the state’s neediest patients than any other doctors in Texas.