YODER, Kan. — The Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center (KLETC) will be a part of a two-day summit focused on court and community response to behavioral health issues in Topeka. It’s drawing registrants from across the state.
The 2022 Kansas Mental Health Summit is scheduled for April 13 and 14 and will be the first of its kind in Kansas. More than 600 registrants including judges, legislators, attorneys, court services officers and community corrections officers will participate. It also includes representatives from the executive branch, mental and medical health disciplines, law enforcement, first responders and community leadership.
The summit planning committee chairperson, Judge Robert Wonnell, said he was inspired to organize the statewide summit after attending a similar regional summit in 2019. That summit was the work of a national judicial task force involving the National Center for State Courts, the Conference of Chief Justices, the Conference of State Court Administrators, and the State Justice Institute.
Judge Steven Liefman of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida will deliver a keynote address that describes what judicial leadership was able to accomplish in Miami-Dade County, the seventh-largest county in the nation with a population of nearly 3 million.
Other speakers on the agenda will give perspectives on local and national initiatives, and panel discussions will feature local speakers who will report their experiences in their own Kansas communities.