Kansas failures put young foster kids at risk, attorneys say. What’s being done?
Attorneys representing Kansas foster care children in a years-long court settlement say new data has them fearing the troubled state system is only getting worse for some kids.
For years, they say state leaders have insisted that most children who end up sleeping in child welfare offices or being shuffled from placement to placement are teenagers. Older kids with behavioral problems who are hard to place.
But in the “last couple of months,” an “alarming number” of young children — from ages 2 to 10 — have ended up in these night-to-night and temporary placements, said Teresa Woody, litigation director of Kansas Appleseed, one of four entities that filed the class action lawsuit seven years ago.
“I was stunned. I was appalled,” said Woody, referring to the moment when she realized kids so young were in unstable placements. “Kids need consistency. They need schedules. They need playtime. They need affection. I think they need all of those things to develop appropriately, and if they’re being passed around, they’re not forming bonds with anybody. … I can’t even imagine the damage being done to those children.”
This new concern comes after a report released this week revealed that Kansas failed in 2024 to meet standards of the court settlement stemming from a 2018 class action lawsuit.
Since a judge approved the settlement in early 2021, the state has met 8 of 14 standards, according to the report by the Center for the Study of Social Policy and its president, Judith Meltzer, who is referred to as the neutral.
Now the worry is, as the state pushes to improve and meet more standards to ultimately get out from under court oversight, new issues are surfacing. That is especially true, attorneys and advocates say, when it comes to night-to-night placements and young children they are failing to place in stable housing.
“What I keep thinking of is a kindergartner who doesn’t know whose bed she’s going to sleep in at night, where she’s going to lay her head,” said Lori Burns-Bucklew, a Kansas City attorney who is among those who filed the lawsuit. “I can’t even wrap my head around it.”
Laura Howard, secretary of the Kansas Department for Children and Families, said she’s seen improvements across the state in the past year and is happy with the progress. And in 2025, she said she’s already seen improvements in some regions.
But, she said, there are struggles in the Wichita area — Region 7 — that are being addressed.
And that includes, Howard said, the night-to-night stays and temporary placements. In some of those cases, she said, the young children involved are part of a sibling group that the contractor wanted to keep together. But, she acknowledged, that doesn’t account for all the children.
“We really put some strategic plans in place, and we’re kind of monitoring those,” Howard said. “We have some goals for October, we have some goals for December, and some practices that we all share some concerns about.”
In a news release about Monday’s report, DCF confirmed it has “participated in mediation with the neutral and plaintiff,” regarding the settlement. Details of mediation are confidential, the release said.
“We regularly meet with the parties to share data, answer questions and receive feedback,” Howard said. “These regular meetings have been beneficial to us, and we hope to the plaintiffs as well.”
‘Need to really bear down’
After failing to meet standards for a fourth year in a row, the question looms:
Where does Kansas child welfare go from here? What does the agency and its contractors need to do to ensure the system is safe and stable for all children in state care?
“They just need to really bear down,” Burns-Bucklew said. “And I think if they bear down in the geographic areas that are so far behind, I think that those areas should be able to learn from the relative success in the other geographic areas.
“And I think that will make a real difference.”
Local advocates and two national children’s rights organizations filed the suit in November 2018, alleging 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.
Foster care contractors 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.
Numbers from last year also revealed that 100 children statewide experienced 216 “Failure to Place” episodes. 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 year before, for that same category, 53 children experienced 69 episodes.
Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director of Children’s Rights, which was part of the class action lawsuit, said those “Failure to Place” numbers for 2024 are “beyond disappointing.”
“I mean, it’s beyond a data point,” Welch said. “One of the primary reasons the case was filed to begin with was that children did not have places to live. So when we see that number, I’ll just say skyrocketing, it is extremely concerning.”
The majority of those Failure to Place episodes — 83 percent — occurred in the Wichita area, the report said.
That area, Woody said, has “been a problem for a long, long time.”
“I really hope to see DCF being more involved with those contractors who are failing and really trying to figure out what’s going on there,” Woody said.
She said Kansas’ child welfare agency should take advantage of the knowledge the Center for the Study of Social Policy has and its experience in other areas in the country to help struggling contractors in Kansas.
“I know that CSSP has actually been meeting with some of those contractors more directly,” Woody said. “So we’re hopeful that that may be helpful.”
Another key thing, she said, is communities in the areas where foster children are still being failed need to realize it’s not just DCF and the contractors that can solve these problems. Leaders and organizations in those areas should get involved and try to improve issues from “within the community as well,” Woody said.
“If I lived in Wichita and I saw this report,” Woody said, “I would feel terrible, because kids in my community are not getting what they need.”
Improvement needed in Region 7
On July 1, 2024, EmberHope replaced Saint Francis Ministries as the foster care contractor over Sedgwick County, which is Region 7 for DCF.
“Transitions are a challenge,” said Howard, DCF’s secretary. “But I would not attribute the numbers fully to transition. There are some particular challenges that are being faced in Sedgwick County.”
The overall need for foster care in Kansas has decreased by 26 percent since 2019, DCF said. But in Sedgwick County, the need for foster care has increased over the past five years.
In its news release earlier this week, DCF said one in four youth in the Kansas foster care system are from Sedgwick County.
“So while other areas have really seen the impact of some of our preventative services,” Howard said, “we’ve not seen that in terms of the number of youth coming down in that county.”
The Wichita area is also seeing more older youth enter care.
“And I can’t sit here and tell you exactly why that is,” she said.
Howard said she’s confident that strategies are in place to make positive change in Wichita. She pointed to the focus on developing more therapeutic foster homes and EmberHope’s push to provide therapeutic day services for young people with some high needs.
“One of the things we’re kind of excited about is we’re adding some services for families who are serving youth in care that might normally have been preventative services,” Howard said.
Brenda Watkins, president of EmberHope Connections, which oversees the Sedgwick County foster care contract, said since July 2024, her agency has supported family reunifications, sibling visits and having children remain in their same school.
“We have invested our own dollars in building capacity in Sedgwick County by opening a Youth Residential Center (YRC2) in Goddard,” Watkins said in an email to The Star. “We have increased our foster home capacity and have begun building Therapeutic Family Foster Home capacity for youth with exceptional needs.
“We remain hyper focused on recruiting new foster families, strengthening supports for current foster parents and kinship families and working with community partners to expand access to residential and mental health resources.”
Watkins also pointed to a partnership with the state on two concurrent pilot projects “that will focus on fewer children entering care and targeting 60 children who can exit care safely with intensive evidenced-based practice support.”
“Additionally, we are working on an internal pilot to exit children more efficiently from care,” Watkins said. “We remain solution focused and innovative to meet the placement challenges in Sedgwick County. The large majority of children in foster care are in a long-term placement.”
Child advocates and attorneys say while Region 7 is struggling to meet some settlement benchmarks, the state is seeing improvements in several regions.
“So what that says to me is that it is possible to do this,” Welch said. “It may not be easy all the time. It may require some difficult decisions and some planning and some more focused resources.
“But it’s not impossible. We’re basically just asking them to find foster homes for children in foster care.”
This story was originally published September 26, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
