The 2019 Child Welfare System Task Force Report recommended increasing funding to effectively attract and retain high-quality family well-being staff. Since time, providers and policymakers together have continued to express concerns about the Family Well-Being System’s workforce shortage. The Kansas legislature supported the workforce with almost $10 million of immediate recruitment & retention funds in 2022; we look forward to exploring longer-term solutions to the family well-being workforce crisis.

Thanks to the support of lawmakers, agency leaders and providers, Kansas has made tremendous strides in child well-being outcomes in recent years. Everyone agrees there is more work ahead. We look forward to building on recent legislative investments in Family First Prevention, the family well-being workforce, kin-first approaches and Child Placing Agency and residential services. Today, Alliance budget priorities center around building innovative approaches to meet the needs of youth with complex behavioral health challenges, delinquency behaviors and disabilities.

The Alliance advocated for Kansas to be one of the first states in the country to implement the federal Family First Prevention Services Act in 2019. Each branch of government worked together to make that happen, and the results have been exactly what we hoped: Kansas has safely reduced the number of children in foster care by 1,300 from June 2019 to June 2022. Our prevention efforts—not only with Family First; but also with Family Preservation, child care and concrete supports for families—must continue. Today, we focus our prevention efforts on youth with complex needs that need stronger community-based supports to safely reduce the need for foster care.

When children must enter foster care to protect their health and safety, the Children’s Alliance supports a Kin-First approach. A Kin-First approach ensures our child welfare professionals engage with and explore the child’s family and community network to support a foster care home setting familiar and comfortable to the child when possible. With the support of the legislature, DCF has supported kin caregivers through enhanced professional support, training and education, peer networking and concrete financial support. The Alliance advocates for Kin-First policies that ensure all children placed in kinship care receive equitable financial and professional support to ensure child safety and well-being.

The Children’s Alliance will continue our focus on improving system collaboration and expanding service array to meet the needs of youth with complex behavioral health care needs, such as youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities, autism, delinquency behaviors or complex trauma history. In recent years, we have seen improved access to psychiatric residential treatment, collaboration between the Family Well-Being System and the Juvenile Justice System, efforts to address youth mobile crisis efforts, legislation to expand behavioral health care access and targeted work to benefit youth with autism. The Alliance will continue to lead to ensure our systems, silos and state agencies prioritize meeting the needs of youth with complex behavioral health challenges.

The Governor and the Kansas legislature have recognized the importance of educational opportunities and achievement for youth in foster care. Kansas has recently implemented a Foster Care Academic Report Card, encouraging coordination and collaboration between the Department of Children and Families and the Department of Education. Gathering baseline data is an important start. Moving forward. the two departments must develop strategies together—this will require resourcing cross-system training and collaboration, innovation and coordination at the state and community levels. The Alliance will advocate for policies that ensure we don’t stop our work with reporting children’s educational outcomes—we work to improve them.