Infant suffered severe head injury while in ‘crowded’ Kansas foster home, lawsuit says
A young Kansas girl suffered a severe head injury after being placed in a foster home by KVC Behavioral Healthcare Inc., according to a lawsuit filed last year in Shawnee County.
The lawsuit alleges that the child suffered severe head trauma after KVC, a state contracted foster care provider, placed the child in a “dangerously overcrowded” foster home and failed to ensure safety planning services were provided to the foster parents.
After about one month in the home, the girl, who was an infant at the time, was “severely injured by another foster child,” according to the complaint.
The lawsuit was originally filed in 2021 in the Shawnee County District Court but was moved to Wyandotte County on Monday.
Jenny Kutz, a spokeswoman for KVC Kansas, which operates KVC Behavioral Healthcare Inc., said the organization is “heartbroken whenever a child in foster care experiences any type of harm.
“Foster care is meant to be a place of safety for children,” she said in an emailed statement.
KVC Kansas has the largest number of licensed foster care families in the state, Kutz said.
According to the lawsuit, shortly after the child was born in March 2018 she was placed in the custody of the Kansas Department for Children and Families and referred to KVC for foster care services.
She remained in the custody of a KVC employee for about one month. Then on April 2 of that year, staff placed her in a foster home, where she lived until another foster child injured her about a month later, around May 7, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit says the number of foster children living in the home “exceeded capacity”, though it is unclear in court documents how many children were in the home. They were also “inappropriate age-mates” to the incoming baby girl, the lawsuit said.
Some of the foster children were suspected of being “mentally unstable and aggressive” according to the lawsuit. But a KVC employee allegedly failed to give the foster parents safety planning services and ensure they understood the behavioral and psychological problems of the other foster children.
The family members of the Kansas girl allege that when KVC placed the infant in the foster home, they made her vulnerable to an “unreasonable risk of danger.”
They are suing for $75,000 in damages, according to the complaint.
Foster home placement
Between 2017 and 2019 was the peak of a challenging time in Kansas foster care, according to Kutz, the KVC Kansas spokeswoman.
“Due to multiple factors including state policy changes and juvenile justice reform, a record number of Kansas children were in foster care,” she said.
Kutz said this caused an “unprecedented surge” and that a lack of placements for children led to some “sleeping in child welfare offices overnight, which no one wants to see happen.”
A 2018 class action lawsuit filed in federal court alleged that some children had been treated so poorly in foster care that they ran away from their foster homes or suffered mentally. In certain cases, children were trafficked for sex, sexually abused inside adoptive homes or in one instance reportedly raped inside a KVC child welfare office.
Despite efforts to recruit more families, Kutz said, there is still more work to be done in reducing the number of foster children and providing mental health services.
As a part of procedure, the needs of every time a child are assessed by case managers before a foster home is chosen. Each case is reviewed by multiple agencies throughout the month and a safety plan, where case managers discuss any medications or challenges associated with a foster child, is discussed with potential foster parents.
There is a limit on how many kids can be placed in a foster home. The limit is based on both the physical capacity of the home and the level of interest among a foster family.
But there are exceptions.
An agency can apply to exceed the capacity of the foster home if that placement has a specialty, such as caring for medically fragile youth, or if case managers are attempting to keep siblings together or within a certain school.
The next hearing in the case is scheduled for March 29 at Wyandotte County District Court.
This story was originally published February 10, 2023 at 10:27 AM.
