Lawsuit: Kansas Department For Children and Families

“Attorneys representing foster children in Kansas have filed a motion to amend their ongoing class-action lawsuit, insisting even more vulnerable kids in the state are being harmed.

Since the suit was filed in November, children still bounce from placement to placement and are subjected to “night-to-night” stays, only compounding the instability they feel, according to court records filed late Friday. Children in state custody also continue to be deprived of the mental health treatment they need, attorneys said.

“We’re very concerned that the same problems continue,” said Teresa Woody, litigation director for Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, one of those that filed the class-action lawsuit in November. “There are a lot of plans, but so far, it’s not actually getting better for these kids.”

As part of the request to amend the lawsuit, attorneys added four new children. When attorneys initially filed the suit nine months ago, they represented 10 children in state care. Two of those kids aren’t in the custody of the Kansas Department for Children and Families anymore, so they are no longer part of the litigation. The suit now includes 12 children.

“The named plaintiff children in this action have been moved anywhere from 10 to over 100 times while in DCF custody,” the motion said. “Much of that churning has occurred in just the past one to two years.”

DCF Secretary Laura Howard said the department typically does not comment on pending litigation.

“However, the agency is committed to improving outcomes including strengthening families, reducing the length of stay in foster care, implementing evidence-based practices to engage families and placement stability,” Howard said in an email statement Tuesday.

She pointed to other initiatives the agency has worked on, including the implementation of the Family First Prevention Act and team decision making.

“DCF believes these improvements can endure at a systemic level,” Howard said. “And we are confident that these changes put the agency on a trajectory toward a stronger system for Kansas children and families.”

A 7-year-old boy, known as E.B., is one of the new plaintiffs. He’s been moved 35 times since April 2018 and was “often forced to spend his days in the KVC contract agency offices between night-to-night placements.”

One 17-year-old girl, known as R.R., has been in more than 100 placements in nearly three years, including nights in a KVC office, the motion said.

Another child, 12 years old, is referred to as M.A. and has been in foster care for six years. Since January 2017, the motion said, he’s been moved “at least 62 times,” including 16 placements in the past five months.

“Though diagnosed with ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, disruptive mood regulation disorder and anxiety, M.A. has not received adequate or consistent mental health services while in care,” according to a news release describing Friday’s filing.

The new motion, which is unopposed, went on to say that the lack of stability and needed mental health treatment has disrupted M.A.’s education. He’s currently reading at a third grade level, the motion said.

“What I think would shock most people is the thought of having numerous children of a variety of ages sitting around in an office all day and not actually devising some kind of plan to do something else,” said Lori Burns-Bucklew, a Kansas City attorney and accredited child welfare law specialist, who joined Kansas Appleseed, the National Center for Youth Law, and Children’s Rights in filing the suit. “Like drive them six blocks down the road to a school.”

The class-action suit names as defendants Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly; Howard; Lee A. Norman, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment; and Howard in her capacity as Secretary of the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services.

In their April 29 response to the original complaint, the defendants denied that they had caused injury to any of the plaintiffs.

“Plaintiffs have suffered no actual injury as a result of the actions or inactions of Defendants,” the document said. It added that “Plaintiffs’ own conduct was a contributing cause of injury alleged by Plaintiffs.”

“Any harm to Plaintiffs is a result of negligent conduct of someone other than Defendants,” the response said, “and the negligent conduct of Plaintiffs or someone other than Defendants proximately caused and contributed to Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries or damages.”

The defendants denied violating the constitutional rights of any of the plaintiffs.

“Acts of mere negligence, the exercise of what may appear in hindsight to have been mistaken or poor judgment under the circumstances, a delay in the provision of healthcare, and/or differences in the appropriate provision of healthcare does not establish a violation of any rights or privileges secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States,” the document said.

In their response, the defendants admitted that each plaintiff had been moved at least eight times and that plaintiff R.M. had been moved more than 100 times. But they denied “that the movements of the named plaintiffs are typical of children in the foster care system generally” and that the agency engaged in the practice of “churning,” or moving children from placement to placement.

The defendants said that if the plaintiffs’ lawsuit is successful, it would harm DCF financially and cause major changes in the way it runs its programs. They asked for the court to dismiss the lawsuit and require the plaintiffs to pay their costs and “reasonable attorney’s fees” associated with the case.

The goal of the litigation isn’t to receive money, but to fix the system for the children described in the suit and others that come after them, attorneys who filed the suit have said.

“In a repetitive, destabilizing cycle, children are regularly forced to sleep for a night or several nights anywhere a bed, couch, office conference room, shelter or hospital can be found,” the motion said. “For days, weeks, or even months at a time, they spend their nights in these short-term placements and their days in agency offices waiting to find out where they will sleep next, only to repeat the same cycle again.”

The Star requested from DCF the number of children who have slept in offices across the state since February. According to the agency, dozens of children have slept in offices from March through July. In May alone, 39 children stayed overnight in an office. In July, 33 did. That has dropped to nine children in August.

The class-action suit asks, among other things, that children no longer be put in short-term and night-to-night placements, and that they begin receiving initial trauma-related screening. It also is requesting that the defendants create and implement trauma-informed practices to help children heal, as well as ensure children have access to the mental health treatment they need.

“This is a crisis,” Burns-Bucklew said. “I don’t see the urgency and persistence that I believe this problem deserves.”

For nearly three years, Kansas’ child welfare system has been under immense fire. Howard, the current secretary of DCF, is the third leader in that time.

And when Kelly became governor, advocates and lawmakers across the state had high hopes that change would come quickly. They say that hasn’t happened.

Before she was elected to lead the state, Kelly had been a vocal member of a legislative task force formed to come up with ways to improve the child welfare system. The system had weathered bad headlines about child deaths, mismanagement inside the agency and a lack of beds and foster homes for the growing number of kids in care.

The task force reconvened in July. Kelly told those gathered that “we made significant progress” but that there was still a lot left to do.

Howard, who also spoke to the group, cautioned that changing the child welfare system will take time.

“This really is going to be a marathon,” Howard said. “The system has so many challenges and we can’t fix everything overnight.””

‘This is a crisis’: Attorneys for Kansas foster children insist kids are still harmed
[Kansas City 9/3/19 by Laura Bauer, Judy L. Thomas, and Jonathan Shorman]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Update: “On Sat., Nov. 9, two dozen citizens of Topeka, KS rallied on the steps of their statehouse for better laws for the safety of children in the foster care system.

Something needed to be done. In November of last year, a lawsuit was filed by local advocates and two children’s rights groups on behalf of 10 children in the foster care system against the Kansas Department of Children and Families. The lawsuit accused the Kansas DCF of being responsible for children running away, being neglected, sexually abused in homes, moving homes 30 to 100 times and even housing children in contractors’ offices. One of these children in the foster care system was a 13-year-old girl who was raped in a child welfare office, where she stayed for the night as the system had no home for her.

The foster care system in the United States is extremely flawed, and laws must be put in place to eliminate the profit motive factor in the lives of foster children. Children are being taken away from impoverished families, disproportionately impacting families of color, where the terms “neglect” and “poverty” are confused. Children are taken from homes with guardians doing everything they can to keep them safe, to homes where foster parents are known to abuse or rape children or group homes where children are neglected.

Unfortunately, the over 7,500 children in the foster care system in Kansas are not the only ones with this experience. The root of the problem, however, begins with children being removed from their families. The stories are horrifying.

In 2016, Iowa Department of Human Services took two 10-month-old boys from their parents with no paperwork, court orders or warrants to remove the children from their home. DHS illegally terminated the parental rights, giving the reason of “possible future abuse.” There had been no prior reported instances of abuse in that particular household, and the officers gave no reason for entering the household. In another household, three girls were taken from their grandmother’s home, to be placed in a home that was already reported for abusing a teenage girl.

Why is this important? Unlike many other human rights issues in the United States, this one is not as public. On the news, you very rarely see stories like the ones mentioned earlier. For this reason, students like us who have been privileged enough to be able to attend an institution like Dartmouth should begin to bring light to this issue. Not only could we go on to jobs in public policy and make real changes to the system, but we can start a very necessary nationwide conversation about the foster care system.

Under the current laws, when state agencies enter people’s homes to take children away, they must either have a warrant or consent from the parents or homeowners. This happens very rarely. When families are getting paid to keep foster children in their home, there is no incentive for the foster parents to do anything to help the children find a more permanent home.

Effective solutions to the foster care system are not going to come from the state level. Currently, each state has a Child Protective Services or equivalent department such as DHS or DCF, which are required to abide by state and federal laws. However, many of them don’t. When claims are made, the proper protocol is for these agencies to get consent to investigate your home and speak to your child. Many of these agencies enter people’s homes with no consent and manipulate families into signing papers allowing the agencies to take their children with little to no reason.

Many state CPS/DCS services are privatized, allowing such organizations to operate with an excessive profitable interest. One issue with privatized health care is the potential incentive to receive payments from the government for the months that foster children are under their care. For example, in Kansas, the Development of Children and Families have two nonprofit organizations serving as contractors. One writer, Jamie Schwandt, points out that these payments to these two private contractors stop when the child is adopted, returned to their biological families or receives permanent custodianship. With payments on the line, foster families have less incentive to help children leave their home. In addition to this, although the contractors Saint Francis Community Services and KVC Behavioral Healthcare, are nonprofit organizations, there is still pressure to make money, and they make money from the state per child in the foster care system. When it comes to children’s lives and futures, money should never be an incentive to decrease opportunities or care.

Currently, taxpayers are paying $22 billion a year on the foster care system. Some might say that families should be grateful for a foster care system to exist in America and leave it at that. However, while $22 billion is going into the foster care system, nobody seems to think the system needs any more help than that.

These children are American citizens who are worthy of everything it means to be one. To throw money at this problem and call it fixed is proof that our government doesn’t care about the children in the foster care system. What really needs to be done is to put laws in place to eliminate the privatized money-making factor in the foster care system and place the focus back on the children in need. ”

Tung: Foster Children, in Danger, and Helpless
[The Dartmouth 11/19/19 by Gemma Tung]