AN ACT relating to child welfare.
HB 778 is a broad child welfare measure that revises Kentucky law across foster care, child protection, juvenile justice, child care licensing, and related criminal statutes. It strengthens background-check and placement rules for foster, relative caregiver, fictive kin, and adoptive homes; requires training for fictive kin caring for young children on pediatric abusive head trauma; and bars placements with certain sex offenders or households containing registrants. The bill also directs the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to prioritize placement of children near their home county when possible, document unmet placement needs, and expand recruitment of foster homes.
The bill adds a new Plan of Safe Care framework for substance-exposed infants, requiring health care providers to notify the department and requiring a safety-focused assessment and service coordination response that is preventive rather than punitive. It also expands reporting and data-collection requirements, including annual reporting on termination-of-parental-rights timelines and foster-care duration before TPR filings, and it broadens the external child fatality and near fatality review panel’s access to records and reporting duties. In addition, the bill updates definitions and penalties in criminal abuse and homicide statutes, including changes tied to child abuse, controlled substances, and fentanyl-related deaths.
HB 778 amends numerous Kentucky Revised Statutes affecting the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, the Department for Community Based Services, courts, schools, child-care providers, law enforcement, and professional licensing boards. It changes foster-care and adoption screening standards, placement procedures, juvenile diversion and school-notification rules, child abuse reporting and confidentiality provisions, child-care licensing and training requirements, and criminal statutes involving abuse, neglect, and violent-offender classification. It also creates new reporting obligations for courts and the cabinet and imposes new training requirements across several licensed professions and emergency responders.
The bill appears to have received overwhelmingly positive legislative support, with unanimous or near-unanimous votes in both chambers and final enactment as an act. The voting history suggests broad bipartisan agreement on the need to strengthen child protection, improve placement stability, and expand training and reporting related to abuse, neglect, and substance exposure. No committee transcript was provided, so there is no recorded committee-level debate in the materials supplied.
No notable floor or committee contention is reflected in the provided record, and the bill passed with no recorded dissent in the votes shown. Based on the text, the most likely areas of policy sensitivity are the expanded background-check and exclusion rules for caregivers, the new mandatory response framework for substance-exposed infants, the increased sharing of juvenile and school-related information, and the broader access/reporting powers for the fatality review panel. However, the available materials do not show any organized opposition or specific disputed amendments.