Child Welfare Research Center at UTA emphasizes collaboration and prevention

The University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work is advancing efforts to transform child welfare systems through the revitalized Child Welfare Research Center, an initiative designed to connect research, practice and policy while addressing the needs of children and families across Texas.

The center builds on the former Center for Child Welfare, re-established to align with the university’s expanding research mission and to address gaps in North Texas.

“The Child Welfare Research Center is a revitalization of the Center for Child Welfare that has been at UTA for a long time,” said Catherine LaBrenz, associate professor and director of the center. “We saw a gap in North Texas to support a lot of the cutting-edge and innovative child welfare work going on in our communities.”

Texas has one of the largest child welfare systems in the country, with close to 30,000 children in foster care each year and approximately 250,000 hotline reports each year. 

The center aims to address long-standing challenges within that system, particularly its reactive nature. LaBrenz said foster care represents only a small portion of a much broader system.

“Child welfare as a system developed as a reactive system,” LaBrenz said. “When you have a really high caseload, it’s juggling and putting out fires all the time.Foster care really should be the last resort.” 

Members of the Child Welfare Research Center pose for a photo at the annual SSWR conference. (Courtesy Photo)

Instead, the Child Welfare Research Center focuses on collaboration and prevention, bringing together researchers, practitioners and policymakers to improve outcomes.

“We see it as a very much mutually interchangeable hub for child welfare practitioners, policy makers and researchers to really help transform the child welfare system,” LaBrenz said.

A key focus of the center is shifting toward upstream solutions that address root causes before families reach crisis points.

“We need to support kids who are currently in foster care but also recognize that to truly transform systems, we need to go upstream,” she said.

That approach includes addressing factors such as poverty, substance use and untreated mental health conditions, which often contribute to child welfare involvement.

“How can we really get ahead of the curve so that we avoid the kids that are in care for long periods of time,” LaBrenz said.

The center’s work includes partnerships with community organizations and agencies across Texas. One example is its collaboration with a Family Recovery Court in Central Texas, which brings together judges, treatment providers and community partners to support families affected by substance use.

“In our initial pilot evaluation, none of the families had re-entries or re-referrals into care,” LaBrenz said. “That’s really a testament of the work that’s being done.”

The initiative reflects a broader emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration, both in research and education. Faculty and students work alongside partners in fields such as nursing, criminal justice and computer science to address complex child welfare challenges.

“Recognizing innovative approaches often means bringing other lenses to the work,” LaBrenz said.

The center also supports hands-on learning opportunities, including simulations that allow students to work through real-world child welfare scenarios alongside professionals from multiple disciplines.

In addition, researchers including the Child Welfare Research Center’s Director of Research, Dr. Hui Huang, are exploring new tools such as large language models to improve how hotline reports are categorized and analyzed, further strengthening data-driven decision-making.

“The goal is to build a village of child welfare professionals,” LaBrenz said, describing the center’s growing network of faculty, researchers and community partners.

Ultimately, the Child Welfare Research Center seeks to balance immediate intervention with long-term prevention, with the goal of reducing system involvement over time.

“In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need a child welfare system,” LaBrenz said. “Communities can support the families that live there and get the resources that they need to thrive.”