Settlement could take Kansas foster care from ‘shockingly broken’ to model for nation
Kansas foster children will no longer sleep overnight in offices or be shuttled from home to home and, for the first time, will receive mental health screening when they enter care.
Those mandates are key components of a settlement filed late Wednesday in U.S. District Court in a class action lawsuit aimed at fixing the state’s long-troubled foster care system.
One attorney for the foster kids said that if the measures are thoughtfully implemented and complied with, foster care in Kansas will go from a “shockingly broken system” to a model one for the nation.
Officials and attorneys on both sides of the lawsuit say the settlement will improve the lives of more than 7,000 children raised by the state and those who will be in its care in the future.
“It does do exactly what we hoped it would do,” said Teresa Woody, litigation director for the Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. The organization, along with four other entities, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the state’s foster children in late 2018.
“It ends the awful placement and instability that continues to exist. ... The state wanted to settle the case, they want to do better by kids than has been done in the past,” Woody said.
A judge ultimately will have to sign off on the agreement before anything is final. Once that happens, the class action lawsuit will be dismissed and the settlement put in place. New outcomes will begin to be measured as early as Nov. 1.
Ira Lustbader, litigation director at Children’s Rights and one of the main attorneys involved in the case, applauded the fact that so many people came forward to help improve conditions for foster children. He said Laura Howard, who took over as secretary of the Department for Children and families two months after the suit was filed, didn’t shy away from doing what needed to be done to make the system better for kids in her care.
“There’s a willingness to pivot and not fight a lawsuit and instead invest in making these changes that are going to help kids and bring better outcomes,” Lustbader said. “That’s a really big deal, especially with what’s going on in the world.”
The suit alleged that Kansas children in care had been treated so poorly that they’ve suffered mentally or run away from foster homes. In some cases, they have been trafficked for sex, sexually abused inside adoptive homes or in one instance reportedly raped inside a child welfare office, the suit said.
One child represented in the lawsuit had 130 placements.
Leecia Welch, of the National Center for Youth Law, said the issue was so bad in Kansas that “we couldn’t even in good conscience refer to it as a placement instability problem.”
“We decided we needed a different term,” Welch said. “We settled on extreme housing disruptions. We had many children’s attorneys telling us having clients subjected to 50 placements was essentially commonplace.”
The settlement includes improvements to be made and built-in time frames for them to be met. Many are aimed at allowing children to have a stable home while in care.
Most night-to-night placements need to end by December 2021. And short-term placements of 14 days or less must stop by December 2023.
Attorneys representing the foster children “went to great lengths not to micromanage,” said Lori Burns-Bucklew, a Kansas City attorney and child welfare law expert. “We did not set out to require them to reinvent the wheel. We’ve identified the problems, together we set goals.
“If they can change their culture as to what’s acceptable, that’s going to be the outcome most important for kids — and I think that can happen.”
Ultimately, the settlement will require that foster children have one or fewer moves during a 12-month reporting period. It also spells out long-term placement with a rate of fewer than five moves per 1,000 days in state care.
That outcome alone will improve lives of foster children, Burns-Bucklew said.
“Think about how it will affect their school, their ability to feel safe,” she said. “It’s going to reduce trauma. Some of them might actually start to feel like normal kids.”
Within 30 days of the settlement becoming final, the new outcomes will be added to the contracts of foster care management providers, a move Lustbader said is a “game changer for contract oversight.”
While most states contract out some portion of child welfare services, Kansas is one of only two fully privatized systems in the country.
The settlement requires the creation of an “independent advisory group” within six months of the order. Members would include contractors, foster parents and youth. The panel can make recommendations to the state on what could be improved.
And the state will work with an outside objective party to oversee the data collected by DCF to measure outcomes. Within the next couple of weeks, Howard said she’ll work on a contract with Judith Meltzer of the Center for the Study of Social Policy for that role.
Meltzer and her team will monitor some data on a quarterly and annual basis.
The state remains under the settlement until all outcomes are met and held for an additional 12 months.
Howard said when she became DCF secretary, ”the fact that a class action litigation had been filed wasn’t what I really wanted to walk into. But I think the process we’ve gone through to come to an agreement that’s really focused on outcomes that really mirror and complement the efforts and systemic changes we are trying to make, I think is a positive.”
Howard said she and her staff and contract providers already have been working toward many of the goals set in the settlement — especially when it comes to the number of homes children are in, mental health support and keeping kids out of care if they can be safe at home with additional services.
“It affirms the focus of the work that we are doing,” Howard said Thursday morning. “I’ve said so many times, and so has the governor, that this has been a big ship to turn. I feel proud of the progress we’ve made, but we have a ways to go. This agreement allows us to be laser focused in those areas.”
Howard was also a defendant in her capacity as the head of the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services. Lee A. Norman, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, also was named in the suit.
Lustbader sees the settlement, which he considers a “great result,” as a powerful message to other states with troubled child welfare systems.
“Invest in families so kids don’t need foster care in the first place,” he said. “And for those who do, give them stability and the help they need to heal their trauma. Give them a chance.”
Jonathan Shorman, The Star’s Topeka correspondent, contributed to this report.
This story was originally published July 9, 2020 at 1:41 PM with the headline "Settlement could take Kansas foster care from ‘shockingly broken’ to model for nation."
