Annual review says state missed placement, health care and caseload goals

TOPEKA — The court-appointed monitor for Kansas’ settlement of a foster care lawsuit challenged the state’s reliance on “sleep-only” housing because the practice didn’t contribute to satisfactory outcomes for children and distorted statistics on the number of youth in stable residential settings.

Monitor Judith Meltzer, senior fellow with the nonprofit Center for the Study of Social Policy, said Kansas was supposed to have remedied years ago problems with temporarily holding foster children in offices, motels and other unsuitable locations. The issue came to light in 2017 during the administration of Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, but continued under Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

Meltzer told the Kansas Legislature’s foster care oversight committee that placement of children in sleep-only settings was an attempt to artificially deflate the number reported as not having been moved to a stable foster home.

“They have a bed for the night, but they need to be out of the foster parents’ house during the day,” Meltzer said. “We’re very concerned about this practice and that these children appear in the data to have stable placements because they returned to the same foster home every night. We think it masks the extent of the problem of their instability.”

She said it was widely accepted that emergency or short-term placements contributed to “the instability of children and exacerbated the trauma of family separation.”

Brenna Visocsky, director of Kansas Appleseed’s Just Campaign, said some Kansas children in sleep-only arrangements had to be out of foster homes each day by 6 a.m. In some instances, the Kansas Department for Children and Families and their private contractors allowed these children to spend portions of the day at school or in unlicensed day centers before returning to a foster home in the late evening.

“We want to make sure these kids are in legitimate stable placements,” Visocsky said. “It is crucial that DCF and their case management partners take accountability for the continued negative realities our foster youth face in their care.”

Kansas Appleseed was among several groups that filed a class-action lawsuit, known as McIntyre v. Howard, against Kansas in 2018 to challenge the state’s poor treatment of foster children. The lawsuit led to a negotiated settlement in 2020 and an agreement on methods of measuring progress and deadlines for gradually making improvements.

Laura Howard, secretary of the state Department for Children and Families, said the agency was striving to improve its ability to place foster children in stable environments. She said it was important to acknowledge how chaotic the state’s foster system was when she became secretary nearly six years ago.

“We had reports, not just of youths sleeping in offices, but youths being driven around in cars all night,” Howard said.

The timeline set by DCF, Kansas Appleseed and the U.S. District Court for attaining agreed-upon goals in serving 5,800 foster children expires in December 2025.

It’s unclear if Kansas could meet that deadline for overhauling the large and complex privatized foster care system. Plaintiffs in the case have requested the federal court appoint a mediator to develop a corrective action plan that could add urgency to the state’s reform of foster care. If that mediation process were to fail, the plaintiffs have the option of returning to court and arguing the state was in breach of the settlement agreement.

Inside the numbers

On Wednesday at the Capitol, Meltzer said Kansas failed for the third year to comply with targeted improvements ordered by the court under the settlement.

“Overall, progress was disappointing,” she said. “It’s important to recognize this state has remained committed to meeting requirements of the settlement. However, despite focused effort, it is far from meeting the majority of the anticipated final targets.”

Kansas was to end the practice of housing youth overnight in offices, hotels and other questionable spaces by 2021, but during 2023 there were 57 children who experienced 68 instances of sleeping in settings not licensed as child welfare placements. That was an improvement over 2022, but preliminary data on 2024 indicated that number was “substantially increasing.”

Meanwhile, foster children 0 to 18 last year averaged 7.9 placement moves per 1,000 days, which was 60% higher than the benchmark goal of five or fewer moves over 1,000 days. In 2023, 822 youth experienced 2,057 one-night placements, which was a 36% increase over the previous year.

Documents analyzed by the court’s monitor showed the state experienced a decline in delivery of behavioral and mental health services.  The goal established in the settlement was for Kansas to gradually improve its rating from 80% served in 2021 to 85% in 2022 and 90% in 2023. Instead, the state reported complying with health needs of children in foster care 65% of the time in 2021, 70% of the time in 2022 and 52% of the time last year.

The monitor’s report noted Kansas lacked an effective statewide data collection system, which meant it relied on a hodgepodge of antiquated data sources to figure out what was happening to foster children. Kansas must have quality data measuring performance and outcomes to hold contractors accountable, the report said.

In Kansas, 3,000 children in foster care were assigned to a caseworker grappling with 30 or more cases. Under the settlement, caseworkers were to have no more than 25 to 30 cases because larger caseloads hindered the ability of caseworkers to connect with children in their care. In July, DCF directed the system’s contractors cap caseloads at 15.

Howard, the DCF secretary, acknowledged shortcomings identified in the annual report but said the state had made meaningful progress in preventing children from entering foster care. In her time at DCF, the roster of foster children in Kansas fell from 7,600 in June 2019 to 5,800 in June 2024.

She said the state increased the number of children placed with relatives — with 54% of placements this year made with relatives. She said 87% of Kansas foster children were in a stable placement and 83% percent had no more than one residential move in the past 12 months. She said mental health crisis support was more readily available.

“Despite these bright spots,” Howard said, “we continue to fall short on a number of settlement performance goals, and from my perspective this level of performance is not acceptable. We have more work to do, especially for a cohort of youth who experience extreme placement instability.”

Poverty, cultural factors

Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a Wichita Democrat on the Legislature’s foster care oversight committee, said it was frustrating Black children were overrepresented in the state’s system. Black children made up approximately 6% of the state’s population, but about three times that percentage were in foster care.

“A lot of times social workers remove children just because they’re poor,” Faust-Goudeau said. “They remove children just because their culture is different. The way that we do things might be different from the white social worker who is visiting the home, so they remove children.”

Republican Sen. Molly Baumgardner of Louisburg echoed Faust-Goudeau’s conclusions and called it grievous a disproportionate number of children of color were entering foster care in Kansas. She said minority children stayed longer in foster care and were not as quickly adopted. She said it was harmful when children from southcentral Kansas were relocated to foster homes across the state, because it made family visits nearly impossible.

Rep. Susan Humphries, a Wichita Republican on the foster care panel, said it was a disappointment DCF hadn’t proceeded quickly on upgrading IT systems to better administer foster care cases.

“I would suggest if this was a private business that we would be able to do it more quickly,” she said. “I know government has bureaucracy. I’m just going to say that. This has gone on way too long.”

Republican Sen. Renee Erickson of Wichita said she was anxious Kansas was missing deadlines outlined in the binding agreement.

She said dedicated people were working on behalf of foster care children, but there should be more urgency in state government to comply with the deal.

“It’s felt to me, being on this committee, a little bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Erickson said. “When I look at the data and all of the efforts and we continue to lose ground and sink a little more every year at the expense of these children, it’s unacceptable.”

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

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