The Texas Youth Commission said Wednesday that it had sent termination notices to 40 employees who have been convicted of felonies or received deferred adjudication for felony charges.

The bulk of the crimes committed by the fired employees were drug-related, though the offenses ranged from forgery to homicide, according to TYC records.

More than half of the fired workers received deferred adjudication for their crimes, records show. In deferred-adjudication cases, a defendant doesn't have a conviction if probation is completed.

TYC's West Texas prison in Pyote - where the sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the agency began - will lose the most employees, with seven terminations. Twelve other facilities, including the central office in Austin, also terminated workers. Of the 40 fired workers, 25 were guards.

The embattled agency has acknowledged that its hiring practices allowed hundreds of people with felony charges and convictions to go to work with the state's troubled youths.

Since the scandal erupted in mid-February, TYC has been rescreening all employees to determine which ones had backgrounds troubling enough to bar them from working with young inmates. Previous agency policy allowed the hiring of workers with criminal records.

Determining the final disposition of some cases was difficult because state conviction records are incomplete. Also, previous agency hiring policy had called for criminal background checks to be destroyed once the job candidate was hired.

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