Jane Adams, Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Jane Adams is the Executive Director of Keys for Networking, Inc., the Kansas state organization of the Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health. Keys for Networking is also the Kansas Parent Information and Resource Center. Dr. Adams serves as an executive board member of the Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health. She is a member of the Kansas Social Rehabilitation Services 2002 Task Force to explore the role of state mental hospitals in community-based continuum of services for children. She has served as an appointee to the Governor's Mental Health Planning Council, the 1997 Topeka State Hospital Closure Committee, and the 2001 Legislative Hospital Review Commission.
As director of Keys for Networking since 1994, Dr. Adams has been instrumental in securing the Medicaid Home- and Community-based Services waiver for Kansas children with severe emotional disabilities. Kansas is one of only three states to offer Medicaid-funded choices to allow parents to raise children with severe emotional disabilities at home. In addition, she has provided the leadership to mobilize families statewide to contact their legislators to secure mental health parity, Healthwave coverage at 200% of the poverty level, and funding for a statewide mental health system of care for children and their families.

Dr. Adams has authored and co-authored such products as the Keys CD-ROM and online WrapAround Training modules (Strengths-based planning, Cultural Competence, Family Involvement, and School Mental Health Collaboration); "STAR, A five module CD-ROM Parent Guide to Proactive Discipline"; "Blamed and Ashamed", a youth-directed national research study of co-occurring mental health, substance abuse treatments; "Best Practices in Facilitating Meaningful Family Involvement in Educational Decision Making" for school psychologists; "Moving Forward Together: Parent Professional Partnership;" Children Time Forgot, A Study of Children Who Died While Incarcerated in the 1800s; and others.

Dr. Adams served as an Associate Professor of Special Education in Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disorders at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas and as principal/special education director of Kansas' largest institution for 200 adjudicated male juvenile offenders. She received her Master's and Ph.D. from Kansas State University, and her Bachelor's degree from Marymount University in 1969. Dr. Adams has two grown children.