Around 120 Kansas kids are abandoned by their families because their mental health needs are too high

1. Families turn to the Kansas foster care system because their children’s mental or behavioral health is so serious.
2. Advocates say home help for families could spare those children the anguish and uncertainty of landing in foster care.
3. The state’s waiver system, designed to assist children with disabilities and behavioral issues, is overwhelmed with long waitlists.

An adoptive mother knew that caring for three children from the Kansas foster system meant nurturing those kids through some truly serious problems.

Yet the mother dramatically underestimated what she was taking on. Particularly the danger.

Two of the adopted children made shanks out of broken glass and damaged toys. They busted up the bedrooms where the walls were torn out from floor to ceiling. They even urinated on their toothbrushes.

The adoptive mother asked for help and applied for the state’s intensive services programs. That help never came.

That’s especially frustrating because adopting the children shifted the responsibility for the children’s care onto her. And foster care is sadly short on families willing to welcome children — who churn through the often-traumatic world of their biological families and the baked-in instability of foster care — into their forever homes.

“The state is not able to help these children anymore,” the mother said. (She asked The Beacon to leave her name out of this story to protect her privacy and that of the adoptive children.) “The state can’t find resources either. That’s the scary thing. We put them in state care to get them help and they’re not getting it.”

Eventually, she handed custody of two of the kids back to the state. The mom still talks to them. She’d consider taking them back — even as her family questions why she’d consider welcoming that chaos back into her life.

“I signed up to love them unconditionally,” she said.

That mother’s story, and the children’s fleeting experience with adoption, repeats itself in a sad routine across the state.

On average, 10 children a month are left at police stations or community treatment programs because their parents refuse to pick them up. These parents are told to pick up the kids, but they can’t handle the stress and don’t have the resources to help these children. So the parents leave them behind.

Once left behind, the Kansas Department for Children and Families is tasked with finding them the help and stable housing they need.

Unlike kids who land in state foster custody because their parents are sent to jail or social workers document abuse or neglect in their homes, these children come from stable homes that just can’t manage the enormity of the children’s mental illnesses or behavioral problems.

Families and social workers say that would happen less often if the state gave parents more help nurturing children who are battling mental illness or having profound difficulty controlling their behavior.

The Beacon talked with three families who had relinquished children to foster care. Each one said they asked for help and never got what they needed, and put their children in foster care after years of struggles.

That mother who gave two of her three adoptive kids to the state? On paper, she might have had all the options Kansas could offer between her private insurance and Medicaid. But she lives in western Kansas, far from the specialists who might have been able to corral their behavior.

“Even if we could drive clear across the state and spend months on end there — I don’t even know how easy it will be to even get them (helped) there because the system is so overwhelmed,” she said.

Families looking for help with troubled children

It’s hard to pinpoint the common reasons families voluntarily put their children in foster care. Each child has a different story.

Some land at psychiatric residential treatment facilities because of the dangers they pose to themselves or others.

A 2023 Kansas News Service article found that 57 autistic children entered foster care in one year because families couldn’t find the help they needed.

Their families hoped foster care could do what they couldn’t on their own. Instead, they lost their kids to the system.

Sherry Lesher is the mother of AJ Iverson, a 17-year-old autistic child who died in 2017. AJ spent two months in a psychiatric residential treatment facility, or PRTF. Lesher, like the western Kansas mother whose adoptive children crafted homemade knives, was trying to find services to help manage her child’s needs.

Other families turn their children over to the state because they can’t deal with their mental health problems. For others, it’s behavioral health. It sometimes tangles together issues like depression or anxiety with substance use or criminal activities.

A 2023 Kansas Statehouse committee heard from dozens of parents who said their kids were violent and needed inpatient care at psychiatric residential treatment facilities they couldn’t find.

Christina Smith told lawmakers at that time that her son threatened to kill her.

Her child didn’t want to go back to a psychiatric facility and threw Smith against the wall. She tried to call 911 but the child took her phone.

“We tried every service,” she said.

Elusive waivers for help

Smith’s and AJ Iverson’s families both applied for special waivers. In Kansas social services terms, “waiver” actually means a child qualifies for special services like intense treatment to deal with everything from autism and intellectual disabilities to “serious emotional disturbances.”

Rocky Nichols, executive director of Disability Rights Center of Kansas, said long waitlists for the waivers essentially mean months or years of waiting for help.

The state’s intellectual/developmental disability waiver has a 10-year-plus waitlist. Some families have been on it so long their children aged out. Another waiver for autism support to help kids from birth to age 5 has a yearslong waiting list.

In addition to waitlists, the programs are narrowly focused, Nichols said.

“As we walk through all seven of these doors (to the state’s waiver programs), most of them are locked,” he said. “If they’re open, they’re cracked open and only a few kids can get in.”

Survive the waitlists, advocates say, and the help can prove life-changing. Pleas to increase spending and shorten the wait times haven’t won over the Legislature, though lawmakers do have plans to help Kansans.

A shortage of help

Helping these families isn’t as simple as building new programs or fixing the waiver system. That’ll help, but finding people to work these high-stress jobs is critical.

For example, crisis teams that talk down suicidal Wichitans struggle to staff evening shifts . Also, mental health hospitals can’t find enough workers, so they can’t take every child. That could leave families on the hook.

So private agency KVC Kansas, one of the organizations hired by the state to manage foster care, has its own team of therapists to help children. Creating new programs isn’t always sustainable or easy.

A team of around 20 therapists helps more than a third of the children the agency manages — around 1,500 kids. But covering just a portion of its cases costs KVC over $300,000 a year and cuts into the margins of the budget it has to look after children.

“Even if every (therapist) hit their full caseload … we’re still going to be losing tens of thousands of dollars,” Matt Arnet, director of outpatient services for the nonprofit KVC Kansas, told The Beacon in 2023 .

Other nonprofits, like community mental health centers, have similar struggles. Finding the money to build programming is hard enough. Finding workers to staff them is even harder.

Psychiatric residential treatment facilities for kids with severe behavior problems can only find enough workers to look after two-thirds of the patients they’re licensed to handle.

“Without the staffing crisis, we would have plenty of PRTF beds,” said Laura Howard, secretary for the Department for Children and Families and the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services.

KDADS said 259 young people are in PRTF beds, as of early June. Another 138 were waiting for one to open up. That wait can run six months — an eternity for a family dealing with a psychiatric crisis.

Kansas is adding more services for kids

Howard continues to push for more prevention services that help kids before they ever enter foster care.

She said the Legislature has made investments to the foster care system, but not enough in services that might deal with the mental and behavioral problems that land so many kids in the system.

Lori Gonzales, president of EmberHope Youthville, is planning to open a new psychiatric residential treatment facility that treats kids at home with their families.

That could fill two voids: the lack of high-needs beds and a lack of in-home services.

Gonzales kept seeing readmissions after kids spend time in a PRTF. They can restore stability to a child’s life that might fall apart when they return home. When families see real progress, their guard might slip and they might skip follow-up appointments or medications — and the crisis returns.

So, EmberHope Youthville puts extra effort into the time after a child goes home.

“Kansas providers really are trying to do the best they can,” she said. “(It’s) just a resource issue.”

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