September 25, 2026
TOPEKA — Kansas’s top foster care official said the state should be “laser focused” on Wichita to improve a youth placement measure that has consistently fallen short of court-ordered standards.
Foster care contractors in Sedgwick County, where Wichita is located, have continuously struggled to place children in housing instead of offices or unlicensed beds. Since 2024, numbers have deteriorated.
Laura Howard, secretary of the Kansas Department for Children and Families, told a legislative committee that in 2025 the “failure to place” metric worsened for the second year in a row in Sedgwick County. It appears on track to do the same in 2026. Failure to place refers to how often foster care contractors let kids sleep in an unlicensed environment.