Foster care is improving in Sedgwick County and Kansas, but still needs community help | Opinion

The foster care system is a mess, and it’s a mess that sometimes kills.

It seems like every other week we read another report of misplaced, injured, or dead kids.

We scream at the Kansas Department for Children and Families or its contractors since the bad outcomes happened while the kids were in their care.

Before you blame DCF consider a sobering reality. Studies show that the ideal caseload for a foster care case worker is 15. Kansas averages more than 40.

When I was a juvenile court judge, I had some case workers with more than 80!

It is impossible to timely respond to foster family needs with such a caseload. Worker stress and anxiety is difficult to imagine.

In my time in private law practice I had dozens of clients at any given time, with just one or two high maintenance, demanding clients.

For social workers in the foster care system, they have dozens of cases with demanding parents, grandparents, judges, foster parents, etc., on every case, and everyone is screaming at them demanding things often incompatible with what others want.

Moreover, a failure to respond to one email or phone message among dozens, if not hundreds, can have catastrophic, even deadly, consequences.

Stressed out case workers take jobs at corporations as employee assistance program counselors, private and public school counselors, and a myriad other jobs that give them time to breathe.

In case it crossed your mind, DCF’s contractors are always recruiting new case workers, but they’re mostly replacing the ones who leave, and treading water with the same spirit-crushing caseloads after the new hires as before.

Depressed yet? Sadly, there’s more bad news.

Bouncing from house to house

With each new administration comes new ideas to fix the system, yet, the measurable statistics haven’t changed much over the past decade or so.

In Sedgwick County, there are 1,366 children in foster care, with more than 300 placed outside the county since we don’t have enough local foster families to care for them.

Their relationships with family and friends are severed, which is a traumatizing event with lifelong consequences.

Another awful outcome of an insufficient number of families is an inability to place kids with families equipped for their individualized needs. This leads to disruptions.

Kansas averages more than seven placements over a 1,000-day case length. This means kids removed from their families are removed from six foster homes before finding stability. Worse, kids will be disrupted many more times if their cases extend beyond 1,000 days.

Each move tells these kids they’re unloved and unwanted, traumatizing them more and making it less likely they will graduate high school, develop useful skills to be a productive adult, and stay out of the criminal justice system.

Indeed, more than 70% of those in five or more homes will be involved in the criminal justice system within two years of aging out of the system when they turn 18.

Also, judges have the statutory authority to appoint Court Appointed Special Advocate citizen volunteers to monitor cases to make sure case workers and others involved in a case plan comply with court orders and that the kids are properly cared for.

Sadly, with 1,366 Sedgwick County kids in foster care, we only have enough CASAs for just under 80!

Many foster care advocates blame DCF and its last contractor, Saint Francis Ministries, for the mess.

But the blame doesn’t fall solely on DCF’s or even SFM’s shoulders. We don’t have enough foster families or CASA volunteers, which is our fault.

If you doubt, consider the numbers. Sedgwick County has a population of 525,000. We have fewer than 700 local non-kinship foster families, and just a few dozen CASA volunteers for 1,366 kids. Why?

A big reason is that families and kids get different levels of service depending on their agency. If a family needs services to help their foster kid and the child has severe behavior issues, a failure of their agency to provide such services will lead to a disruption of the placement and a move to another foster home — which traumatizes the child further and leads to more behavior issues and disruptions.

It’s also likely that the traumatized foster family will drop out of the system.

The result is that while foster-care agencies are vigorously recruiting and training new families, they are replacing ones that quit due to the lack of support and not adding to the total foster family number.

The pathway to improvement

To give skeptics the benefit of the doubt, DCF has finally responded to your demands. It replaced Saint Francis Ministries with Ember Hope.

So, we have a foster care reset in Sedgwick County. But there’s more going on than just this change.

Finally, after I and others beat the drum for several years, well-funded philanthropists, DCF, the Kansas Legislature and Gov. Laura Kelly have listened to our demands for consistent care regardless of agency and have gotten behind local nonprofits, churches, and others in a massive push for a multi-faceted continuum of care in Sedgwick County.

Stand Together, a non-profit funded by Charles Koch and Koch Industries, determined to make its home town, Wichita, the model city for how to care for vulnerable children and families by organizing stakeholder meetings to bring the community together.

The first result of this effort is the creation of a web site, www.careforeveryfamily.com, a resource to help churches and pastors tap into the full range of service providers who support foster families and children. Churches have always been the No. 1 community resource for foster care, and they now have a place to go when they need help.

With the support of DCF and Stand Together, Gathered Inc, www.gatheredstrong.com, will be gathering together all local organizations that support vulnerable children and families, both those in foster care and others struggling to get by, to connect families to organizations equipped to address their specific needs such as food, shelter, counseling, drug treatment, or whatever.

Thus, there’s more going on than just a new agency scooping water out of the Titanic.

For this foster care reset, we have an entire community coming together to care for vulnerable children and families. The only way for this reset to work is if we all work together.

If you’ve been burned before as a foster parent or CASA, please consider engaging again. Things are changing for the better. You will get the support you need to care for kids. Care For Every Family can help your church find ways to help.

Check out the above websites to see what you can do.

Finally, there’s hope, but it will take all of us to make a real, lasting difference.

This story was originally published July 29, 2024 at 10:16 AM.