Editorial: Audit overdue

An audit ordered by state legislators should provide important information about the Kansas foster care and adoption system.

Twenty years after Kansas privatized its foster care system, a review of how that system is working is overdue.

Amid various questions about how the Kansas Department for Children and Families is handling foster care and adoptions in the state, Kansas legislators last week took the prudent action of ordering an audit of those DCF services.

The audit will include a number of important questions related to how good a job DCF is doing of keeping Kansas children safe and how it handles the removal of children from their homes and their subsequent placement in the foster care system. The audit will include two questions specifically aimed at the impact of foster care and adoption privatization on Kansas children and families involved with that system and whether privatization has “significantly affected the cost of those services to the state.”

Increased efficiency and lower costs were among the selling points of the privatized system when Kansas became the first state to approve such a system in 1996. There are various ways to measure the success of that move, but one indicator is a report issued last fall showing that the number of Kansas children in the state system was at an all-time high. A number of children in the foster care system have died in the last year, and DCF and its contractors reportedly are having trouble attracting enough social workers to provided the needed services.

During an appearance before the House Committee on Children and Seniors this week. DCF Secretary Phyllis Gilmore seemed defensive about the issues covered by the audit. She told the committee that the Kansas foster care system is one of the safest in the nation, adding, “I know that’s not what’s reported.”

She also contended that “Children die, but they are not in our custody,” which seems to contradict official reports that five children in the foster care system died during fiscal year 2015 — one from maltreatment and four from other causes.

The most pointed objections from Gilmore, however, were directed at a question that wasn’t even approved for the audit: “What are the DCF’s formal policies and actual practices regarding the placement of foster care and adoptive children with same-sex couples, and how do they compare to those in other states?”

Gilmore called the question “unbelievably accusatory,” and said any questions related to same-sex couples were a potentially harmful distraction to the department.

Some Kansans would have liked to see the question on same-sex couples included in this audit, but, even if the audit doesn’t specifically address that issue, it should provide important information to state lawmakers about the overall successes and failures of the state’s foster care and adoption system.