2025 Policy Priorities

Address the use of secure care as a placement option for youth who struggle with elopement and chronic running behaviors, and focus efforts on nurturing placement options and the provision of resources that can provide appropriate safety, stability, and support.

• Youth with significant struggles and runaway tendencies are in need of increased support and care that addresses the root cause of the elopement and runaway behaviors. 
• It is necessary to grow the availability of placements equipped with the tools  needed to keep kids who struggle with elopement and running behavior in a safe home placement and with access to necessary resources to meet their needs.
• If out-of-home placements must be used, keeping kids close to home yields the best results. Kansas should work to invest in making secure care options that have robust, therapeutic wraparound services regionally available so Kansas kids with high needs can remain closer to home.
• To better support youth, we must reduce the length of secure care placements to a maximum of 45 days, and eliminate extensions. No child should spend up to 180 days in a secure care facility.

Improve Kansas’ foster care system through increased transparency and accountability, increased and improved access to mental health supports, and the elimination of resource access barriers impacting youth and their biological, kinship, and foster families.

• Transparency and access to accurate, robust data are vital to fostering positive outcomes, allowing for quick and clear communication between agencies, which supports the provision of services and success of transitions for youth within the foster system. Data barriers impact the ability to make well informed system-wide management decisions, create systems of accountability, and ensure the successful provision of adequate services to our foster youth.

• The state has failed to provide required mental health services to children in foster care. Case review data shows, 75% of children had evidence of a mental health need, but only 52% of those in need received appropriate mental health services. Of the youth who received appropriate services, 58% experienced a delay in accessing those services.

• Foster care workers’ caseloads must align with best practice standards, which specify that caseloads not exceed 12–15 children/youth for those in foster care or kinship care, and eight children/youth in treatment foster care, and their families. Data shows an average of 3,016 children across Kansas were assigned to a permanency caseworker handling 30 or more cases, which accounted for 39% of all assigned children, despite these best practice standards.

Cementing and strengthening the Executive Order eliminating the funneling of foster youth’s SSI and Survivor Benefits payments towards foster care agencies into statute. Kansas must continue to place these funds into account to be used by the youth as they transition out of services or to meet their needs not met by DCF while in care and build out robust measures to ensure funds are always utilized in a way that provides the best outcomes for each foster youth.

• Kansas is now upholding the Representative Gail Finney Memorial Foster Care Bill of Rights by supporting foster youth’s right to have and maintain their belongings, including SSI and survivor benefits; however, we must establish this protection into law to ensure the state continues to uphold these rights well into the future.

• Accountability and transparency are vital as Kansas corrects course and implements these changes to benefits payments. Protecting and tracking these funds to guarantee they provide the best possible outcomes to foster youth while in the foster system and as they transition out. It is important that the statute strengthen measures to track the spending and saving of these funds.
• ABLE accounts, just one option for children to receive benefits and navigate savings limits, hold up to $20,000 for the youth. These accounts limit spending but allow previous foster youth to pay for expenses like uncovered postsecondary education costs, a security deposit on an apartment, a vehicle to get to work, and other needs not covered by DCF while in care. Codification protects the continuation of adding benefits payments to these accounts, ensuring more positive transitions for our youth aging out of the foster system.