By MADELINE FOX

The Kansas Department for Children and Families is opening up child protection services jobs to people who aren’t licensed social workers.

Child protection workers investigate reports of possible child abuse or neglect and make recommendations about whether or not children should be removed from their homes.

A third of child protection positions are vacant, and some have been for more than a year, according to DCF. Loosening the prerequisites, said DCF Secretary Gina Meier-Hummel, will help fill in the gaps.

“We have been advertising and advertising positions for quite some time now, and we can’t get many of those positions filled,” Meier-Hummel said Monday in announcing the hiring policy change. Considering unlicensed job candidates, she said, is a must, “in order to have an adequate workforce.”

DCF will still require a bachelor’s degree for its child protection workers. And Meier-Hummel stressed that her agency will extensively train non-licensed workers, and intends to place them in offices with licensed supervisors and other licensed social workers.

Becky Fast, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers’ Kansas chapter, doesn’t think opening the child protection jobs up to unlicensed workers will solve the underlying issues that are keeping the positions unfilled.

“Worker turnover, recruitment, retention will not be solved unless there are higher salaries, adequate training, and lower caseloads,” Fast said.

Meier-Hummel said hiring college graduates for these child protection jobs, regardless of whether they have a license in social work, puts Kansas in line with many other states across the country that don’t require licenses for all child protection roles.

DCF is also planning pay raises. The agency is asking the state for an additional $5.4 million over three years to increase current staff salaries by 5 percent, to attract and retain the licensed workers it currently has.

“In order to make sure we can move to the unlicensed staff, we want to make sure we can take care of our current licensed staff,” Meier-Hummel said.

But the bulk of the new budget request announced Monday — $22 million — would go toward updating the old IT systems DCF uses to track children and cases.

That follows a request in January for a $16.5 million budget enhancement for this year and next to address other nagging problems, including providing a place for children awaiting placement to sleep, locating kids missing from their foster homes, and family preservation.

Madeline Fox is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can reach her on Twitter @maddycfox. 

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) – The U.S. Senate has confirmed Timothy Garrison as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri.

Garrison has been an assistant U.S. attorney in the district’s Springfield office since 2007 and has been serving as the interim U.S. Attorney since his appointment by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Jan. 3.

Before becoming a federal prosecutor, Garrison was a prosecutor in the Marine Corps. He is a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve and has served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A former teacher of the year for a northeast Kansas school district has admitted to having with a student.

Forty-five-year-old Todd Burd pleaded guilty Friday to amended charges of unlawful sexual relations.

He initially was charged with aggravated criminal sodomy after the 16-year-old boy reported being assaulted while sitting in Burd’s pickup truck.

Court documents say the victim told police that Burd sent photographs and messages that were “sexual in nature” beforehand. The victim said Burd had been pressuring him to meet after school hours.

Burd taught music and was the choir director at Gardner Edgerton High School in late 2016, when the incident happened. Burd received the Gardner-Edgerton district’s Teacher of the Year honor in 2015. His sentencing is set for June 29.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) – The Latest on allegations against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (all times local):

6p.m.

A judge has denied a request by Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens to prohibit Attorney General Josh Hawley from investigating the governor and a veterans’ charity he founded.

The decision Friday by Cole County Circuit Judge Jon Beetem comes just one day after a hearing in which Greitens’ attorney suggested Hawley had a conflict because he publicly called for Greitens to resign.

The judge said Greitens’ attorneys had no legal grounds to stop Hawley’s investigation. He dismissed Greitens’ request.

The Republican attorney general called for the Republican governor’s resignation after a House committee released a report earlier this month containing allegation of sexual misconduct by Greitens.

Hawley says that was unrelated to his investigation into Greitens’ alleged political use of a donor list from The Mission Continues charity.

3p.m.

A legislative committee investigating Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens is having trouble obtaining a deposition taken by Greitens’ attorneys of a woman with whom he had an affair.

Records obtained by The Associated Press show the House issued a subpoena for the deposition April 18. A previously unpublicized court filing by House attorneys says lawyers for the woman and St. Louis prosecutor’s office agreed to provide the deposition but Greitens’ attorneys have not yet done so.

The deposition was taken this month in preparation for Greitens’ May 14 trial on an invasion-of-privacy charge alleging he took and transmitted a nonconsensual, compromising photo of the women.

Greitens attorneys previously released a brief excerpt of the deposition in which the woman expressed doubts about whether she had seen Greitens with a camera.

ANDERSON COUNTY — A Kansas man died in an accident during a chase by law enforcement just before 5:30a.m. Friday in Anderson County.

The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2007 Suzuki motorcycle driven by  Luke Lennon Rea, 21, Ottawa,  was being pursued by the Anderson County Sheriff and was attempting to pass a semi.

Upon passing, Rea lost control of the motorcycle when a tire went off the right shoulder. The semi ran over Rea and the motorcycle.

Rea was pronounced dead at the scene and transported to Frontier Forensics.  The semi driver William D. Metcalf, 57, Dallas, Texas was not injured.

The Anderson County Sheriff did not report what prompted the chase.

By JIM MCLEAN

A high-stakes gambit initiated by Kansas lawmakers Thursday could prove to be the checkmate move that blocks Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer from imposing new Medicaid eligibility restrictions.

Colyer wants a four-year extension of the federal waiver that allowed the state to privatize its $3 billion Medicaid program and re-name it KanCare in 2013. It currently covers more than 420,000 low-income, elderly and disabled Kansans

Early in the legislative session, lawmakers added language to a budget bill to stop Colyer from seeking federal approval for the eligibility changes. But they worried that the governor could still use his line-item veto to strike the proviso and move forward with KanCare 2.0.

To prevent that, the Senate Ways and Means Committee on Thursday approved an amendment authored by Republican Sen. Vicki Schmidt that ties all Medicaid funding to the survival of the proviso.

“The governor could still line-item veto (the proviso), but the consequences would be dire,” said Sen. Laura Kelly, the top Democrat on the committee and a candidate for governor.

A veto, Kelly said, would “un-fund our entire Medicaid program.”

Colyer’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At issue are Colyer’s proposals to impose lifetime benefit caps for some KanCare recipients and to require that others work or undergo job training to maintain their eligibility. Federal officials consistently rejected such restrictions since the inception of Medicaid in the mid-1960s.

But the leaders installed at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by President Donald Trump reversed that policy as part of an effort to lessen dependency on government assistance programs.

“People moving off of Medicaid is a good outcome,” Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in defense of work requirements at a January press conference at the White House.

“We hope that means they do not need the program anymore, that they have transitioned to a job that provides health insurance or that they can afford insurance on their own,” she said.

Critics of the tighter restrictions say Medicaid’s primary purpose is to provide health coverage to low-income, elderly and disabled people — not vocational services.

“There is no independent data that shows that work requirements do anything except reduce the number of people who get health care,” said Kansas House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Wichita Democrat running for governor.

Jim McLean is managing director of the Kansas News Service. You can reach him on Twitter @jmcleanks. 

ST. LOUIS (AP) – The source of a $100,000 payment that went toward legal fees of the ex-husband of the woman involved in a 2015 affair with Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens will be the subject of a deposition next week.

Attorney Al Watkins represents the ex-husband and has said his firm received two anonymous $50,000 payments in January, just before Greitens admitted to the affair. But Watkins’ attorney, Chuck Hatfield, said in a hearing Friday that an unnamed client of Watkins was involved in providing the money.

Defense attorneys have speculated that the money could be from a “political operative.” Judge Rex Burlison ruled that Watkins must appear at a deposition Monday.

Greitens is charged with invasion of privacy related to the affair. A separate felony case accuses him of misusing a charity donor list.

HARRISONVILLE, Mo. (AP) – Police say a cattle trailer has overturned in western Missouri, killing 40 to 50 animals.

The crash happened around 4:30 a.m. Friday in Harrisonville, which is about 30 miles south of Kansas City. Police say the truck was pulling a trailer with 80 to 100 head of cattle.

A man and woman in the truck were taken to a hospital with minor injuries. Police say the surviving cattle were rounded up and taken from the scene in trailers. Police say some are expected to be looked at by a veterinarian. It’s unclear where the cattle were going.

The cause of the crash remains under investigation. It caused major traffic delays on northbound Interstate 49.