The child’s mother was trying to get him substance abuse help. The child didn’t think he needed it. That disagreement ended with foster care.
by Blaise Mesa
A high school junior based in Salina regularly came home at night drunk.
Sometimes he passed out in the front yard of his mother’s home. Other times, he’d sleep off a night of heavy drinking in the passenger’s seat of a car.
The teen’s mother didn’t know what to do. She’d lost the boy’s father, a drinker, to liver failure. The boy didn’t see much of a problem. After all, lots of high schoolers drink.
The minor, who isn’t being named to protect his privacy, was in therapy — something his mother initiated.
But then she got a call from police that he’d been busted for underage drinking. She didn’t come pick him up.
Under Kansas law, the teenager couldn’t be forced into a drug treatment program when he was living with his mother. But if he was a ward of the state, a foster kid, he could. She hoped a short stint in foster care would get him sober. She struggled to find resources in the community and hoped this desperate effort would turn the child’s life around.
But foster care is the wrong place, experts say — so the child’s life got turned upside down.
This story is common. On average, 10 children a month in Kansas get left at police stations or community treatment programs because their overwhelmed 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.
Those children who are left by their parents aren’t technically foster kids. At least not automatically. Once left behind, it’s the job of the Kansas Department for Children and Families to find them the help and stable housing they need.
But their numbers, some 120 cases a year, is equal 4% of the state’s foster population. That’s on par with the number of kids who land in foster care because of a parent’s drug abuse or because of sexual abuse. It exceeds the cases stemming from a parent going to jail, caregivers hooked on meth or domestic violence.
Details about the case
The Beacon isn’t using the full names of anyone involved in the case to protect participants’ identities. But we talked to the child, who’s 16 now and living in a group foster home. We spoke to his mother, to an aunt who had custody for a time and to an attorney representing the child’s interests in custody matters. And we looked at court records.
The boy first entered state custody in October 2023. That’s when he was booked for underage drinking when he was found in the passenger seat of the car.
The mother didn’t come pick the child up that night.
St. Francis Ministries, the foster care agency running his case, didn’t find an opening with a foster family at first. So the boy spent the first few weeks at a group home in Andover, Kansas.
That’s when the child’s aunt stepped in and the boy went to live with her in November 2023.
The first few months were rocky. At one point, the boy sent a letter to the judge overseeing his case complaining about his situation.
“I have been borrowing and using other people’s stuff since I don’t have anything of my own,” the boy said in the letter. “I could be a normal teenager if I had some of my belongings.”
The child was short on clothes. He needed a winter coat. He wanted to apply for a job and needed his Social Security card. Eventually, he got those and other crucial items. He wanted the family dog to come with him, but that didn’t happen.
His aunt provided his home from November through April 2024. She had raised three boys of her own and had a spare room for a teenager. She assumed her experience raising children would make life as a foster care placement easy, but it didn’t.
The teenager had a lot of appointments — random drug tests, therapy appointments and other visits required by the foster care system.
His aunt felt like she was in a no-win situation. She missed so much work because of all the random appointments that she found herself in danger of losing her job. Still, she failed to get him to so many appointments that she got at odds with caseworkers.
“I’ve been a working mom of three kids for a whole lot of years,” she said. “I thought it was something I could handle and knew how to do. I was completely unprepared for the amount of time that all of those things were going to require.”
The aunt asked St. Francis for help with transportation to appointments. She said the private nonprofit foster agency offered options to make transportation easier. But days later, the agency decided to move him out of her home.
St. Francis has systems to help families make those appointments and assists families regularly.
“We remain committed to continuous improvement and delivering quality care and services,” an agency spokesperson said in an email. “Our primary focus is always on the well-being and safety of the children and families we serve.”
Failed drug tests weren’t the boy’s only issue. His mother and aunt disagreed on what medications he should take.
A court ordered the teenager to counseling and various doctor’s appointments. Those doctors prescribed medication that the aunt gave him. That upset the child’s mother, who didn’t want him taking the medications.
Parents in such cases retain a right to determine what medicines their kid takes. That meant the aunt was told one thing by the boy’s mother while a court order sent him to therapy and a therapist put him on medication.
This back-and-forth eventually led to a safety plan, a written plan that said to follow the mother’s wishes on things like taking him off the medication.
The aunt accused St. Francis of failing her and refused to sign the safety plan without a commitment of more help. St. Francis contends it was helpful and needed the aunt to promise to get him to more appointments. The mother was mad at her sister for how she was taking care of the child in general.
Eventually, the case managers sent the child to a new home. That upset him and he ran away. The child was found and put into a new placement — a group home in Bel Aire, Kansas.
The child has missed around 40% of school since the arrest that led to him leaving his mother’s home. Regular tests for substance abuse have gone well, but he’s hours away from his friends.
The relationships between the boy and his mother, with his aunt and between those two sisters grew increasingly tense. As caseworkers tried to build a plan that might eventually put him back in his mother’s home, the lawyer in this case secured a court order blocking contact with his aunt.
The aunt said the system has failed. If the boy had gotten help in Salina for his drinking, she contends, his chaotic path through the foster system could have been avoided. Instead, he’s living in a group home and she hasn’t had so much as a phone call with him for months.
“They took him out of a very healthy family situation where there were obvious indicators that he was being successful, and put him in a terrible situation where his options at a future are incredibly limited,” she said.
The teenager has since been moved to live with his grandparents.
Foster care lacks additional resources
The Salina case started because a mother thought foster care could get her help she couldn’t find elsewhere. Matt Stephens, vice president of foster care at St. Francis Ministries, said he’s heard that a lot.
“Every time I hear it,” he said, “I make sure to try to educate people that that’s just not a reality of the situation.”
DCF and the private nonprofit agencies it works with couldn’t run the foster care system without help from community counseling centers and other social service organizations that couldn’t help that mother in Salina.
Foster agencies offer some of those services, but mostly for kids in the system. The state offers some services, counseling and the like, aimed at keeping them in their families’ homes. Those services are just in short supply.
For example, the Salina teenager got counseling 160 miles from home, through the Johnson County Mental Health Center.
Kristalle Hedrick, vice president of FosterAdopt Connect, said foster care doesn’t have enough money to deal with everything that’s thrown at it.
Years ago, the Kansas Legislature passed a law that made it much harder to put minors in jail. Lawmakers reasoned that correctional facilities can’t provide the therapeutic services minors needed. But the Legislature didn’t invest enough additional funds into community support.
Hedrick said she’s heard stories from caseworkers who call the state corrections department looking for resources to help high-needs kids and get turned away. Caseworkers hear: They’re foster care kids. They’re not our responsibility.
“It’s sort of a hot-potato kind of issue,” she said.
Some possible fixes
The state has made gains. It passed a law last year compelling the prison system to work more closely with foster agencies to address underlying problems children in the foster care system face.
State lawmakers are considering spending more on therapy and other services to whittle down waitlists that can stretch on for years.
Laura Howard, secretary for the Department for Children and Families, said her agency has expanded services aimed at preventing kids from falling into foster care, added crisis hotlines and tapped into some federal programs.
For instance, she said a child behavioral intervention program brings therapists to the homes of children to work on behavioral and emotional management.
That program is also now a Medicaid service, which means families don’t need to enter foster care to get it.
“We have filled a lot of gaps in the system. We have more to fill. I mean, we’re not there yet,” she said. “(But) I’m definitely more optimistic today.”
This article was republished here with the permission of: The Beacon