Something’s wrong with the Kansas’s privatized foster care system.

Children are hardly being returned home or adopted any more quickly than they were before privatization.

“We’re still not doing our job,” said Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita. “We’ve still got kids lingering in the system.”

Today, about one-fourth of the children in foster care are able to return home safely within six months, 44 percent in 12 months.

Six years ago, the numbers were 27 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

The six-month figure is about 5 percentage points above the national average; the 12-month figure is considerably below average, though state-to-state comparisons are not always valid.

Lawmakers privatized the state’s family preservation, adoption and foster care services in 1996 after they failed several court-ordered reviews. At the time, SRS was confident that switching from a state-run system to one driven by private charities bidding on regional contracts would speed up the processes.

But the changes have not resulted in children moving through the system any faster.

The switch wasn’t cheap. Before privatization, said former SRS Secretary Robert Harder, child welfare services cost the state about $70 million. SRS expects to spend more than $145 million in the coming year.

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“It continues to amaze me,” said Harder, now a volunteer child advocate for the United Methodist Church. “We’ve spent all this money and, bottom line, the results aren’t any better.”

Not meeting goals

At the onset of privatization, SRS said it wanted 55 percent of the children in foster care to exit the system in six months; 70 percent in 12 months.

Some contractors — The Farm and Kaw Valley Behavioral Health, primarily — have, on occasion, met the goals within their regions. The state as a whole has not.

“We’re aware of the situation,” said Sandra Hazlett, director of children and family services at SRS. “We need to do a better job.”

In June, SRS unveiled major changes in its child welfare contracts, effective July 1, 2005.

Not yet awarded, the new contracts include incentives aimed at moving children through the system faster. Rather than contractors being paid a set fee for each month a child remains in the system, they’ll be paid 100 percent of the fee for each of the first six months; 66 percent of the fee for the second six months; 29 percent of the fee thereafter.

“We think this will help,” Hazlett said.

It might. But Hazlett and others say they’re not sure why the system hasn’t shown more improvement

“There are a bunch of different pieces that go into this,” said Bruce Linhos, executive director at Children’s Alliance of Kansas, an association representing the state’s nonprofit child welfare agencies.

“So much of what we do is aimed at keeping kids safe and not letting them go home until it’s pretty clear that if they go home, they’ll stay home,” Linhos said. “As a state, we don’t have very many kids re-renter the system. So at some point, we have to ask ourselves what’s the point of moving kids through the system a whole lot quicker if it means that many more are going to come back in.”

SRS records show that about 10 percent of the children who exit foster care return within a year.

Also, Linhos said, the state’s family preservation efforts have kept thousands of children out of foster care who, before privatization, likely would have returned home within a few weeks or months. Without these children in the mix, he said, the average length of stay is sure to lengthen.

Harder doubted Linhos’ assessment.

“He’s saying the kids in the system are more difficult than before,” he said. “But that’s been the case every year. They’ve always been there.”

Services lacking

The lack in improvement didn’t surprise Corrie Edwards, program director at Keys for Networking, a Topeka-based program for mentally ill children and their families.

“All I know is that after all the changes we’ve been through, families still can’t get services,” she said. “Either they’re not available, they’re not there when they need them or at the level they need them.”

Without access to services, she said, families are often forced to give up their children.

“I see it every day in every part of the state,” Edwards said.

Mary Berry, a social welfare professor at Kansas University, said she doubted that children would show much improvement anytime soon.

“The determining factor on when a child returns home is not how well the child is doing, it’s whether the home environment is safe enough,” Berry said. “But most of what we do is aimed at helping the child. That’s fine, but if the goal is to reunite them with their families, that’s not going to do it.”

The state, Berry said, should focus more of its foster care efforts on helping parents cope with their children.

“It’s the parents’ improvement — not how well the child is doing — that determines when the child gets to go home,” he said. “In fact, the evidence shows that the more a child improves in foster care, the less willing a judge will be to send them home.”

Landwehr, who chairs the House subcommittee charged with overseeing the SRS budget, agreed with Berry’s analysis.

“I see us spending thousands of dollars to keep a kid in foster care when, if we’d spend half that much on mom and dad, the kid could go home,” Landwehr said. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”