Amid troubles at DCF, Derek Schmidt says Gov. Laura Kelly failed to fix child welfare system

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly promised to fix problems at the Kansas Department for Children and Families, which is now led by Laura Howard. Republican Derek Schmidt argues that Kelly failed.

After years of ongoing troubles at the Kansas Department for Children and Families, Republican Derek Schmidt is making child welfare a campaign issues in the race against Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly.

“Governor Kelly made a promise in 2018 to fix the Kansas foster care system — even going as far to say we have a ‘moral obligation’ to do so — and the bottom line is she’s failed,” Schmidt said. “Many of the problems plaguing the system are still there.”

While campaigning in 2018, then-Sen. Kelly promised to fix the foster care system.

“We are complicit in what has happened in our foster care system,” Kelly said at the time. “And we have a moral obligation to change it, and I will do that.”

Top Republican lawmakers contend that Kelly has failed to deliver.

“We have a governor right now that has badly over-promised and under-delivered when it comes to fixing our foster care system,” said Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover. “Things aren’t getting better. They’re getting worse.”

More: DCF contractor Saint Francis Ministries defrauded of $10.7 million by former IT chief, feds allege

Kelly campaign manager Shelbi Dantic defended the governor’s record.

“Governor Laura Kelly inherited a foster care system in shambles from the previous administration, and since she took office, she’s made remarkable progress,” Dantic said.

She cited additional funding for social workers, creation of a child advocate office and decreasing the number of children in foster care. She promised that Kelly “will continue to protect and invest in Kansas children.”

Rep. Jarod Ousley, D-Merriam, said the Legislature was partly at fault, noting that policy issues to address systemic problems — such as Medicaid expansion — had gone unheeded.

He said DCF was going in the right direction under Kelly’s leadership and had made progress on a number of areas, such as policies to stimulate improved child support collections.

“I think this administration has done more to move our system in the right direction … than either of the other administrations I’ve served underneath,” Ousley said, referring to Brownback and his successor, Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer.

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Schmidt pushed back.

“She hasn’t fixed the problems she promised to solve,” Schmidt said. “Kansas children deserve better, and with the right leadership we can and will do better.”

Schmidt’s campaign news release didn’t include specific policy proposals, other than putting the newly created child advocate office into statute.

“Derek Schmidt, however, has no plan or vision, just a track record of defending Brownback’s reckless policies at DCF — and we cannot afford to go backward,” Dantic said.

Children sleeping in offices instead of homes as DCF struggles to find housing

DCF has struggled to find housing for children in the foster care system. Dozens of children have slept in offices instead of homes.

“Despite Kelly’s campaign promises and her administration settling a lawsuit, which cost taxpayers more than $2.3 million in plaintiffs’ legal fees, with an agreement to stop placing foster children in non-child-welfare housing within four years, Kansas foster children are still sleeping in contractor offices,” the Schmidt campaign said.

The class-action lawsuit was filed in 2018 when Colyer was in office. The Kelly administration came to terms on a settlement in 2020 with DCF promising to do better.

Among the agreements, which were required to be implemented over a four-year-period, were promises to stop using night-to-night placements and other short-term placements lasting less than 14 days and to end the practice of housing children in inappropriate locations, such as agency offices and hotels.

The state has also settled another lawsuit stemming from the practice, the Kansas News Service previously reported.

Kansas must pay $1.25 million to a child, who was sexually assaulted in 2018. The victim of the assault was 13 years old at the time and was sleeping in the office of foster care contractor KVC. The attacker was an 18-year-old with a history of sexually abusing others who was also put at the same office.

The victim’s attorneys said DCF and KVC were responsible for “a failure of the most basic legal responsibility.”

More: Kansas foster care system to pay $1.25M after child sexually assaulted in a contractor’s office

Despite the two settlements, the practice hasn’t stopped.

Between January 2021 and May 2022, 79 children spent a total of 214 nights sleeping in offices, the Kansas News Service reported. It isn’t known how many were due to extenuating circumstances, such as a COVID-19 illness or a late-night removal from a home.

Issue of missing children persisted under Kelly administration

Kelly, who was on a child welfare task force when in the Legislature, took credit during her 2018 campaign for a leadership change at DCF. That came after she helped bring to light a pervasive problem of missing children in the foster care system. She put some of the blame on understaffing at a “decimated” agency.

That issue has persisted under the Kelly administration.

Kansas has one of the highest rates of missing children of any state foster care system, according to a federal watchdog report covering July 2018 through December 2020.

The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported in May that 7% of foster care children went missing in Kansas — tied for the highest of any state.

Kansas had 15,810 children in foster care, 2,274 episodes of a child going missing, an average of 27 days missing and a total of 89 missing children as of Dec. 31, 2020.

There was measurable improvement when Kelly came into office.

DCF in 2019 expanded its special response team tasked with locating and recovering youths missing from foster care. The agency reported that prevention and recovery efforts combined with system improvements decreased the daily rate of youth on the run from 94 to about 50 by spring 2020.

But numbers have risen since the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest DCF reporting shows daily absent youth without leave has regularly been in the 60s and 70s this summer. The figure was 64 on Friday.

Still, Ousley, the Merriam representative, said he believed the numbers to be trending in the right direction.

And he argued the issue persisted in states across the country beyond Kansas, making it unfair to hold state officials overly responsible.

“I’ve also spoken with caseworkers, who oftentimes know where their kids are at, even though they may be (technically) unaccounted for,” he said.

Child advocate office created last year

In October, Kelly signed an executive order at the Kansas Children’s Discover Center in Topeka.

The order created an independent Division of the Child Advocate, focused on child welfare oversight, investigating complaints from families, recommending structural changes, helping people navigate the child welfare system and expanding coordination among interested groups.

The office has handled several cases since its first director was hired earlier this year.

While such a position has enjoyed bipartisan support among lawmakers — as well as Kelly and Schmidt — proposals to create such a position stalled in the Legislature amid disagreement over which office should house the child advocate.

Many Republicans had wanted Schmidt’s Office of the Attorney General to have the new oversight authority, making it independent of the governor’s administration.

More: Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly creates child advocate office through executive order, circumventing divided Senate

Schmidt’s campaign contends that Kelly’s office was “created in name only” and “has no force or legal authority to make change, as evidenced by persistent problems.”

“We need a real Office of Child Advocacy in statute that has real power to provide independent accountability,” Masterson said, “not just another state government employee with a fancy title and no independent ability to bring positive change to the system.”

Despite initial threats from lawmakers after Kelly’s executive order, they didn’t seriously pursue passing legislation on the matter in 2022 either.

The original version of the bill would have placed the office in control of the Legislature. Some argued that the move to place to office under Schmidt’s control was a political ploy.

“The only times he’s chimed in (on foster care issues) that I can think of is in that Senate hearing where they were going to place the Office of the Child Advocate within the Attorney General’s Office, which I think is where it became a political football,” Ousley said.

Rise in child sex abuse went unreported by DCF

Schmidt’s campaign also knocked “further systemic issues at Kelly’s DCF” following reporting by The Capital-Journal that DCF hasn’t produced annual reports mandated by the Legislature.

Those reports are to contain basic data on child sexual abuse reports from abortion providers.

The reporting requirement was passed into law in 2011, but the agency never produced the mandatory annual report until this summer, when The Capital-Journal filed an open records request.

After blaming the Brownback administration for initial failures to follow the law, the Kelly administration has since produced reports dating back to 2017 and is working to backfill the data since 2011.

“The Legislature’s hands have been tied by the Kelly administration because DCF is unwilling to provide an accurate accounting of escalating problems,” said Sen. Molly Baumgardner, R-Louisburg. “We only learn from media reporters when they uncover new accounts of child endangerment and abuse within the foster care system.”

More: Rise in child sex abuse cases went unreported to Kansas lawmakers for six years

Child abuse deaths in the foster care system have happened under both the Brownback and Kelly administrations.

Schmidt opponents cited his role as attorney general in defending the state in a lawsuit after the death of Jayla Haag. The girl died of abuse in 2012. Her father sued DCF and won a settlement in 2018.

More: Kansas officials approve $75,000 settlement in DCF child-death lawsuit

“After defending the negligence of Brownback’s DCF — including the heinous death of an 18-month old — Schmidt is once again trying to rewrite history, hoping no one will remember him siding with Brownback over our children,” said Kansas Democratic Party spokesperson Emma O’Brien. “Meanwhile, Governor Kelly has worked to clean up the mess left behind by Schmidt and Brownback. Does Schmidt really think the system was better under his and Brownback’s watch than Governor Kelly’s?”

“Every time she’s presented with her own failures, she attacks someone who hasn’t been on the ballot in Kansas for nearly a decade,” said Shannon Pahls, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party. “Bottom line is she’s been governor for four years now and has failed Kansas kids. She’s to blame, no one else.”

Jason Tidd is a statehouse reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached by email at jtidd@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jason_Tidd.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Derek Schmidt says Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly failed to fix DCF problems