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Sadie Carpenter said no one ever told her why she and her husband weren’t allowed to adopt their great granddaughter.

Marilyn Dilley said she and her husband were never told why they couldn’t adopt a boy they’d cared for as foster parents.

Julie Hatcher said she and her husband did everything their social worker told them to do but it didn’t matter. The court still put their 5-year-old son in foster care.

“From day one, they told me they would take my son from me,’ Hatcher said, testifying Thursday before the House Federal and State Affairs Committee.

The state’s foster care system, they said, treated them like dirt.

Her comments and the others came Thursday during a third day of hearings on Kansas foster care being held by the House Federal and State Affairs Committee.

Carpenter accused the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services of “buying and selling children” not unlike “Hitler’s Germany.”

SRS Secretary Don Jordan assured the committee that was not the case.

The process for removing children from abusive or neglectful homes, he said, is “very exact” and subject to a series of checks and balances designed to protect a parent’s rights while ensuring a child’s safety.

Jordan said there’s no way someone in Thatcher’s situation would have had her child removed if she had complied with the court-sanctioned plan for the return of her son.

Decisions on who should be allowed to adopt a child, he said, are based on “what’s in the best interests of the child,” and not on what a relative or foster parent may want.

“Often what happens is people are told what might happen, based on a lot of contingencies,” Jordan said. “But because they’re excited (about adopting), those contingencies don’t get heard.”

Jordan said the foster care system isn’t perfect and mistakes are made.

“But there are systems in place to correct those mistakes,” he said.

He denied the often-heard allegation that foster care decisions are influenced by the state’s four regional contractors needing to make money. The contracts, he said, are “incentivized” to move children through the system.

“These are managed care contracts,” Jordan said.

Kansas, he said, has about 900 fewer children in foster care today than it did three years ago.

In the current fiscal year, SRS expects to spend $125.8 million in state funds ($196.2 million all funds) on foster care, family preservation and adoptions services.

Rep. Mike Kiegerl, R-Olathe, said that after listening to Thatcher, Dilley, and Carpenter’s testimony, he found Jordan’s explanation hard to believe.

The system, he said, appears to conspire to do what’s best for the contractors, not what’s best for children.

“But I don’t think the problem with SRS is at the head,” Kiegerl said. “I think it’s way down at the case manager level.”

Kiegerl’s daughter is an attorney who often represents parents and grandparents whose children and grandchildren are in foster care.

Kiegerl’s criticism baffled The Very Reverend Edward Fellhauer, who runs St. Francis Community Services, the foster care and family preservation contractor in the western half of the state.

“We care about the kids of Kansas,” Fellhauer said. “I’m concerned when I hear we’re in this for money. That is just not accurate. We don’t make more money if we have more kids. Our goal is not to make money; our goal is to reintegrate these families, to get them back together.”

On Monday, children who’ve been in foster care are expected to testify.