Kept in a West Texas coliseum for nearly two weeks, the first of more than 400 children taken from a polygamist compound boarded buses Tuesday bound for group homes and other faraway foster care facilities.

Some of those new homes could be in the Houston area, including a center in the Brazoria County town of Liverpool.

While officials with Kidz Harbor, a children’s shelter in Liverpool, would not confirm if any children from the sect would be housed there, The Facts newspaper reported that officials with the Alvin school district had been notified that as many as 40 of the kids from the West Texas sect could be staying Kidz Harbor.

An Alvin ISD spokeswoman is quoted in the paper saying they were expecting some guests that may also be attending school within the district.

“We have been informed there is a possibility youngsters from West Texas would be placed at a facility in Brazoria County,” Alvin ISD spokeswoman Shirley Brothers told The Facts.

AP photo

Children from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are transported from the San Angelo Coliseum in San Angelo, Texas to various parts of the state of Texas on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 after 51st District Judge Barbara Walther signed an order to place the children in foster care facilities.

Kidz Harbor also was soliciting donations from area businesses, telling business owners that they had been informed by the state they could expect 40 children to be housed at the shelter.

According to The Facts report, Kidz Harbor is licensed to house 60 children. The organization’s president told the paper that there were 30 kids – not from the Eldorado sect -- already staying at the facility.

The board president said too that children who stay at the facility must attend school in Alvin ISD.

The facility, which opened in 2003, sits on a 6-acre tract of land near Chocolate Bayou and features dorm-style housing. It also has a gym and swimming pool.

According to The Facts report, the facility routinely takes children who are in CPS custody from across the region.

Meanwhile in Hockley, near the Harris and Waller County borders, another facility was not expecting any new guests.

The sprawling Boys and Girls Country in Hockley was one of 15 Texas facilities named in a court order to accept the children.

The facility’s director would not comment if they expected any children from West Texas to arrive anytime soon, but didn’t mind giving 11 News a tour.

The tour guides were a pair of youngsters, Celeste, 9, and Krystal,11, who are residents.

The pair said they would welcome any new roommates at the facility where kids live eight to a cottage. 

And while the facility doesn’t comment on specific clients, its director boasted about its family like setting.

“We are a great place for sibling groups they can grow up here and still have contact with family members,” said Shirley Wright, the facility’s director.

As the buses rolled out from San Angelo and the children eagerly waved and smiled at television cameras, adult members of the sect filed through an unmarked building on a courthouse square in nearby Eldorado for the second day of DNA testing meant to map the tangled family trees that authorities came across while investigating a teenage girl’s allegation of abuse by her much older husband.

Lawyers inside the coliseum who were meeting with their adult or child clients said state Children’s Protective Services workers installed tight security, allowing no one in or out while the children, 114 of them by day’s end, were loaded onto the buses.

The remaining 300 children at the coliseum were still undergoing DNA testing and could be moved on Thursday, said Guy Choate, a state bar official who has been coordinating the attorneys brought from all over the state to represent the children.

State District Judge Barbara Walther signed an order Tuesday allowing the state to begin moving the children into temporary foster care while the state completes DNA testing of the 437 children and at least 175 adults and develops individual custody and treatment plans.

On Monday, technicians tested children and parents in the coliseum. On Tuesday, the state added a testing site closer to the ranch, on the Eldorado courthouse square.

Women in prairie dresses and men with shirts buttoned to their necks trickled into a stone building flanked by deputies to offer DNA samples, but their lawyers say many were reluctant to offer samples for testing they believe is invasive and unnecessary.

Arriving in pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles a few at a time, the parents came to allow technicians in lab coats to swab the inside of their mouths as they fight to regain custody of their children.

By midday, only about two dozen of the 175 under court order had shown up at a stone building near the Schleicher County Courthouse. Several dozen mothers were still with the youngest children at a shelter and they could be swabbed there.

“We’ve told them to cooperate, but there are a lot of people who are reluctant,” said Cynthia Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Legal Aid attorneys who represent dozens of mothers. “There’s a perception there that the state will be using it to separate them” rather than reunite them with their children.

Susan Hays, an attorney for a toddler in state custody, said many of the fathers are reluctant and some may have left the state, fearing that the tests are really designed to help prosecutors make criminal abuse cases.

The state won the right to put the children in foster care on suspicion that members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints pushed underage girls into marriage and sex and that all the children raised in the church are in danger of being victims or becoming predators. The children had been removed from the Yearning For Zion Ranch, the renegade Mormon sect’s compound in nearby Eldorado.

CPS spokesman Darrell Azar said child welfare officials wanted to get the children in a more homelike setting.

“They need to be out of the limelight,” he said. “Children can’t get into a normal routine in a shelter.”

CPS officials said in its placement plan — attached to Walther’s order — that it will try to place mothers under 18 with their children and will try to keep sibling groups together. Some of the families may have dozens of siblings.

Boys ages 8 and older will likely be placed in a setting similar to that where dozens of teen boys were taken last week, a Boys’ Ranch near Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle some 250 miles from Eldorado.

The CPS document lists 16 facilities all around Texas—as far as Houston, about 500 miles away—where the children may be placed.

Walther ordered all the children taken from the compound two weeks ago be given DNA tests after child welfare officials complained they couldn’t identify the children and parents, who lived in enormous log-cabin style homes with their “sister wives” and other children and relatives. The judge ordered any known or suspected parents to also get tested in one of the largest custody cases in U.S. history.

Results will likely take a month or more.

On Tuesday, former FLDS member David Williams arrived from

Nevada to give a DNA sample.

Clutching a Book of Mormon and photos of his boys ages 5, 7 and 9, Williams looked at his feet as he said his children were “taken hostage by the state.”

“I have been an honorable American and father and I have carefully sheltered my children from the sins of this generation,” Williams said.

He denied the children living at the ranch were abused.

Rod Parker, an FLDS spokesman, said at a news conference in Salt

Lake City that the state doesn’t know how to handle FLDS children and efforts to keep the children from being moved have been ignored.

“These people are not equipped to handle these children,” said Parker. “They don’t know anything about these children.”

All of the children are supposed to get individual hearings before June 5 to help determine whether they’ll stay in state custody or that parents may be able to take steps to regain custody of their children.

On Tuesday, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the mainstream Mormon church, issued a statement in response to earlier plans to ask Mormon officials to monitor FLDS prayers inside the coliseum.

“It would be erroneous to base any request for assistance from members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the basis that our beliefs and practices are close to those of this polygamous group because they are not,” spokeswoman Kim Farah said.

The main Mormon church does not recognize FLDS and disavows polygamy.