In Kansas, an agency that institutionalized a six-year-old is looking for a bailout

Stock photo from Pixabay

Add Kansas to the list of states where private foster care agencies are looking for a bailout to cover high insurance costs. So far, California has caved, New York has resisted, and it looks like Illinois is going to study the matter. 

Insurance premiums are skyrocketing because of laws making it easier for victims of horrific abuse in foster care and institutions to sue. Those lawsuits are what insurance companies needed to notice something a lot of us have been saying for decades: Though foster care is portrayed as a safe haven for children, it’s rarely a haven – and often it’s not safe. 

So now agencies are running to government seeking either near-immunity from lawsuits, taxpayer bailouts or both. 

The real solution is to curb needless removal of children. That way, group homes and institutions no longer will be needed, and for the few children who really need to be taken from their parents, safe, loving family foster homes will be available. 

In few places is this more apparent than Kansas. When you count only the removals of children to which the state Department of Children and Families admits to taking, Kansas tears apart families at a rate more than double the national average. Add in Kansas’ own special form of hidden foster care, so-called police protective custody placements, and it’s probably closer to triple. 

                                        Nat. Avg.                 KS official      Estimate: KS+ "police                                                                                                                      protective custody"

Enter Brenda Watkins, president of EmberHope Connections, the latest subcontractor handling foster care for the Wichita region, telling the Kansas Legislature her agency needs a bailout – even as she admits to “pandemonium” in her own agency. 

As a story in the Kansas Reflector explains: 

She described “pandemonium,” staff and child injuries and security troubles. One security company fired EmberHope, and off-duty Wichita Police Department officers now help in place of private security guards. 

The issue arose in connection with the Wichita region’s dismal record for stashing children in makeshift night-to-night placements, such as offices. It happens across Kansas hundreds of times. And in 2024, the Wichita region, with roughly 27% of the state’s population, had 83% of such incidents.

Which brings us to the matter of institutionalizing six-year-olds. From the story: 

One 6-year-old boy spent 48 nights in an EmberHope office and 40 nights in a hospital in a three-month span. … 

The boy, who was eventually diagnosed with a neurological condition, has been living in a residential psychiatric treatment facility and is expected to soon be discharged into a therapeutic foster home, Watkins said. 

So was this child actually abused? Neglected? Abandoned? How exactly did a neurological condition call for any form of foster care, much less what this six-year-old is being forced to endure. 

Perhaps most disturbing is how Watkins spins this as some kind of success.  Now, at last, she says, 

“He has been wrapped around with community services and supports to meet his needs,” Watkins said. 

Yes, private agencies can pervert any term to suit their interests. No, warehousing a six-year-old in an agency office, a hospital, and a residential treatment center and then providing a supportive home is the antithesis of Wraparound. For the benefit of anyone who may be confused, here’s a brief video refresher course in what Wraparound really means: 

There are more details here. 

Of course, Watkins blamed a shortage of placements. But neither she nor anyone else explains why the so-called “shortage” apparently is even worse in Wichita than the rest of the state. 

One place to look might be back at those police protective custody placements.  When it comes to officially acknowledged foster care placements, the Wichita region does not appear to be out of line with the rest of the state in its rate-of-removal – it’s horrible everywhere. 

But when it comes to those off-the-books placements, Wichita is far worse. We don’t know why, but I can suggest one place to look. 

In Kansas child welfare, caseworkers come and go, private contractors come and go, commissioners come and go, even agency names come and go (DCF used to be SRS - the Department of Social and Rehabilitative Services). But for decades, there has been one constant: Ron Paschal, the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). 

Based on what I am sure is a sincere belief he is protecting children, there is no stronger advocate for a take-the-child-and-run approach to “child welfare” – and no stronger defender of police protective custody placements – than Paschal. Seventeen years ago, his office was accused of bullying caseworkers into including things in sworn affidavits that the workers didn't actually believe. Paschal’s staff also was accused of cussing at, screaming at, yelling at and threatening the caseworkers. 

The accusations came from none other than the head of SRS at the time – Don Jordan. Paschal strongly denied the accusations and, ultimately, so did Jordan. When Jordan found out his comments had been taped and would be made public, he called Paschal and apologized. He didn’t mean it, he said; he was merely “pandering” to the family advocates with whom he was meeting. (Details on all this are in the report on Kansas child welfare that we released at the time.) 

But there is no doubt that Paschal has spent decades pushing a take-the-child-and-run agenda and opposing any attempt to curb it. 

So he, too, really should watch the video above. 

And then he and Watkins should read that new study from Sweden -- the one finding that, by age 20, foster children were more than four times more likely to have died than those alleged to have been comparably-maltreated but left in their homes. So no, the horrifying finding is not because the foster youth were in worse shape to begin with. 

The major cause for all those foster child deaths: Suicide. 

So after reading the study, I hope that Paschal will reconsider his approach. And I hope Watkins, whose agency is not responsible for the initial act of removing children, will speak out about those who are responsible and are taking too many needlessly. 

I also hope Watkins will move heaven and earth to wrap real help around that six-year-old for a long, long time. Because it sure sounds like he’s going to need it.

NCCPR in the Kansas Reflector: Yes, there’s a way to make child abuse horrors less common in Kansas — but it’s not what you think

 A child dies a gruesome death. The child was “known to the system.” In fact, the case file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. That leaves everyone asking: “How could it have happened?” 

The answer is counterintuitive. 

Tragedies like the death of Zoey Felix, who was killed after slipping through the cracks, happen in every state. But they are more likely to happen in Kansas. That’s because Kansas has embraced an approach to child welfare that can be boiled down to: Take the child and run. Kansas tears apart so many families needlessly that workers have less time to find those very few children — like Zoey — who really do need to be taken. … 

Read the full column in the Kansas Reflector

Willful blindness at the Kansas “child welfare” agency

 

Image designed by Wannapik

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?

How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.”

Even the Wizard of Oz couldn’t do that. But at last, we’re getting a peek behind the curtain. 

This post was updated on August 4, 2025, to replace comparative figures for 2022 with figures for 2023, the most recent available.

Seventeen years after we first raised the issue, an ugly little practice that leads to hundreds of needless foster care placements in Kansas every year finally is getting some attention – though far from all of the attention it deserves. 

The Kansas Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill that may slightly reduce the number of times this practice is invoked – but it still allows the family police agency, the Department of Children and Families, to keep such placements “off the books” – so no one will know how many children really are taken from their homes in Kansas each year. 

The practice is known as placing children in “police protective custody.” It’s a special Kansas twist on the ugly practice of “hidden foster care.” What Kansas allows is so awful that it earns the state a special note in the narrative for the NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index. 

After decades, it appears that DCF finally has leadership that is concerned about the practice and how it leads to the needless removal of children. They supported the modest reforms.  But they’re still sticking to the disingenuous claim that these placements are not foster care. 

Why are police protective custody placements not foster care? Because, DCF says, they’re police protective custody placements, that’s why! 

And no wonder: 

In a foster care placement, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

In a police protective custody placement, on the other hand, an agent of the government demands that parents surrender their children. The government then decides where that child will go – perhaps to a relative, perhaps to a stranger, perhaps to a group home or institution. The government decides when – or if – the children ever will see their parents again. 

See the difference?  

Well, actually there is that one difference. When the police take the child (hence the term “police protective custody”) and the child is returned home at or before the first court hearing – which can be as much as six days later – DCF pretends it never happened!  In other words, when Kansas tells the public, and the federal government, how many children were torn from their homes and placed elsewhere by force of law, they don’t count police protective custody placements. 

How many such placements are there? No one knows for sure, but apparently quite a lot – so many that it can take the rate of removal in Kansas from outrageous all the way to obscene. Even worse, it appears that a significant proportion of these placements involve dumping children into the worst, most traumatic form of placement of all – institutionalizing them in parking place “shelters.”   

            Nat. Avg.      KS official      Estimate: KS+
                                                               "police protective
                                                custody"

Officially, in 2023, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Kansas consigned 2,662 children to the chaos of foster care – that made the rate of removal in Kansas double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. 

But in March, DCF finally released some figures on police protective custody placements. While not precise, they suggest that anywhere from 979 to 1,076 children were taken into police protective custody and then “thrown back” – much the worse for the experience – before the first hearing, and so would never be counted in official figures.  (A link to DCF’s figures and an explanation of the estimate can be found at the end of this post. If anyone wants to suggest an alternative figure, I’d be glad to take a look.) 

Using the low-end estimate, that would mean Kansas really took away 3,641 children in 2023. That would make the rate of removal in Kansas nearly triple the national average and the third highest in the country.

The practice goes back a long way 

We first discovered the practice in 2007, while working on our report about Kansas child welfare. We discovered it when it was referenced in passing in an op-ed column written by the public official who, then as now, might be Kansas’ foremost proponent of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. That would be Ron Paschal, then as now the deputy district attorney in charge of the Juvenile Division in Sedgwick County (metropolitan Wichita). His op-ed hinted that the number was huge, but offered no specifics. 

Just as in 2007, the most extreme use of police protective custody placements is still in the Wichita area. In that region, it appears that more than half of all entries into care were police protective custody cases in which the children were returned to family within six days. 

The excuse for hiding all these placements 

Although DCF has more concern about these placements now than it did in 2007, it still uses the same excuse now as then for failing to report them as entries to the public or to the federal government: It’s not foster care because DCF doesn’t have custody of the children – the police do. In other words: Sure, they’re in exactly the same places and subject to exactly the same control as if DCF had them, but hey, so what? That’s our technicality and we’re sticking to it! 

At best DCF is exploiting a loophole in federal regulations concerning what must be reported as an entry into foster care, at worst they may not be following those regulations. 

Those regulations do not say a child has to be in the custody of a given agency to be counted as in foster care.  Rather, the state family police agency must have “responsibility for placement and care of the child.”  In the case of Kansas police protective custody placements, children may be placed in foster homes group homes or institutions that are licensed and overseen by DCF. That sure sounds like responsibility for placement and care.  But, in fairness to DCF, when we asked the federal Administration for Children and Families about this in 2007, they were just fine with letting Kansas do this and looking the other way. That may be in part because if Kansas doesn’t call a case foster care, the federal government doesn’t have to pick up part of the tab for that case. 

So maybe DCF can get away with it legally – ethically it’s a shameful misrepresentation of the full scope of the extent to which Kansas destroys families.

Six-day placements are almost never necessary 

The new data also tell us something else: In nearly 1,000 cases – and maybe more – a Kansas law enforcement officer decided that something was happening to a child that was so awful it required tearing that child from everyone she or he knows and loves and throwing that child in with strangers – at worst dumping them into an institution. And yet, that child could be returned, typically to the home from which she or he was taken, within six days. 

A sadistic, brutal parent out to beat and torture a child does not suddenly reform in six days.  Neither does a parent who’s been deliberately starving a child. In these sorts of extremely rare cases, the problem is not likely to be remedied in six days.  Where the danger is not severe and immediate, odds are there are things that can be done without taking away the child. Here’s a good example, from next door in Missouri, of a police officer who understands that.  

But Ron Paschal doesn’t understand that. In legislative testimony, he cited horrible situations supposedly requiring police protective custody, and declared in written testimony that when the child then is returned home from this supposedly impossibly horrible situation within six days “THIS IS AN INDICATION THAT [POLICE PROTECTIVE CUSTODY] WAS SUCCESSFUL.” (Capitals in original(!)) 

That’s like saying that kidnapping a child does the child no harm, and even declaring success, if the child is rescued in a few days.  I think most people – especially the children in question – would consider it far better not to be kidnapped in the first place.  And make no mistake, particularly for a young child, the trauma is every bit as great as a kidnapping – no matter how “short” the time in foster care – oops, sorry, I mean “police protective custody.” 

If anything, Paschal suggests Kansas still isn’t tearing apart enough families.  He cites claims that child abuse is underreported, and the fact that his position has popular support – as evidenced by viewer comments on a television station website. 

This is a longstanding belief on Paschal’s part. You can read more about him in NCCPR’s 2007 report on Kansas child welfare. 

One other thing about police protective custody placements. They don’t always end with a return to the birth parents. Sometimes they end with an informal arrangement to place the child in the home of a relative – in other words, the classic version of hidden foster care. So Kansas’ special version of hidden foster care – police protective custody placements – probably increases the number of classically hidden placements. 

______________

How we estimated the number of unreported foster care entries in Kansas. 

In written testimony to the Kansas Legislature, Deputy DCF Secretary Tanya Keys includes several tables on Page 5. One of those tables puts the total number of Police Protective Custody (PPC) placements in 2024 at 2,509.  Another table states that of all the children Kansas officially admits they put in foster care in 2024, 1,433 of them started off as PPC placements. So if 1,433 out of 2,509 PPC placements ultimately became officially recognized foster-care placements, that leaves 1,076 that did not. That would be 1,076 children taken from their families but never officially counted as foster care placements. 

But the number might not be that high. In an email, Keys explained that's because the 1,433 figure is actually an estimate, extrapolating from various data sources. (By the way, however much I disagree with the agency, Keys sure works hard – she answered my emails on a Sunday night.) 

But there’s an alternative, simpler way to estimate: The Kansas Reflector reports that during a legislative hearing 

Keys said, the Kansas Department of Corrections reported 39% of children dropped off at juvenile facilities last fiscal year by law enforcement officers across the state were subsequently released to a family member. 

“Forty percent of those children are returned to a parent or relative. That’s their placement outcome after a juvenile intake an assessment worker is alongside that family,” Keys said. 

That would be 979, and that more conservative figure is the one I’ve used to estimate the real rate of removal in Kansas.

Child welfare in Kansas: They’ve been knocking on doors for nearly 30 years. Maybe someone is starting to listen.

When parents picketed the Kansas State Capitol last week, something unusual happened.

The first time I heard from a grassroots group of parents fighting for their children against the child welfare system in Kansas it was 1990 – shortly after my book, Wounded Innocents, was published.

Any such group has all sorts of strikes against it from the start: Most of the members will be poor – because that’s who is targeted by child protective services agencies – so they won’t have much in the way of resources.  Most have watched their children endure the trauma of needless foster care.  And then, when they organize, they are demonized; viewed at best as sick and at worst as evil.

So after several years, the members can’t keep up the fight anymore.  Then, perhaps a few years later, a new group forms and the pattern repeats.

That’s because among those who view them as sick and/or evil are many in the state’s media. For example, they have faced only contempt from the largest newspaper in the state, the Wichita Eagle.

But last week, when parents organized and picketed outside the State Capitol in Topeka, something heartening happened: They were treated with respect by the reporter who wrote this story; Peggy Lowe of public radio station KCUR.  Perhaps that’s because Lowe has partnered with Sherman Smith of the Topeka Capital-Journal to take a careful in-depth look at what happens to children after they are taken.

It also may be because Kansas has become a de facto laboratory experiment proving that child welfare systems routinely confuse poverty with neglect.  As Lowe and Smith explain:

Kansas added thousands of children to the state foster care system as former Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his appointed DCF secretary, Phyllis Gilmore, imposed policies that reduced aid to struggling families.

A University of Kansas study found that was not a coincidence.  That is in line with multiple studies suggesting a good solution: When you increase cash assistance to poor families, what the child welfare system calls “neglect” declines.

How the system hurts children

The reason it’s so important to listen to these parents is not because the system hurts them – though of course it does. The reason to listen is because the system does so much to hurt children.

● It hurts children needlessly removed by inflicting upon them the same enormous emotional trauma felt by children separated at the Mexican border.  So it’s no wonder study after study of typical cases finds that children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

● That harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one.  The majority are.  But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population.  Multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.  The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.

● But even that isn’t the worst of it.  The more that workers are overwhelmed with false allegations, trivial cases and children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger.  So they make even more mistakes in all directions.  That’s almost always the real reason for the horror stories about children left in dangerous homes.

So in case there are any other Kansas reporters who want to reconsider old assumptions, here’s some context.

● Kansas tears apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation – nearly double the national average.  The number of children trapped in foster care on any given day in Kansas is higher than all but four or five other states.

● And those are just the official figures.  Many states use a system of hidden foster care to hide large numbers of placements.  But Kansas has another dodge that, as far as I know, is unique.  If Kansas were required to count these placements as well, the state might well be the child removal capital of America.  You can read all about how Kansas gets away with it here.

● One former Kansas human services chief, Don Jordan, was apparently caught in a bald-faced lie; we just don’t know which was the lie.  While meeting with parents in 2008, he said:

In Sedgwick County [metropolitan Wichita] oftentimes we end up writing things because it's what our social workers get bullied by the District Attorney's Office into writing. So they really have no belief in what it says. [Emphasis added].

Later in the meeting, Jordan said:

I am working on our staff that we do our assessments properly and we not get bullied into writing things we don't believe. But then the reality comes down to, you send a 25-year-old social worker into a room with a 15-year county ADA (assistant district attorney) who is willing to yell at them, cuss at them, scream at them and threaten them, you know.

But when he found out the comments would become public, Jordan, told the district attorney that he was just “pandering” to the parents.  That gives a sense of just how abysmal Kansas child welfare leadership has been. 

By the way, that didn’t happen under Brownback.  Both the apparent lying and the inventive method for hiding foster care placements took place under former Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. In Kansas, child welfare has been bipartisan: both parties have failed miserably.

● Another former Kansas human services chief effectively admitted that large numbers of Kansas children are in foster care needlessly – in the most bizarre way possible.  Confronted with the fact that so many Kansas foster children were running away – and how little she seemed to know about it, Phyllis Gilmore sought to reassure people that children running away from foster care isn’t always so bad. So, according to The Kansas City Star:

(Gilmore) said that in many cases, children have left to go back to their biological families or other people with whom they have a relationship in order to try to not be in foster care. … “So it isn’t always a tragedy but some certainly can be and that’s why we have to take it all very seriously,” Gilmore said.

But wait a minute. The Kansas Department of Children and Families, as the agency now is called, says children are taken away only when they have been harmed or are at imminent risk of harm — harm so severe it can’t possibly be prevented without resorting to foster care. And, of course, children are not supposed to be returned as long as those harmful conditions exist.

So how can it not be a tragedy when children go running straight back to these supposedly horrible parents who are such a danger to them?

Unless, of course, many of those parents are not actually a danger — and Gilmore knew it.

● A group that should be helping to fix all this may make things worse; not on purpose, of course, but because of naiveté about how child welfare works and what’s needed to fix it.

Kansas Appleseed has partnered with the group that calls itself “Children’s Rights” which has brought another of its McLawsuits in Kansas.  There’s an excellent chance the suit will actually make Kansas child welfare even worse.  That’s because you can’t solve these problems by hiring a bunch more caseworkers and launching another foster parent recruiting campaign. 

Kansas doesn’t have too few foster parents.  Kansas has too many foster children.  And if all you do is go on a caseworker hiring binge, without changing what those caseworkers actually do, all you get is the same lousy system only bigger.

Wrongful removal drives everything else. The only way to fix foster care is to have less of it.  And that won’t happen until we start seeing everyone in that system, children and parents, for who they really are.

For more about Kansas child welfare, see the comprehensive report issued by NCCPR in 2007. Unfortunately, it's not out of date.