Because of the widespread interest in the success of child welfare reform in Kansas, staff of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitative Services (DSRS) had to turn interested people away at the conference they held in November. (The staff are hoping to be able to hold another conference in about a year.) The-standing-room-only crowd was able to hear about how the state of Kansas contracted out its foster-care, family-preservation, and adoption services; the conference focused on the lessons that the DSRS has learned over the last two years.

As those who have been tracking-the state's efforts will remember, its child welfare reform covers point-of entry to exit-from the moment a report is called in to the return home of the child or an adoption finalization-although not all services are targeted for privatization. The news that the crowd received was good news for children in Kansas: for example, in the first full year of contracting out adoption services, adoptions went up by 26 percent over the last year when the state handled them.

Marilyn Jacobson, the deputy commissioner of Children and Family Services, noted that they have made a few changes here and there with some of the contracts but are genuinely pleased with results thus far. She empathizes that this is a new way of doing business and that there will naturally be bumps along the road, but she was not chagrined. Foster care is a much bigger piece of the system than adoption services, and it will take some time to work out a privatization program that will not unduly penalize contractors for federal and state regulations that the contractors have no control over.

Equally important to those who work in state government is the fact that no state employees lost-their jobs. Because of a state hiring freeze coupled with some employees retiring or leaving government to work in private-sector alternatives, all employees who wanted to remain with the state did so.

The state employees, who used to be spread out all across the different parts of the system, have now all been trained to become better investigators who work in tandem with the police and the prosecutors. (The training was funded by Court Improvement Program dollars, federal funding available from the Children's Bureau). Thus the state retains its vital function-determining whether a child is in danger from a parent, and setting criteria for acceptable adoptive homes-but the services are all done by the private sector.

The success of the efforts in Kansas was confirmed on Capitol Hill on February 12, 1998, when the-secretary of the DSRS went before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Secretary Rochelle Chronister testified that the department's-reforms were all done internally, without one legislative change. Moreover the cost savings have all been put directly back into the child welfare system, largely in training. She note that reforms were done first and foremost to make all child welfare services outcome-driven. That means that the focus is on a permanent home for each child. As the secretary said, "The 'old-world' incentive was-to keep the beds filled; now it is permanence."

The state-has also hired an outside contractor to evaluate its entire child welfare reform effort. The intent is to add credibility to the initial results and help ensure the children are not "slipping through the cracks" under the new system which is a major concern of critics of the reform. The contract was won by James Bell and Associates, of Arlington, Virginia, a firm experienced in evaluating child welfare services.