Diana Frederick, executive director of Douglas County’s CASA, says the organization is serving more than 90 of the children in Douglas County who are currently in the custody of the Kansas Department for Children and Families.

More Douglas County children are in the custody of the Kansas Department for Children and Families now than ever before, and officials are bracing for additional increases.

In addition, recently passed legislation may make matters even worse for the DCF.

At the end of both October and November, an all-time-high of 170 children were in DCF custody within Douglas County, according to the most recent statistics available on the department’s website. The peak numbers are a sharp increase from the average of 85 children in DCF custody recorded five years ago.

Currently, Diana Frederick, executive director of Douglas County’s CASA, said her organization is serving more than 90 of the county’s 170 children in DCF custody.

The organization works to help children in the custody of the state, in part using volunteers to meet with the children regularly and make recommendations to the court in each child’s best interest.

Not only is Douglas County’s CASA serving a record number of children, but nearly as many are still waiting for help, Frederick said.

“Right now, we have more than 80 kids on our waiting list for a CASA volunteer,” she said. “We are in desperate need of volunteers to be advocates for children, and the need is likely to just increase.”

Frederick said she took over Douglas County’s CASA in 2008, and since then the number of children in need of care has more than doubled.

“My first year as director, we served 66 kids and basically had a CASA volunteer for every child that needed one,” she said. “Last year, we served 142 kids.”

In addition, the climbing number of children in need of care in Douglas County and across the state could be exacerbated by the Juvenile Justice Reform Act, Frederick said.

That measure was enacted in 2016, but has not yet been fully implemented. One goal of the legislation is to divert lower-risk juvenile offenders away from correctional facilities in favor of in-home services. The savings accumulated from the shifts are then meant to help fund those in-home services.

The act also stipulates, however, that courts may refer juveniles to the DCF in certain situations.

Kathy Armstrong, DCF’s assistant director for legal services, testified in March 2016 that those referrals could become “potentially duplicative and cumbersome” to the department.

Frederick said she could not discuss the legislation’s potential impact at length, but did acknowledge the act could produce “a big jump in the number of child in need of care cases. So we will definitely be watching it very closely.”

While parts of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act were supposed to be in place by Jan. 1, Randy Bowman, director of community-based services for the Kansas Department of Corrections said in late December the KDOC asked for an extra month or two to “fully vet through policy issues” so they and the Kansas Office of Judicial Administration could make recommendations to state agencies.

Similar to Douglas County, the state of Kansas hit an all-time high of 6,911 children in custody in October, according to DCF statistics available on the department’s website. Although that figure fell to 6,846 in November, October’s high water mark is an increase from the monthly average of 5,182 children in DCF custody for 2012.

In part, the DCF attributes the statewide increases to a “breakdown of family” and an increase of substance abuse issues within homes, said Theresa Freed, the department’s communications director.

“When you have parents absent from the home, it can create greater stresses on the parent,” she said.

Additional DCF statistics show lack of supervision and physical neglect have increased seven percent over the past five years as cited reasons for removing children from their families.

Of the children in DCF custody, about 60 percent are placed with a family foster home, 33 percent are placed with a relative, and about six percent are placed in a group home or residential care, Freed said.

Frederick said her CASA location is just one of 23 in Kansas. The Kansas CASA Association, which oversees each location, has a legislative committee that will, in the near future, meet to discuss potential impacts of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act.

“Until the legislative committee has a chance to meet, they’re going to monitor the act and see what happens,” she said.