Alert! Friday 1/23/26 Family and Children/Youth Groups are cancelled due to weather! Please stay warm and we will see you on 1/30!

 Federation of Families - Texas

We are a family to family support and advocacy organization. We are families who have raised children with mental health needs. We have experience with mental health, education and sadly justice systems. We share what we have learned through experience and what we have come to know about the best practices that our children would benefit from.

We meet weekly on the Texas Woman’s University Denton campus in collaboration with the School of Occupational Therapy. Please see the flyer below and share with anyone who may benefit.

Advocacy Resources

Texas Children’s Behavioral Health Strategic Plan 2025-2029

(published December 2024 … due to the dramatic changes beginning 2025, check for current relevance)

Texas’s Statewide Behavioral Health Coordinating Council (SBHCC)  released the Children’s Behavioral Health Strategic Plan for the fiscal years 2025-2029. This council represents voices from across Texas, including mental health, substance use, and criminal justice professionals, people with lived experience and their families, community leaders, and program and policy subject matter experts across other stakeholder systems. The plan focuses on the mental health and substance use needs of children in Texas and offers a blueprint for understanding and meeting these needs over time. 

Education Resources and Issues

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which frames special education and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provide legal safeguards for children with disabilities in schools. The enforcement capacity within the Office of Civil Rights (OCR, within the US Department of Education) had been a target of 2025 cuts that impaired their ability to assure that children’s rights to a free and appropriate education (FAPE) are followed. See Inside Higher Ed article. The laws requiring FAPE still exist - the concern is whether the capacity to enforce them does and how does that impact children and youth? Locally, we are seeing students pushed into the justice system when we might have expected that a Manifest Determination Hearing ( a process to determine whether a behavior is a manifestation of a student’s disability) might have kept them in school and required appropriate supports be put in place.

Here is an IDEA Manual created by ARC and Disability Rights Texas that walks through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the processes and protections it provides. As of this writing, the 2022 version is still up, but there is a new one due to be posted soon.

TWU student, Hannah Sunil, is working on her capstone project creating resources for 504 in Spring 2026 and links to her work will be posted here.