SAN ANTONIO - Lawmakers were set to put millions of your taxpayer dollars toward take-home DNA kits, meant to help find your child if they ever went missing. But as the session drew to a close, funding was eliminated. This comes after reports that the kits haven't helped find anyone.
The kits were handed out in districts across Texas, offering a fingerprint card, a place for saliva DNA, and medical history. A law passed in 2021 required the Texas Education Agency, or TEA, to have these kits available for school districts.
A spokesperson tells us TEA didn't directly purchase the kits, but helped pass the money through to a grant recipient, the Safety Blitz Foundation. More than $5.7 million was put toward buying them.
"When a family member is missing, they can't sleep, they can't eat, they can't work..." said Dottie Laster, a longtime advocate for missing children. "Every second, they have to know they're doing everything they can to find their loved one."
Laster has spent most of her career helping families in their worst moments. She spent more than two years leading the Heidi Search Center in San Antonio, and now works as a consultant for Trafficking Victim Rescue Central, LLC.
"The person missing, of course, whatever happened to them is bad. But the exponential effect to the community is endless," Laster said.
That's why she says she was angry to hear the funding for child identification kits was pulled from the state budget.
"We're not a poor state. We have money for what we care about. And repeatedly, I see that we don't care about our children," Laster told us Friday.
These kits were free to families. We spoke with Rose Garcia, Director of Guidance and North East ISD as they handed out the envelopes to families last year.
"It is not something that's mandated that all students have to do, it's just something to be made available to parents in case they would like to have this for your child," Garcia said.
A TEA spokesperson tells us another source of funding hasn't been identified. That leaves districts in limbo.
Northside ISD tells us they distributed the kits to parents who wanted them this year, but now, they're assessing how to move forward.
If you're wanting a DNA kit for your child, there are more options available. Child Safe Kit offers similar kits for free. National Night Out has boxes of the same kits given out in schools for sale in increments of 100.
Laster also created a digital kit for parents to use, listing their usernames, gamer tags, and electronic devices.
"Because if they go missing in 2023, it's more times than not due to some interaction online," Laster said.
The resource is available for free here on the Trafficking Victim Rescue Central website.
"Many times we got them back because of it," she says of the completed forms.
Laster also says having an updated, unfiltered, solo photo of your child is one of the most beneficial things you can give to an investigator.
"They might be making silly faces, or other things that make someone that doesn't know them, unable to recognize them. And we came across that many times. They either had blurry photos, or old photos, and so that information you have along with current, updated photos really important," Laster said.