Foster care needs scrutiny

A troubling legislative audit of Kansas’ foster care system deserves bipartisan attention and action at the Statehouse. The defense offered last week by Kansas Department for Children and Families Secretary Phyllis Gilmore must not be the last word.

In the first of three phases of a performance report on the state’s privatized foster care system, the Legislature’s nonpartisan, independent auditors found reasons for serious concern. Among them:

▪  Background checks of people living in foster homes are spotty or too infrequent.

▪  “DCF does not always follow adequate policies to ensure the safety of children during the removal and placement process,” sometimes failing to investigate reports of alleged abuse and neglect in a timely manner.

▪  DCF doesn’t ensure that children are placed in homes with “sufficient living and sleeping space and financial resources,” in part because rules are waived on request. One home licensed for three foster children had been allowed to have seven, plus three non-foster children – 10 total, though regulations limit families to six children under age 16.

▪  Heavy caseloads are preventing caseworkers from completing the required monthly visits with foster children. The audit quotes one: “I now have a caseload of over 50. This has nearly doubled in the last six months.” Auditors also pointed to poor documentation of such visits, as well as monthly “aftercare visits” of children adopted or reintegrated with family.

▪  And “DCF continues to take a hands-off approach to monitoring contractors and perhaps focuses too much on whether federal outcomes are met and not on the specific steps needed to meet them.”

That last finding underscores the need to explore whether the system’s 1997 privatization is working – the subject of the audit’s third phase. The use of private contractors was intended to improve the child-welfare system, not reduce the state’s accountability for what happens to these vulnerable kids.

Gilmore both downplayed the auditors’ findings and assured lawmakers that DCF was addressing them.

But with the state’s budget a mess and the numbers of foster children up – having risen by 20 percent since 2008 to about 6,300 in fiscal year 2015 – lawmakers and advocates need to keep up the scrutiny of the system. Concerns in the audit about caseloads, training, turnover and more likely reflect insufficient resources as much as inadequate or ignored policies.

This story was originally published August 5, 2016 at 12:07 AM with the headline "Foster care needs scrutiny."