The director of Missouri’s Department of Social Services will resign next month, allowing Gov.-elect Mike Kehoe to choose a new leader for the embattled agency.

Robert Knodell’s last day as director of the department — which oversees foster care, Medicaid, other public assistance programs and services for delinquent youth — will be Jan. 13. He accepted a job to be the city manager of Poplar Bluff, his hometown, on Tuesday.

Knodell has been director since Oct. 2021.

Previously, he worked in Gov. Mike Parson’s office as deputy chief of staff and then acting director for the Department of Health and Senior Services.

In an interview last week, Knodell said his biggest accomplishments leading the agency included helping push for staff pay raises, modernizing technology and putting the child welfare system on a more “positive trajectory” by emphasizing prevention.

“We have to continue to try to do everything as a full continuum to make sure that family needs and children’s needs are being addressed and that safety can be assured,” he said, “to prevent children from having to go into the foster system. And the prevention focus is new for the department.”

During his tenure, the department faced criticism over its administration of public benefits. 

A federal judge earlier this year ruled Missourians were illegally denied food aid by the state due to hourslong call center wait times for participants to receive a required interview. 

The most recent monthly data the state submitted in the lawsuit says the average wait time to get through for its general call line was 43 minutes as of November.  The wait time for the interview line for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was 23 minutes.  

The department in its budget request to the state legislature is asking for $11 million to hire 220 new staff in the Family Support Division to help ensure the agency complies with federal and state rules on timely processing, and “maintains a reasonable wait time in the call centers,” the budget request states. 

The state has also struggled to meet federal guidelines for its processing of Medicaid applications. 

Over the summer, the federal Medicaid agency announced it was intervening to help bring the state back into compliance. According to the most recent federal data, 27% of low-income Missouri Medicaid applications were processed in excess of the 45-day limit in July, which is down from 72% in February.

The department also faced scrutiny for its handling of missing foster kids.

A federal report in 2022 found that there were 1,780 instances of foster kids going missing in Missouri over a two-and-a-half year period that spanned July 2018 to December 2020. The agency last year said it has increased efforts to find missing foster kids. As of the most recent public data, from October, there were 72 foster children categorized as runaways.

That data doesn’t distinguish between missing kids and those whose locations are known but unauthorized, though the department says it collects that data now.

Knodell said one of the challenges has been balancing the desires of those who want as robust a safety net as possible with those who want to control costs. 

“We try to build as strong a safety net as we can, being as responsible a steward of the resources that we have as possible,” he said. “But there is a push and a pull, and there are limits to what the government can do, but certainly we want to do the things that we’ve been tasked as efficiently and effectively as possible. “

Knodell said the social services system in Missouri has “ been underinvested in for so long. But you know, hopefully, we’re pointed in the right direction.”

Parson in a press release Tuesday said “I remain ever grateful that, regardless of the challenges, Robert answered the call to serve in leadership within both DSS and the Department of Health and Senior Services.”

If the Christmas cookies are about to hit the fan, Missouri’s nature centers could be a great way to prevent a holiday meltdown.

The centers are known for showcasing Missouri’s rich natural resources. The hiking trails could help families take a deep breath of fresh air and appreciate the sunshine. A stretch of water capturing reflections of wildflowers blowing in the wind could provide a chance to reset after a stressful day.

On the inside, there might be live animal exhibits, indoor aquariums, and hands-on activities. A host of classes are offered to teach you about anything from soap making, embroidery, and woodcarving, to owls, foxes, and the slithery world of snakes.

Margie Vandeven, the Missouri Department of Conservation’s new education branch chief, said the nature centers are a great place to unwind.

“What a great thing to do on your way home after having a relatively frantic day at the office, or maybe a busy time with your children, and they might be a little sugared up. Get outside and have them play,” she told Missourinet.

Vandeven said you’ll be amazed at the calming effects that nature can have on us.

“We’ve been hearing more and more about the mental health needs that we’re all experiencing right now for a lot of different reasons,” she said. “Nature is just an amazing place to be and helps students in ways that I don’t know that we’re always thinking about, unless we are very strategic in making sure that we’re providing those kinds of opportunities for our kids.”

Missouri’s nature centers are in Cape Girardeau, Jefferson City, Joplin, Springfield, Winona, Lebanon, and the St. Louis and Kansas City areas.

A new Missouri Department of Conservation education center is opening Thursday in Branson. The Shepherd of the Hills Conservation Education Center includes room for two classrooms, a 7,500 gallon indoor aquarium, and new exhibits. It is adjacent to the department’s fish hatchery, where one million trout are raised each year.

The state also has about 100 parks and historic sites to help you reset.

Vandeven, who previously served as the state education commissioner, is now devoting her days to bringing nature into the classroom. Since 2009, more than 1,000 Missouri classrooms have been participating in the Missouri Department of Conservation’s “Discover Nature Schools” program.

The nature schooling curriculum is available to K-12 classrooms and covers a variety of topics, such as wildlife, kayaking, fishing, and the different ecosystems. The teacher and student guides are free and can be ordered through the department’s teacher portal.

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A Missouri priest claims that when he stole $300,000 from parish coffers, it was to hide the money from his diocese, in bank accounts belonging to himself and his sister.

With Fr. Ignazio Medina set to be sentenced Wednesday in federal court, his attorneys told a judge last week that the priest took money from his parish accounts in order to keep it from diocesan oversight and assessment, and that he should not face prison time.

Prosecutors have questioned the priest’s credibility — noting that he was found guilty in a canonical penal process of sexually soliciting a penitent in the confessional — and urged that Medina, 73, should be sentenced to 18 months in prison.

And an expert on parish finances has raised questions about Medina’s newly claimed reason for stealing from St. Stanislaus Parish of Wardsville, Missouri, where he was pastor from 2013 until 2021.

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In a plea agreement signed in July, Medina admitted to a federal judge that he had taken $300,000 from a parish bank account.

The account in question had been for years untracked — unreported to the Diocese of Jefferson City, or included on parish balance sheets.

While the account was discovered by diocesan authorities in 2018, and put into parish financial records, Medina took money from the account in June 2021, shortly before he was transferred from St. Stanislaus to a different Jefferson City parish.

In that month, the priest wrote two checks from the account — one to his sister, for $100,000, and another to himself, for $200,000.

The checks were discovered by parish leaders soon after, and the Jefferson City diocese contacted federal law enforcement officials.

Medina initially told investigators that the money did not belong to the parish — that it was given to him personally by parishioners. He also claimed that his sister had given him $100,000, and that he was writing a check to refund the money.

But that story soon fell apart.

Medina’s sister told investigators that she had never given him the money, and that when her brother wrote her a big check from a parish account, he said it was meant to help care for their mother. Parish donors told investigators that they had not given Medina money personally, and that donations they had made to St. Stanislaus Parish were meant for the parish, and not for the priest personally.

While Medina’s July plea agreement meant he did not go to trial, he did present a new story to a federal judge last week, as his attorneys argued for a sentence of house arrest.

In a sentencing memo, Medina’s lawyer argued that the priest “made a bad decision relating to parish finances,” but that he had not done so to enrich himself. Instead, lawyers said that Medina’s theft “stemmed from his desire to keep St. Stanislaus Parish donations to fund St. Stanislaus Parish specific projects.”

“He did it because he was concerned that the money in the St. Stanislaus Parish account would be used according to the directives of the diocese rather than according to the desires and needs of the parish,” his sentencing memo wrote. “He should have voiced his concerns to the diocese and used its internal processes to try to achieve the same aims.”

The defense memo did not address Medina’s initial claims that the money was given to him — in part by his sister — and not to the parish. Nor did it address $20,000 in cash withdrawals from parish accounts during Medina’s tenure at St/ Stanislaus parish.

But the Diocese of Jefferson City told The Pillar Monday that Medina’s claim was a “troubling statement” and “inconsistent with the reasons previously cited for the misuse of funds.”

For its part, Medina’s memo focused on the priest’s apparent contrition.

“He knows that he should not have taken the money in question and does not seek to justify those actions, but does want to explain that he was not funding a drug habit, financing a broad criminal enterprise, or paying off gambling debt with this money. His desire was to benefit his most recent parish,” Medina’s attorney said.

But in their own Dec. 4 memo, prosecutors in the case called Medina’s “particularly egregious,” and lamented the priest’s “greed in the face of … trust.”

Arguing for 18 months incarceration, prosecutors noted that Medina “stole from people whom he had known and pastored for years – people who dug into their own pockets and provided their own hard-earned money to support the needs and religious mission of their place of worship.”

“As a priest, he had an unparalleled amount of trust placed in him, both financially and morally,” prosecutors noted. “But this trust served to shield his wrongdoing from detection.”

“Even when his side account at Legends Bank first came to light [in 2018], the parish and diocese apparently continued to assume his honesty, concluding that they did not believe any ‘intentional wrongdoing’ had occurred. Other irregularities, such as missing cash bonuses at the parish school, similarly went unresolved because no one suspected the parish priest was the thief in their midst.”

Prosecutors added that “while the defendant does not have any prior criminal history, his current offense, as well as his recent church adjudication for soliciting sex during the sacrament of reconciliation, demonstrate that laws – whether criminal, ecclesiastical, or moral – do not adequately constrain his conduct. He is therefore a recidivism risk, despite his lack of prior criminal history, and this warrants a sentence of incarceration.”

“While the known loss in this case is correctly calculated at $320,000, it is impossible to know the true extent of his conduct, because the trust placed in him was so great.”

A spokesman for the Diocese of Jefferson City told The Pillar on Monday that Medina was found guilty in April 2023 in a canonical penal proceeding which concluded that he had abused his ecclesiastical office by taking parish money.

In January 2024, the diocese announced that the priest had also been found guilty of soliciting sex in the confessional, a “reserved delict” in the Church, whose adjudication is overseen by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Medina is prohibited from hearing confessions, from holding ecclesiastical office, and from publicly celebrating Mass without the permission of Jefferson City’s Bishop Shawn McKnight.

McKnight, 56, could soon find himself facing a new raft of complex parish financial issues, as the bishop is reportedly in consideration for an appointment to lead one of several U.S. archdioceses, among them either the Archdiocese of Omaha, or the Archdiocese of Washington, which is facing a multi-million dollar operational deficit.

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Robert Warren — a retired IRS investigator and professor of accounting at Radford University, has conducted extensive research on priests who steal — told The Pillar that he believes Medina’s most recent claim, that “he maintained a secret parish bank account, and then drained that bank account through disbursements to both himself and his sister, because he was actually trying to save the money for the parish” — “fails the test of logic.”

Warren especially argued that if Medina had intended money sent to himself and his sister to be used for parish expenses, he would have informed his sister of that fact, while her interview with police would appear to indicate otherwise. Further, Warren said, “the record does not reflect that Father Medina made any provisions that upon his death, or the death of his sister, that the funds would be repatriated to the parish.”

Warren noted that Medina is not the first priest to steal from an off-the-books parish bank account claimed to exist to avoid diocesan detection.

In 2012, Bridgeport priest Fr. Michael Moynihan was sent to prison, after he stole hundreds of thousands from an unaudited bank account at St. Michael the Archangel Parish in Greenwich, Connecticut. The account was reportedly opened by Moynihan’s predecessor at the parish, who reportedly opened it to maintain funds that were not audited or taxed by his diocese.

In 2015, a Michigan priest, Fr. Ed Belczak, was sent to prison for stealing $573,000 from his parish, including $420,000 which had been deposited into an undisclosed and unaudited parish bank account, seemingly to avoid archdiocesan detection.

“Based on my research, I think it used to be a common practice for pastors to maintain secret, or off-the-books bank accounts in the name of the parish for which the pastor used as a discretionary fund,” Warren told The Pillar.

Acknowledging that such practices may still exist in some places — and that Medina’s off-the-books account was in operation until relatively recently, Warren said that in his view, “these types of accounts are unethical, immoral, and I’m sure in most cases, illegal. Parishioners, auditors, and the chancery should have access to complete, reliable, accurate, relevant, and timely financial information. To do otherwise is a disservice to all those just mentioned.”

Medina’s attorney has not responded to The Pillar’s request for comment.

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