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Here’s what the Child Advocate in Kansas, Kerrie Lonard, says goes on in the group homes and institutions in which Kansas warehouses foster children, according to this story in The Beacon:
These facilities have drug use, violence between kids, excessive force among staff and property damage, Lonard said. There’s also lax oversight that makes it easier for children to run away.
Hard to believe that could happen considering the way the Kansas Department of Children and Families keeps an eagle eye on them – just kidding! Actually, they’re inspected once a year, and the group homes are told in advance when the inspectors are coming.
Lonard is proposing a radical solution – just kidding again. She recommends that they be inspected more often, and that the inspectors don’t let the institutions know when they’re coming.
But why would DCF even need anyone to tell them that? Why would they make it a point never to do the kind of inspection likely to turn up the most serious problems? Because DCF doesn’t dare.
DCF tears apart families at a rate double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. And when you count Kansas’ unique form of hidden foster care, the real figure may be far worse.
DCF is begging for beds, and beggars can’t be choosers. They don’t do inspections likely to turn up problems because they don’t want to see the problems.
This also is why even switching to unannounced inspections won’t do much good. You can bet the inspectors will still turn a blind eye to all but the most egregious abuse – and maybe even that. In addition, when an agency investigates abuse or miserable conditions in group homes and institutions, it is, in effect, investigating itself, since they put the children there in the first place.
It all creates huge incentives to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the casefile.
All this helps explain why the official figures agencies publish about abuse in foster care are vastly lower than what is found by independent studies.
But demanding unannounced inspections would solve a problem for one group: Kansas legislators. They then can issue chest-thumping press releases about the bold step they’ve taken to protect children, how “ensuring the safety and well-being in these settings must remain a top priority,” blah, blah, blah.
Oh, wait, one lawmaker already has said the “top priority” part – while not even committing to demanding unannounced inspections.
And did she say remain a top priority?
