Texas leaders had a detailed roadmap to improve mental health care for kids. They only followed a small slice of it.
Lawmakers implemented just eight of the 31 recommendations in the Statewide Behavioral Health Coordinating Council’s children’s strategic plan, leaving major holes in services for young Texans. Advocates warn that the gaps will mean longer waitlists, more children pushed into foster care, and more kids winding up in crisis placements instead of getting help in their own communities.
Advocates’ analysis, highlighted by KERA, found that during the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers took steps to partially or fully implement fewer than a third of the plan’s recommendations. That conclusion has renewed pressure on state agencies and lawmakers to turn the paper strategy into real-world funding and concrete administrative changes.
What Lawmakers Funded, And What They Didn’t
A December 2025 review from Texans Care for Children notes that the Legislature did sign off on some targeted investments. Those included roughly $40 million to expand mobile youth crisis outreach teams and about $32.7 million to grow multisystemic therapy, or MST, capacity across the state, according to Texans Care for Children.
Even with those dollars, the state is still far from what its own strategic plan says is needed. Texas now has 16 mobile youth crisis teams and 23 MST teams, well short of the roughly 40 crisis teams and 140 MST teams the plan calls for statewide, the group reports.
YES Waiver Left Strained
Advocates say one of the clearest missed chances was the Youth Empowerment Services, or YES, waiver, a Medicaid program that helps children with significant mental health needs receive intensive services at home and in their communities. Despite rising demand, lawmakers cut about $1.3 million from the program.
“We know that six percent of Texas youth are entering the foster care system due to unmet mental health services or care,” Muna Javaid told KERA. At the same time, The Texas Tribune reports that in 2023, there were about 3,109 inquiries for YES services, while only roughly 2,227 children actually received them, leaving nearly 900 kids waiting and hundreds of providers exiting the program between 2020 and 2023.
What The Statewide Plan Calls For
The Children’s Behavioral Health Strategic Plan, produced by the Statewide Behavioral Health Coordinating Council and released in December 2024, lays out 31 specific recommendations to expand prevention, crisis response, and community-based care across state agencies. The plan is posted by Texas Health and Human Services and is intended to serve as a coordinated roadmap, detailing how different systems are supposed to work together instead of leaving families to navigate a maze on their own.
Advocates’ Top Asks For 2027
In its review, Texans Care for Children boils the to-do list down to five high-priority moves for the next Legislature. At the top: restore the YES waiver cut and increase funding to match the level of need. The group also wants Medicaid to cover more community-based services, crisis programs scaled up to true 24/7 availability, a stronger behavioral health workforce, especially in rural areas, and modern data systems that actually track outcomes, according to Texans Care for Children.
Some of the recommendations could move forward through agency action alone. Most of the big-ticket items, though, will require sustained funding and statutory changes when lawmakers return to Austin in 2027.
Advocates and providers say the 2025 spending was a necessary start, but not a full strategy. They expect the fight over what comes next to be front and center in the next session. The Texas Tribune reports that advocacy groups and state agencies have requested coordinated appropriations totaling roughly $61.9 million for 2026–27, money supporters hope will finally begin to close the gaps that have kept so many Texas children waiting for care.
