Kansas’ foster care safer, but keeping kids out of the system is the better solution | Opinion
In the mid-1990s, the Kansas child welfare system was in crisis. There were excessive caseloads, a lack of safety and escalating numbers of children waiting to be adopted. After an ACLU lawsuit settlement, then-Gov. Bill Graves and legislators made child welfare their priority, increased the state’s child welfare budget and partnered with private nonprofits with expertise in child and family well-being to give kids the best care possible.
The transformation was viewed by most as a success, and we were proud to be part of it. Kansas’ network of nonprofit providers helped the state become a national leader in improving outcomes such as child safety, caring for children in families rather than group homes, kinship care, shorter time in foster care, fewer reentries, more private donations and greater innovation. Other states looked to Kansas and learned from us.
But policy and funding changes in the 2010s dealt one crushing blow after another to that success, sending Kansas backward. Funding in Kansas for mental health and foster care prevention was reduced to one of the nation’s lowest levels compared to other states. At the same time, a surge of 2,500 more children — a 50% increase — entered foster care.
In addition, Kansas’ well-intentioned 2016 juvenile justice reform, S.B. 367, pushed thousands of young people with significant behavioral health needs and violent behaviors into foster care. Imagine asking social workers and foster parents trained to care for traumatized victims to instead care for youths with violent behaviors. It is this group of young people who previously would have been served by the juvenile justice system who are experiencing placement instability. The foster care system simply wasn’t designed to serve them.
With these complex factors at play, it can be difficult to determine how our child welfare system compares to other states.
At KVC Kansas, we’ve developed a statewide scorecard that demonstrates the dramatic progress that has been achieved in foster care. For many years now, the Kansas child welfare system has far outperformed the federal safety standard for child safety. According to data in the federal Child and Family Services Review, Kansas foster care is not only safe, but it’s in fact safer than most other states’ foster care systems.
Kansas also just safely reduced the number of children in foster care to fewer than 6,000, which is the lowest level since 2014. This is due to the leadership and prevention efforts of Kansas Department for Children and Families Sec. Laura Howard and her team.
In addition, an overwhelming majority of children in Kansas foster care now live with relatives or foster families, which is proven better for children’s development and well-being than growing up in group homes. Kansas’ kinship care rate is also very high at nearly 50%. Most states in our country aspire to be like Kansas on these outcomes.
Yet there are areas where we’re collectively underperforming: placement stability, access to timely and consistent mental health services and instances of children staying in offices overnight, which should be zero. DCF and foster care providers are accountable for their results.
But the 11% of children in foster care who are having the most placement instability are often a direct result of the 2016 juvenile justice reform bill. Before the passage of this bill, Kansas did not have young people staying in offices or moving placements frequently.
Looking at data from other states, it’s clear that foster care prevention is key. Kansas still has one of the nation’s highest rates of children in foster care at 10 children per 1,000, compared to a national average of 5 per 1,000.
We must deeply intensify our state’s foster care prevention funding. While we’re thrilled to have reached a decadelong low of 5,988 children in foster care, to bring us in line with the national average, we must fund prevention strategies that safely lower that number to 3,500 or fewer.
What qualifies as foster care prevention? It is access to healthy food, stable housing, early childhood intervention, parent skill-building, behavioral health treatment and transportation security. It’s access to health care including Medicaid, mental health and substance abuse treatment. It’s early childhood programs and strong K-12 schools. And it includes child welfare interventions such as family preservation therapy, which is up to 98% effective at preventing foster care and costs 10 times less per family than foster care.
Child welfare experts across the country agree: Foster care prevention is the future and the only solution. Safely reducing by 50% the number of Kansas children in foster care would transform our state’s ability to provide the very best care to children who do need foster care for their safety. Prevention is the right thing to do for children and families.
Teresa Markowitz is president and CEO of nonprofit Case Commons and a board member of KVC Health Systems, the parent organization of KVC Kansas. She was a leader in the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, which is now the Kansas Department for Children and Families, during the 1990s. She is Executive on Loan with the Annie E. Casey Foundation. She co-authored this with B. Wayne Sims, who served as president and CEO of KVC Health Systems for 35 years and continues as board co-chair today.
