Kansas fails again to meet foster care settlement outcomes. ‘It’s just painful’
For the fourth consecutive year, Kansas has failed to meet requirements of a foster care settlement meant to make kids more safe and stable, a report released Monday said.
Attorneys and advocacy groups that filed the class action lawsuit seven years ago said it’s disappointing and frustrating to see Kansas continue to fall short of giving quality care to all foster children. Though there were improvements in many pockets of the state, the Wichita area continues to struggle to meet standards, the report showed.
And in at least one critical area — with foster children who are hard to place — the state system took a significant step back, according to the report by the Center for the Study of Social Policy and its president, Judith Meltzer.
This report covers performance from Jan. 1, 2024 to Dec. 31, 2024.
“I just have to think that Kansas can do better than this,” said Teresa Woody, litigation director of Kansas Appleseed, one of four entities that filed the class action lawsuit in late 2018. “We’re continuing to fail kids in the foster care system. And just because it’s getting better in some areas doesn’t mean that it’s getting fixed.”
In reaction to the report, The Kansas Department for Children and Families, however, touted what has been accomplished. Of the 14 benchmarks DCF must meet in the settlement, a total of eight have been met, said DCF Secretary Laura Howard. Six of those have been fully met, meaning that the next annual reports won’t be looking at new data for those standards, Howard said.
The DCF Secretary pointed to improvements in crisis intervention services available statewide, as well as mental health resources and progress made in stable placements for the vast majority of children in Kansas foster care. Case reviews found that “92 percent of children whose cases were reviewed were in stable placements,” the report said.
“We are happy with the (outcomes) that were met and then the areas where we have progress,” Howard told The Star Monday, noting that “more progress” is needed. “I want kids who are in my care to have stability.
“I want them to have stable placements, because we know how important stability is. So I’m concerned from that perspective. ... We take (the settlement) very seriously. We’re focused on it. But I think it’s what those measures represent that’s most important to me.”
Outcomes from 2024 measured
The report detailed how case reviews found that “most children in DCF custody are in a stable placement.”
“But children without stable placements continue to experience a concerning number of nights without placement (FTPs) and night-to-night and short-term placements that do not meet the needs of children,” the report said. “For a number of children, this placement instability is extreme, with 341 children experiencing six or more placement moves in a 12-month period.
These children, the report said, account for just 4 percent of children in custody, but “the 4,517 combined placement moves they experienced are 50 percent of the total moves that occurred in Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2024.”
Foster care contractors for the state focused last year on working to end children staying overnight in child welfare offices. But what that led to, advocates and attorneys say, is that children in the state’s care continued to be in night to night placements and shuffled from home to home.
In 2024, the report showed that 824 children experienced a total of 2,006 night-to-night placements, and 1,282 children experienced a total of 3,577 short-term placements. Those numbers were similar to the year before.
“It’s just painful… really painful to think about,” said Lori Burns-Bucklew, a Kansas City attorney who is among those who filed the suit. “That’s all I can say.
“... I’m not sure that it makes that much difference to an 8-year-old whether they’re sleeping on a pillow in an office or on a pillow in a strange bed every night.”
The data in Monday’s report “reflects a heartbreaking reality,” said Kamala Buchanan-Williams, attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, another group involved in filing the class action lawsuit.
“... Too many children in Kansas’s foster system sleep in a different bed every week or even every night, go without desperately needed mental health care,” she said. “And lack consistent adult support because of high caseloads and staffing turnover.
“Kansas has a long way to go to meet the needs of all the children in its care.”
Committed to improving, but falling short
Local advocates and two national children’s rights organizations filed the suit in November 2018, alleging that some children in Kansas had been treated so poorly that they had suffered mentally or run away from foster homes.
In some cases, the class action suit said, they had been trafficked for sex, sexually abused inside adoptive homes or in one instance reportedly raped inside a child welfare office. The goal of the suit wasn’t to receive money, but to fix the system for these children and others who come after them, the attorneys who filed the suit have said.
As part of the settlement, which a judge approved in early 2021, the state needs to meet the 14 standards before it is released from court oversight. In the report released Monday, Judith Meltzer — known as the neutral — said the state “remained committed to improving outcomes” and “made progress in many areas during the past year.”
The settlement, she said, required all practice improvements to be completed by the end of 2021 and all outcomes to be achieved by the end of 2024.
“While performance assessed by the Neutral found that the State met or exceeded the requirement for four Settlement Agreement commitments in 2024,” the report for 2024 said, “most Practice Improvements and Outcomes have not been achieved within the required timeframe.”
One of the biggest concerns highlighted in Monday’s report is the number of Failure to Place (FTP) episodes last year. That is defined, the report said, as a child being “temporarily housed or maintained overnight at a (child welfare) office, hotel or another location that is not a licensed child welfare placement.”
The report described this increase as “significant and concerning.”
In 2024, 100 children statewide experienced 216 “failure to place” episodes, which means they didn’t have stable placements night to night. The year before, for that same category, 53 children experienced 69 episodes.
The majority of those FTP episodes — 83 percent — occurred in Region 7, the report said. That is the Wichita area.
Howard said they are aware at that increase in Region 7 and are focused on strategies to improve that.
