Foster care in Kansas: Kansas Appleseed chooses the “child savers” over the children

They’re backing another pointless – and potentially harmful – McLawsuit by the group that calls itself Children’s Rights.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 2025: In the years since this lawsuit was filed, Children’s Rights has dramatically changed its approach – for the better. To their great credit, they’ve refocused on racial and class bias in child welfare and curbing the needless removal of children. There’s been a similar change at their co-counsel in Kansas, the National Center for Youth Law.  I doubt that either organization would have brought this kind of lawsuit today. But because the approach taken in 2018 was doomed to fail, the Kansas system is no better now than it was then. In some ways, it may be worse.

Here we go again.  The group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights (CR) – while ignoring children’s right to their own families – has filed another of their McLawsuits against a state child welfare system.

Nothing unusual in this. But one of their allies in the suit ought to know better.  For them, signing onto the suit is a betrayal of their own stated mission.

CR’s McLawsuits reflect the finest thinking of the 19^th Century – when self-proclaimed “child savers” rushed to take impoverished children from their supposedly unworthy, unfit parents.  That’s still the norm today.  But instead of working to curb these practices, CR lawsuits aim to “fix” foster care largely by throwing more caseworkers and more paperwork at the problems.

What’s the matter with Kansas child welfare?

This time the target of the lawsuit is Kansas.

As usual, CR’s description of the enormous harm the system does to children is undoubtedly accurate.  As a horror show for children, Kansas child welfare may be matched only by Texas. But as usual, CR got the solutions all wrong.

The lawsuit ignores the problem that drives everything else: The system is inundated with children who never needed to be taken from their parents in the first place.  CR always ignores this. But it takes a particularly willful measure of ignorance to ignore it in Kansas.

Kansas tears apart families at the a rate nearly 50 percent above the national average. And that’s only the official figure. As we first discovered more than a decade ago, the state hides a huge number of entries into foster care, violating at least the spirit and possibly the letter of federal regulations. Include those placements in the total and Kansas may be tearing apart families at the highest rate in the nation. (There’s more about all this, and the other failings in the Kansas system, in our 2008 report on Kansas child welfare.)

Even the former head of the Kansas child welfare agency effectively admitted, albeit inadvertently, that there are plenty of children in Kansas foster care who don’t need to be there.

And what does CR’s 68-page lawsuit complaint say about this?  Not one word.

After documenting some of the most horrific problems in any foster care system in America, the solutions called for by the suit are mostly requests for injunctions barring the state from doing things such as moving children from home to home night after night, sometimes more than 100 times. But Kansas can’t stop doing that until Kansas stops taking too many children needlessly.

They also seek a study to tell us what we already know -- that caseloads are too high -- followed by the usual caseworker hiring binge.  But if all you do is hire more caseworkers without changing Kansas child welfare’s take-the-child-and-run approach, all the new caseworkers simply chase all the new cases and all you get is the same lousy system only bigger.

And it can get even worse.  All those caseworkers cost money.  That’s fine, I’m all for spending moresmarter. But CR has an unfortunate habit of demanding more spending without putting any limits on where the money comes from.  So at least two states complied with settlements of CR lawsuits cutting aid for poor families. 

on child welfare – if an agency also spends

The founder of CR, Marcia Lowry once famously said she doesn’t know how to fix poverty but she knows how to fix foster care. In fact, there’s no evidence she knows how to fix either one. Sometimes her lawsuits actually made the poverty worse.  Though Lowry is no longer with CR, this latest suit is typical of the kinds she brought. So there’s nothing to prevent the Kansas suit from making poverty worse.

That’s not the only way things could get worse. CR actually seems to be calling for Kansas to add more of the worst form of care of all: “residential treatment centers” (RTCs) – even though there is no evidence it works, even though there are far better alternatives, and even though, on the very next page of its complaint, CR acknowledges that existing beds in RTCs are being filled by children who don’t need to be there! (By which, of course, CR means they could be in foster homes. CR would never, ever suggest they could be in their own homes.)

CR’s partners

CR has two partners in this suit.  One is the National Center for Youth Law, based in California.  No surprise there.  Long ago, their similarly myopic approach to litigation prompted me to call them “Children’s Rights West.”

But the big disappointment is the other partner: Kansas Appleseed.  They really ought to know better.  On its website, they say they “investigate social, economic, and political injustice in Kansas and work toward systemic solutions.”  They describe themselves as part of a network “working to defeat poverty and injustice.”

But this lawsuit does nothing to defeat either and may worsen both.

● There is nothing in this lawsuit about the children torn from everyone they know and love because family poverty is confused with neglect – in spite of the fact that a study linked the rise in foster care in Kansas directly to cuts in public assistance.

● There is nothing in this lawsuit about the racial bias that permeates child welfare.

● There is nothing in this lawsuit about providing concrete help to families instead of simply hiring new caseworkers to do exactly what the old caseworkers do – needlessly tear apart families at an obscene rate.

(Oh, and there’s also nothing about curbing the mad rush to termination of parental rights and quick-and-dirty slipshod adoptive placements, even though three of the ten “named plaintiffs” in the suit were victims of failed adoptions.)

And Kansas Appleseed is not alone. Over the years, Appleseed groups in two other states have joined similar McLawsuits.

CR’s usual excuse

Perhaps they were lulled into joining by CR’s oft-repeated claim that you can’t sue on behalf of children not yet in the system.  In fact, you can – as evidenced by the fact that CR itself has done it. 

And, of course one of the only class-action lawsuits that ever significantly improved a child welfare system, the one in Alabama, was built around rebuilding the system to do more to keep families together.  One of the groups that brought the lawsuit, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law wrote a whole book about it. (Bazelon’s legal director also is a member of NCCPR’s volunteer Board of Directors.)

So it can be done.

And there’s still a way to do it in Kansas.  Most of these McLawsuits are resolved through negotiations.  The resulting agreements usually involve a lot of pointless micromanaging and, of course, the caseworker hiring binge.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Kansas Appleseed can be true to its stated mission by insisting on an Alabama-style resolution to the case - instead of what usually follows a CR McLawsuit: A CR McSettlement.

Foster care lawsuit in Nevada: How the National Center for Youth Law planted the seeds of its own defeat

            I’ve written often here about the failure of my fellow liberals on child welfare issues.  But if you want to see a good old fashioned failure of right-wing extremism, just check out the decision by Federal District Judge Robert C. Jones throwing out a lawsuit against the child welfare system in Clark County (metropolitan Las Vegas) Nevada.  (Check it out when the decision in Henry A. v. Willden becomes generally available online, that is; right now I’ve only been able to find it through a federal courts database that requires registration; but this story in the Las Vegas Review Journal sums it up well.)

            In the course of throwing out a lawsuit brought by the National Center for Youth Law (which should not be confused with the more progressive Youth Law Center), Judge Jones essentially ruled that, under the U.S. Constitution, the rights of children thrown into foster care are perhaps one step above the rights of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.  NCYL plans to appeal, and we’d better hope that appeal is successful.

            It’s not that this was a very good lawsuit to begin with.  As I’ve discussed previously on this blog, NCYL has the same approach to litigation as the group that so arrogantly calls itself Children’s Rights: Whatever you do, don’t raise the issue of children not needing to be taken away in the first place.  So NCYL’s suits tend to produce the same mediocre results as CR’s, which is why I’ve taken to referring to the California-based NCYL as “CR West.”

            For example, NCYL is waging the same war against grandparents as CR.  Indeed, the one good thing about Judge Jones’ decision is that it threw out NCYL’s bizarre claim that foster children have a constitutional right not to be placed with their grandparents or other relatives if those relatives can’t comply with every hypertechnical licensing requirement.

This, of course, illustrates the problem with claiming to “represent” children through adult “next friends” who may barely know them or who, in this case, may simply be current or former foster parents who may put a shared ideology ahead of what the children really want. It’s hard to imagine that thousands of children really are begging their caseworkers by saying something like “Please, please don’t place me with grandma unless her house has precisely the square footage required in section 4 subsection A(2) of regulation 456!”

            But the rest of the lawsuit might have made things a little better. And by setting such an appallingly low standard concerning what foster children are entitled to, the decision, if upheld on appeal, could make things much worse.

            The great irony in this – and the biggest lesson for NCYL, CR and all the others who willfully ignore the problem of wrongful removal of children is that ignoring that problem helped plant the seeds of NCYL’s defeat.

            That is evident from this section of the decision, on page 12:

Plaintiffs have failed to allege that Defendants “did anything more than place foster children into an already broken system.” … Moreover, the Complaint does not state that Defendants created or increased the danger to children. Based on these pleading failures, this claim for relief is dismissed.

In addition, Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity on this claim. In this regard, Plaintiffs have not provided any factual assertions that the Defendants increased the danger to Plaintiffs. [Emphasis added.]

In contrast,

           ● Had NCYL taken note of Nevada’s extremely high rate of child removal – more than 50 percent above the national average.

           ● Had NCYL pointed out that many of those removals are unnecessary (something well documented in a casereading by Prof. Leroy Pelton of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas School of Social Work)

          ● And had NCYL included cases of wrongful removal among their “named plaintiffs”

then they could, indeed, have made the claim that Clark County and the State of Nevada had actually made things worse for the children, and the judge would have had a lot more difficulty dismissing the case on that ground.

           Of course, given the judge’s clear hostility to the whole lawsuit, even had NCYL acknowledged the existence of the elephant in the room, judge Jones might well have ruled against them anyway.  But there’s still a lesson for those times when cases are brought before more reasonable judges: NCYL’s embrace of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare got in the way of making the strongest possible case for the children it sued to protect. 

Three more foster care lawsuits doomed to fail, three more bad child welfare systems likely to get worse

MASSACHUSETTS AND NEVADA SUITS IGNORE WRONGFUL REMOVAL; THE NEXT TARGET IS ALMOST CERTAINLY TEXAS

The group that so arrogantly calls itself "Children's Rights" has filed another one of its Mclawsuits against a state child welfare agency – this time in Massachusetts. And NCCPR's sources say that another such Mclawsuit, in Texas, is imminent.

Meanwhile a group which is unaffiliated with CR but has the same myopic outlook about how to fix child welfare systems, the National Center for Youth Law, has filed the same kind of suit in Nevada. (I've come to think of the California-based NCYL as "CR West")

All of these child welfare systems almost certainly are every bit as bad as CR and NCYL say they are. But at best, these suits are likely to drag on for years, perhaps decades with no real improvement (witness CR's suits in Washington DC and Connecticut and NCYL's in Washington State). At worst, they will make these child welfare systems worse, by diverting scarce resources from prevention and family preservation into more child abuse investigations and foster care.

Neither CR nor NCYL has learned from successes elsewhere – including their own.

The only class-action lawsuit settlements that really work are those that push child welfare systems to rebuild by emphasizing family preservation; or at least include such efforts as part of the reform effort. The consent decree that helped transform child welfare in Alabama, brought by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, is the classic example. (The Legal Director of the Bazelon Center is a member of NCCPR's Board of Directors.) But CR's own settlements in New Jersey and New York City also illustrate this, and so does NCYL's settlement in Utah. In all three cases, individuals and organizations wiser than CR or NCYL helped them craft settlements better than anything they could come up with on their own.

But it seems neither organization has learned either from their failures or their successes.

Judging by CR's press release, the Massachusetts suit zeros in on the problems of abuse in foster care and moving foster children from foster home to foster home – enormously important issues that are at the heart of NCCPR's own advocacy. But the key cause of those problems is the simple fact that children in Massachusetts are taken from their families at a rate nearly 50 percent above the national average. That creates an artificial "shortage" of foster homes, so workers wind up moving children from home to home. And it creates an incentive to ignore abuse in foster care.

But CR, of course, ignores this issue. Worse, their track record in places like Michigan and Georgia suggests they will press for settlements that will allow the states to divert funds now used for prevention, family preservation and help to impoverished families, into more child abuse investigations and more foster care. That, of course, will make everything worse.

The wrongful removal problem in Nevada is even worse than in Massachusetts, with a rate of removal 70 percent above the national average. A comprehensive review of a random sample of cases by one of the nation's leading experts, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Social Work Professor Leroy Pelton, found widespread wrongful removal and confusion of poverty with "neglect." But NCYL ignores the issue.

CONTINUING THE WAR AGAINST GRANDPARENTS…

And both organizations appear determined to extend the war on grandparents that CR is waging in Michigan – which already has caused the expulsion of hundreds of children from the homes of grandparents and other relatives in that state.

Massachusetts already is more restrictive than Michigan about placing children with relatives when their homes are unlicensed. It can be done only when a court approves. But apparently, CR thinks even this is not restrictive enough, since their Complaint complains about these exceptions.

NCYL's suit is even worse. Nevada law explicitly allows placing children in unlicensed homes as long as basic health and safety standards are met. (A great deal of formal licensing typically involves standards geared to middle-class creature comforts.) NCYL argues that the standards under the Nevada law are, in fact, too low. But instead of looking for sensible middle ground, NCYL offers up a horror story or two and appears to demand that every impoverished grandparent meet precisely the standards used to license the homes of middle-class strangers.

There is special irony in this in light of a key issue raised in the NCYL suit: the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medication on foster children. Florida is closely examining this issue and may be doing more than any other state finally to come to grips with it. Florida's data show that the best protection against overmedicating foster children is – grandma. Foster children in kinship placements are far less likely to be prescribed psychiatric meds than those placed in what should properly be called "stranger care."

It's not hard to figure out why: Grandparents and other relatives are more likely to love these children, and so will tolerate more difficult behavior before demanding a prescription.

So now we have the spectacle of the National Center for Youth Law simultaneously identifying an extremely important problem – and undermining the best solution.

And God only knows what kind of chaos CR has in store for Texas.

… AND RATCHETING UP THE WAR AGAINST FAMILIES

Entirely on its own, Texas already came up with the dumb idea of diverting funds from prevention and family preservation into more child abuse investigators and foster care workers. The legislature tried it in 2005, and it failed miserably – just as NCCPR predicted it would in a report we issued on Texas child welfare that year. Now the Texas child welfare agency is trying to reverse years of escalating entries into foster care. That may well be what made Texas a target for CR.

Indeed, a recent "Executive Director's Report" from CR's Marcia Lowry, indicates that CR is about to escalate its war against impoverished families caught up in the child welfare system. Instead of simply ignoring the problem, CR is now threatening to attack states that have succeeded in reducing entries into care. They've already pressured the Tennessee legislature into repealing a law that would have put one very small brake on such removals.

And CR is threatening to make its own determination of which prevention and family preservation programs "work" and which do not. In fact, there is abundant evidence already available on this; and CR is almost certain to get any such effort wrong.

Lowry likes to say that she doesn't know how to fix poverty, but she knows how to fix foster care. In fact, the results of her lawsuits suggest she doesn't know how to fix either one – and her efforts sometimes make the poverty worse.

No one can stop CR from suing Texas of course. We can only urge that state, and Massachusetts and Nevada as well, to fight any proposed settlement that is not built around doing more, not less, and spending more, not less, to keep families together.

Perhaps then Texas won't be the latest state to see its children wronged by "Children's Rights."