Addressing the Foster Care Crisis in Kansas: Recommendations from the Strengthen Families Rebuild Hope Coalition

Executive Summary

Problems in Kansas foster care:

1. Too many Kansas children are in the foster care system, and they are entering at racially disproportionate rates. Though there is an upward trend nationally in the number of children in foster care since 2012, the increase in Kansas is significantly greater than in the rest of the country. A disproportionate number of the children entering foster care are African American. The number of reports, investigations, and family removals are increasing, while the number of families referred to preventative services are decreasing. Families often lack access to the supports needed to keep children safely in their home.
2. Kansas children are staying in foster care for too long, and they often experience dangerously high instability in their placements. The average length of stay in foster care is increasing in Kansas. Caseworkers are overwhelmed. Children are increasingly more likely to be placed in group residential homes, rather than family-like settings. Far too many of these children experience dangerous instability. They are repeatedly moved around, bounced from placement to placement and school to school.
3. It is too difficult for Kansas children in foster care to find permanency. Too few children are finding permanent families in a timely manner. They are frequently re-entering the system. Kansas is failing to meet performance standards in finding permanent solutions. Because of the complexity and depth of the problems, no single solution is likely to fix this crisis by itself. Instead, multiple issues need to be addressed on multiple fronts. The Strengthen Families Rebuild Hope (SFRH) coalition has identified three key areas of recommendations for improving the foster care system.

Recommendations:

1. Support Kansas families by ensuring they have the resources necessary to take care of their children and avoid contact with the foster care system. Reductions in safety net programs have made this more difficult for Kansas families. Independent research strongly suggests that improving access to supports like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF - also known as cash assistance), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP - also known as food assistance), Child Care Assistance, and Medicaid would reduce the number of children being removed from their homes.
2. Once children do become known to the Kansas Department for Children and Families (DCF) through reports and investigations, Kansas needs to focus on more targeted prevention and early interventions. Kansas should make it a priority to fully implement the provisions of the new federal Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA). The targeted prevention services that already exist, such as Family Preservation Services, should be better funded and used more often. Racial disparities in the removal of children from their homes urgently need to be addressed.
3. Finally, Kansas needs to improve conditions for youth in foster care. Placement stability for children in the foster care system must be a priority. There must be adequate numbers and quality of placements to ensure every child, especially those with high needs, has the support and stability they are entitled to. Foster families and birth families need more support, and the systems they are expected to navigate need to be streamlined and easier to access. There must be more support for the workers who find themselves saddled with excessive caseloads. There must be more support for children who age out of the foster care system.

Kansas must act now to fix the system and start to heal the thousands of children and families who have been traumatized by Kansas’s foster care crisis.