Kansas agreed foster kids shouldn’t sleep in offices. But 4 years later, they are

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Four years ago, Kansas’ child welfare agency agreed in a court settlement that state contractors would no longer have foster kids sleep in offices overnight.

But information obtained by The Star shows that the agency hasn’t upheld that vow.

In fact, three out of the four contractors in the last year had children sleep in offices on multiple occasions. And one of those three — Saint Francis Ministries, headquartered in Salina — had kids log 88 nights in April and May alone.

“That’s depressing information,” said Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director of Children’s Rights, one of four entities that filed the class action lawsuit six years ago. “We’re incredibly disappointed that we had that many children spending the night in offices this many years after the case was filed. … We shouldn’t be doing this. They committed to stopping this completely.”

Information from the Kansas Department for Children and Families shows that in total, foster children spent 136 nights sleeping in offices from July 2023 through May of this year. Cases managed by Saint Francis made up 80 percent of those stays (109 nights), which the state refers to as “failure to place.”

When children are kept overnight in a child welfare office, they sleep on a cot or couch or other accommodations and are given basic hygiene items if they don’t have them, DCF has said. Staff members stay in the office overnight with them.

These new numbers reveal that Kansas is not living up to its settlement pledge that foster children will have stable placements across the Sunflower State. And, because of that, DCF continues to fall short of meeting all standards agreed upon four years ago and accepted by the court in January 2021.

Denny Marlin, a Saint Francis spokesperson, said that having youth sleeping in offices is “unacceptable” and his agency continues to work with system partners to “grow the capacity and capability of placements.”

“We remain dedicated to finding solutions that lead to placement stability,” Marlin said. “ … Our unwavering dedication is the pursuit of solutions that result in stable and secure placements for the children we serve.”

Erin La Row, DCF’s deputy director of media relations, said that all contractors are working to provide stability for foster children.

“DCF and its case management partners (CMPs) are committed to avoiding all incidences of youth staying in child welfare offices, hotel rooms, and other unlicensed locations,” La Row said. “Statewide, in state fiscal year 2024, the number of youth placed in family-like settings has remained over 91%.”

It’s the number of nights when contractors fail to find a place for youth in state care that concerns lawmakers, advocates and attorneys fighting on behalf of those children.

As of early June, 72 youth under the age of 17 and four young people over 18 experienced at least one failure to place, DCF said. In total, 27 foster children experienced more than one episode of failure to place. No youth has experienced more than four consecutive nights of failure to place during fiscal year 2024.

Cornerstones of Care is the only foster care contractor in fiscal year 2024 that didn’t have any children sleep overnight in a child welfare office, DCF information showed. As of early June, TFI Family Services experienced just two nightly stays in the past year and children in the care of KVC Behaviorial HealthCare — also known as KVC Kansas — spent 25 nights in offices.

When kids are sleeping in offices they’re not getting “anything they need,” said Teresa Woody, litigation director of Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit serving excluded Kansans, that worked with Children’s Rights and others to file the class action lawsuit that led to the settlement.

“It’s the instability, it’s never having a place where you feel safe, never having a place where you feel like you’re getting consistency,” Woody said. “We’re very concerned that this particular commitment in the settlement has not yet been resolved. That means that they aren’t complying with the terms of the settlement.”

A rough transition period?

Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a Wichita Democrat who is a member of the Joint Committee on Child Welfare Oversight, said she wasn’t aware that some children were still not in stable foster homes and sleeping in offices.

“I thought the numbers had gone down,” Faust-Goudeau said. “We don’t want that and that’s something that I thought we had addressed.

“I don’t know what has happened that we’re back to that point again.”

Part of the blame, some say, may lie in the transition Kansas is in as one contractor is added to the mix. As of Monday, when the new child welfare contracts went into effect, there are now five contractors handling foster care in Kansas.

EmberHope will take over foster care in Sedgwick County which used to be handled by Saint Francis.

During the past few months, there have been changes in staffing and focus on certain logistics to make the shift.

“I do know that this transition from Saint Francis to the new contractor has created a lot of the problem, a big majority of the problem,” Welch said. “And I can only hope that it’s one of those situations where it gets worse before it gets better. But you know, really, only time is going to tell on that one.

“And I do hope that there are a lot of lessons learned on the part of the agency with regard to how this transition has been truly harmful to so many young people.”

In April, foster children in Saint Francis’ care spent 49 nights in child welfare offices and 39 nights in May, according to information The Star obtained.

“Unfortunately, we are often faced with an overwhelmed system that frequently lacks options for high-acuity teens,” Marlin said, referring to the difficulty his agency can have. “Often, providers are unwilling to take high-acuity youth, leaving limited alternatives.”

Kansas Appleseed has heard in recent years that workers across all contractors can get exhausted “staying in these offices with these kids, especially with higher need kids,” Woody said. Those kids should be in a place with more wraparound services, she said.

“And they’re not getting those services if they’re sitting in an office,” she said.

To address the most recent increase in office stays, La Row said, Saint Francis gathered a team of agency leaders to address barriers affecting the youth impacted.

“The placement roundtable discussions have provided an open forum for youth to meet with senior SFM leaders along with their case teams,” La Row said. “These teams have been successful in finding placements for youth either in relative, non-related kin or foster home placements.”

This team will remain in place throughout the transition of the case management from Saint Francis to EmberHope in Sedgwick County, she said.

At this point, two groups of kids are ending up in offices overnight, advocates say. One group consists of older kids with high needs.

“Teenagers who are basically in their early to the late teens who have significant issues, nonverbal autism, things like this, and they’re being sort of warehoused in these offices instead of getting any kind of real treatment,” Woody said. The other group contains children who “do not want to be placed … and are refusing placements,” she said.

“One of the reasons that some of these kids are refusing placements, is they don’t want to trust anybody,” Woody said. “The placements they have gone to have been bad. Things have happened, and so they don’t trust anyone.”

‘Calling it something different’

These two groups of children who some contractors are struggling to place are the same youth that the class action lawsuit from 2018 aimed to help.

The suit alleged that some hard-to-place children had been treated so poorly that they had suffered mentally or had run away from foster homes. In some cases, the 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 intensity of the foster care placement problem in Kansas was so extreme we couldn’t in good conscience refer to it as ‘placement instability,’” Welch said. “Instead, we decided on the term ‘extreme housing disruption,’ because how else do you describe a young person who is subjected to 130 placement moves while in foster care?

“We had children’s attorneys telling us that having their clients subjected to 50 moves was commonplace.”

The goal of the lawsuit 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.

As part of the settlement, which a judge approved in 2021, the state will need to meet 14 standards before it is released from court oversight.

Last August, an independent monitor — known as a neutral — found that the state had still not met six benchmarks. It had met four and two were in progress. An additional two could not be determined because of “data issues.”

Another progress report is expected as early as next month.

One thing lawyers and advocates say they will be paying close attention to in that report, in addition to the office stays, is the number of night-to-night placements. And whether another issue, which they see as yet one more instance where contractors are failing to find stable homes for youth, is addressed.

“One of the things we’ve also discovered is that kids are being held in offices during the day, and then transported at night to sleep in a group home or group setting,” said Mike Fonkert, deputy director of Kansas Appleseed. “And then brought back (to the office) the next day. … This was not on our radar.”

Added Woody: “The basic issue is they’re still failing to place these kids. They’re failing to place them, and they’re calling it something different.”

Nearly 3 ½ years after a judge approved the settlement, attorneys who filed the initial class action lawsuit say they hope the upcoming report shows some progress. And they hope the state continues to focus energy and resources on ending office stays and improving stability for kids.

Just like they said DCF vowed to do.

“Despite these promises — four years after the settlement was inked — we still have children in offices and bouncing all over the state in night-to-night placements,” Welch said. “To say the situation is heart-breaking doesn’t do it justice.

“Children are being robbed of their childhood by this system.”

The Star’s Jenna Barackman contributed reporting