A bipartisan group of Missouri lawmakers pressed Children’s Division Director Sara Smith on Wednesday to explain how the agency ensures children with elevated medical or behavioral needs get appropriate foster placements.
The questions came after what state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, an Arnold Republican and chair of the legislature’s Joint Committee on Government Accountability who called the hearing, described as “a number of fatalities” this summer involving children in the agency’s care.
Among them was Korbin Papadopoulos, a 17-year-old with type 1 diabetes and autism who died June 6 after Macon County division workers placed him nearly 300 miles away in southwest Missouri.
Police records reviewed by The Independent show the foster parent was licensed only to care for relatives and later told law enforcement he had not been trained to manage diabetes. An autopsy listed Korbin’s cause of death as diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening buildup of toxins in the blood caused by uncontrolled diabetes.
Korbin’s father, Teddy Papadopoulos, told lawmakers on Wednesday that his son’s death was the result of failures by the division.
“Our family had to bury our son,” he said, “because of negligence on Children’s Division’s part.”
Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin, a Shelbina Republican representing the district where Korbin’s parents live, asked about the agency’s procedures to keep kids safe “when an appropriate placement can’t be found.”
Smith said that “it’s all hands on deck” when a child with elevated medical or behavioral needs must be placed on an emergency basis.
“Everybody needs to be helping to look to find a placement for this child,” Smith said. “Whichever child it is, it is something that (the division’s) central office needs to be involved in. It’s something that our regional leadership needs to be involved in.”
When there is no appropriate placement, Smith told the committee, standard practice is for division workers to stay with kids in hotels because “at the end of the day, Children’s Division is who is charged with keeping that child.”
But state Rep. Ian Mackey, a St. Louis Democrat serving on the committee, said Smith’s description raised questions about whether anyone has clear responsibility for making sure a high-needs child ends up somewhere safe.
Smith described a centralized residential screening team and regional “level of need specialists” who help find placements. But she also described staff at multiple levels of the department joining the search.
“You said it’s a centralized system, and then you described an all-hands-on-deck approach, which is actually the opposite of a centralized system,” Mackey said. “Having anybody and everybody who’s got their fingerprints on the case or who works at any level of the department ultimately being responsible for finding qualified placements or specialized placement is an incredibly chaotic and unsustainable system.”
Assessing safety and risk
The scrutiny comes as the division prepares to restructure the teams that investigate allegations of child abuse and neglect, placing workers under more centralized state supervision and creating specialized career pathways.
Less than 24 hours before Wednesday’s hearing, Gov. Mike Kehoe signed an executive order establishing a child welfare task force to develop “unified standards of safety” for shared use by division staff, juvenile offices, courts and private contractors.
Coleman, who told The Independent she did not learn of the executive order before it was issued, said the governor’s action was a reaction to the legislature’s decision to hold a hearing.
Smith said the push for greater consistency grew partly out of an “internal assessment” conducted over the past year through meetings with division staff, courts, juvenile officers, law enforcement and community members across the state.
This assessment, Smith said, uncovered instances in which division workers did not respond to hotline reports of potential abuse or neglect before law enforcement became involved, did not refer alleged victims of abuse to child advocacy centers and refused to cooperate with juvenile officers.
“This indicated to our leadership team that our workforce did not understand how to assess safety and risk,” Smith said.
After the restructuring goes into effect, workers will report to regional leaders of teams with specialities such as newborn assessments and sexual abuse allegations, instead of local supervisors who oversee all assessments and investigations within a smaller area.
But frontline workers told The Independent in recent months that new requirements and prescriptive policies introduced in the past year and a half have limited their discretion to help children and families and made it harder to close cases.
Ashley Allen, an investigator who quit the division in April, said those additional demands can have consequences at both ends of the system — delaying responses to children who may be in danger while prolonging investigations involving families whose children are safe.
“You’ve got kids to see that may or may not be unsafe, but you don’t get around to seeing them because of all the other things that you have to do, and it puts some families on the backburner,” Allen told The Independent. “And there are kids that are safe where we’re pestering their families.”
Smith said the restructuring is also intended to reduce turnover among workers who investigate reports of potential child abuse or neglect.
Current turnover among the division’s frontline workers is about 40%, Smith said. Turnover reached 55% in fiscal year 2022, after then-Gov. Mike Parson cut almost 100 jobs in the division in 2020, citing COVID-19 budget constraints.
While it’s an improvement, Smith said, the current turnover rate still means that the division lost more than a third of its frontline staff in a year.
In a January email to The Independent, the Department of Social Services, which oversees the Children’s Division, described the creation of specialized teams as a way to build up a more tenured workforce and maximize “efficiency within currently allocated funding levels.”
The division has already expanded a specialized team serving older foster youth and launched a critical investigations unit in January focused on child fatalities and near-fatalities related to alleged abuse or neglect. Smith said those two teams have had no turnover so far.
“One of the clearest lessons was that we cannot continue asking frontline team members to be experts in everything,” Smith said. “That’s just not sustainable.”
Lawmakers had mixed reactions to the restructuring and Kehoe’s announced task force.
State Rep. Raychel Proudie, a Democrat from St. Louis, cautioned against attempting to write a rigid definition of child safety into state law.
“The mission is to include keeping kids safe, and we can have a conversation on what that means in particular,” Proudie said. “But obviously free from harm, injury or death seems pretty standard. That seems like a good framework on which to start.”
State Rep. Melissa Schmidt, a Republican from Eldridge, asked for “uniformity of practices across the state, rather than some decisions being made county by county,” which she said could include “the definition of safe practices.”
‘Somewhere the buck has to stop’
Police records reviewed by The Independent show Macon County workers did not verify that the foster parent who agreed to take Korbin was licensed to care for him. And when workers realized six days after dropping Korbin off in southwest Missouri that they had mistakenly placed him with a foster parent who was only licensed to care for his relatives, they didn’t send someone to pick him up.
One worker involved in Korbin’s placement told police that a circuit manager was part of discussions about whether workers needed to bring the teen back to Macon County. The supervisor said workers had been calling emergency residentials, foster homes and therapeutic foster homes but could not find an appropriate placement for him.
The day Korbin died, according to police records, the supervisor tried to arrange immediate transportation of the teen back to the Macon County division office.
When no one was available, the supervisor told an on-call worker to drive to southwest Missouri and bring Korbin back to the office. But the worker said the foster parent had agreed to keep Korbin in his care for a few more days, until Monday.
Korbin died that day.
Mackey said cases involving children with significant medical or behavioral needs should have a clear line of authority at the state level.
“I think you want it to be centralized,” Mackey said. “But it sounds like right now it absolutely is not.”
O’Laughlin said the system Smith described left her unsure who ultimately bears responsibility for making sure a child is placed safely.
“If that many people get notified when you’re having a problem placing someone,” she added, “somewhere the buck has to stop.”
When Coleman asked Smith how many children had died while in foster care since she became director in March 2025, Smith said she didn’t have that number but would find out.
Papadopoulos, who told lawmakers he testified “for Korbin and every other kid in foster care now and in the future,” told The Independent time will tell whether the hearing was worthwhile.
“The long term will determine how I feel about today,” Papadopoulos said. “If nothing gets done at all, nothing changes, no policies or no change, nothing at all, then it’s just a waste of time. I’m here to hopefully change something for somebody, to help somebody — between protocols that are in place that weren’t necessarily followed and protocols that should be in place.”
This story was originally published by the Missouri Independent.
