The time is now for Kansas to solve workforce issues
For years, advocates working to improve systems in Kansas that are meant to serve adults and children in need have run into the same lingering issue: workforce shortages. Finally, Kansas has seen consecutive years of budget management that have led to budget surpluses rather than crippling deficits, and rather than continuing to focus on reconfiguring our tax structure to figure out how to eliminate those surpluses, we finally have an opportunity to invest in our state in previously unthinkable, and truly live changing ways.
In our state’s foster care system, one of the country’s most privately operated foster care systems, our private contractors that provide case management services have struggled for years to achieve the appropriate workforce. This has led to extremely high and unmanageable caseloads for caseworkers — the people we trust to engage with children and families encountering the foster care system. This has led to overworked caseworkers being unable to fulfill the duty that they desperately want to meet, and as a result, children slip through the cracks, families feel neglected and betrayed, and workers leave jobs because of unrelenting demands on them that have been shown time and again to be impossible to meet.
Our state has also struggled for years to meet the needs of children and adults needing mental and behavioral healthcare. Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility waitlists keep those experiencing mental and behavioral health crises waiting weeks or months before a space opens up that allows a qualified practitioner to begin to help them stabilize and heal. Substance abuse treatment facilities face backlogs, too, and the result is Kansans who need help are being told that they must wait to get the help they need. Waiting has dire results for those individuals, their families, and Kansas communities.
Kansas children who encounter the youth justice and child welfare systems deserve quality, robust legal representation, but the numbers don’t add up. Too many cases are dropped in the laps of youth defenders and guardians ad litem for every child to receive the rigorous legal representation they deserve. Rural and frontier areas in Kansas may have few attorneys available to serve the children in those areas.
With a budget surplus in the billions, the time is now for Kansas to solve these workforce shortages. We need a plan. And we need to invest in our state like never before. Kansas Appleseed has the unique position of working with Kansans in need, community leaders, advocates, and state leaders from the legislature to state department officials, all the way to the Governor’s office. We’ve seen what can be accomplished when Kansans come together to do the hard work of solving problems that face our state. There is no doubt that we can tackle these issues, but it will require hard work, innovative ideas, and strong leadership. Fortunately, we know Kansas has all these and a strong budget to support it. Together, we can create a plan for deep, long-term investments to train, recruit, and retain the workers we need to meet the needs of all Kansans. The results will be more stable families, healthier communities, and economic prosperity for the state we all love.
