TOPEKA — As part of ongoing budget cuts, officials at the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services have decided not to renew the agency's contracts with two child advocacy programs: Keys for Networking and the Kansas Youth Empowerment Academy.
As a result, the Kansas Youth Empowerment Academy is expected to close on Dec. 31.
“We’re fairly new, so we don’t have a lot of reserves built up,” said Julia Thomas, the program’s director. “We’ve been told we can rebid on the contract, but there are some bigger programs out there that want it. We can try, but I doubt that we’d get it.”
Launched in 2005, the academy is charged with helping young people with disabilities learn job skills, find employment and live independently.
Each of the academy’s five employees is disabled; Thomas is blind.
SRS’ contract with the academy was for $150,000 a year.
Keys for Networking’s future also is uncertain. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know that we’re not giving up,” said the program’s executive director, Jane Adams.
The program’s contract with SRS was for $288,000 a year. The contract ends Aug. 31.
Under its contract, Keys for Networking worked with hundreds of teenage children in foster care who were at risk of not graduating from high school.
“Our task was to make that (graduation) happen,” Adams said.
When SRS began the contract in 2006, less than one-fourth of the teenagers who aged out of the foster care system had high school diplomas. Last spring, she said, more than 80 percent graduated.
Keys for Networking staff developed a spread sheet that kept track of the students’ credit hours, where they were going to school and where they were living.
“For some of these kids, it wasn’t unusual for them to move two or three times a semester,” Adams said. “When that would happen, we’d get everybody on the phone and find out what needed to happen to make sure that kid’s credit hours followed him from one school to the next."
Keys for Networking has 10 full- and part-time employees.
In an email to KHI News Service, SRS spokeswoman Angela De Rocha wrote that SRS workers plan to take over the Keys for Networking role. She also noted that the state’s four foster care contractors are responsible for meeting the educational needs of the children in state custody.
Kansas privatized most of its foster care system in 1997. Currently, SRS contracts with KVC Health Systems, St. Francis Community Services, TFI Family Services and United Methodist Youthville.
Keys for Networking’s role, De Rocha wrote, was “greatly reduced” earlier this year when legislators passed Senate Bill 23, which in part stipulates that children aging out of foster care will be allowed to graduate if they’ve accumulated a minimum of 21 credits hours.
Prior to the new law, foster children, depending on where they lived, may have been required to have as many as 32 credit hours to graduate. In Kansas, graduation requirements vary from school district to school district.
Adams, who helped write Senate Bill 23, said the new law is sure to give teenagers a clearer picture of what they need to graduate, but it does little to help them or their advocates keep track of their records as they move from one foster home to another.
Children in foster care are allowed to ask a judge to release them from state custody once they are 17; they’re allowed to remain in the system until they are 21.
Keys for Networking also has a separate contract with SRS to help mentally ill and emotionally disturbed children who are not in foster care but who may have been suspended or expelled from school due to aberrant behaviors.
That $150,000 contract was recently extended until the end of September.
“We’ve been told that we’ll be able to bid on it,” Adams said. “It was supposed to end June 30, but it’s been extended to the end of September. The RFP (request for proposal) isn’t out for it yet.”
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