Over the last decade, there have been tens of thousands of words written about West Virginia’s foster care system. As an editor at Mountain State Spotlight, I’ve edited many of those words. I’ve read the stories about ongoing systemic dysfunction, and have occasionally been tempted to throw my hands up in the air. It’s such a mess, the problems are so huge, and no matter what changes, it seems kids are still getting hurt.
But as with any big problem, there are still both lingering questions and essential watchdog journalism to be done. And faced with a state bureaucracy that refuses to engage much to provide answers, a massive federal database became one way to learn more.
I first learned about the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) database back in 2022, when reporters at ProPublica and NBC News used its data for a national reporting project on child welfare. The stories took readers from Pennsylvania to Arizona to Texas, and even stopped in West Virginia to analyze the rate at which parental rights were terminated. AFCARS includes information about every kid who has spent time in the U.S. foster care system. I was intrigued by that data’s potential to shed more light on West Virginia’s secretive system — and to show whether or not anything has changed.
On a really basic level, AFCARS can provide foundational data about who was in West Virginia’s foster care system (without identifying details), why they were there and why they left. This is information that has largely been missing from the public conversation, even as West Virginia begins its second decade of trying to address major issues in the foster care system: factors like a continued overreliance on group homes and residential treatment centers and a chronic shortage of both child welfare workers and foster family homes. Over that time period, West Virginia officials have utilized different reports and dashboards to communicate information about the system to legislators and the public, but as the administrations, agency officials and sometimes the names of the agencies themselves change, the data reports are changed in a way that makes it difficult to compare raw data year over year.
The AFCARS data, obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, provides a better comparison. It allows researchers to follow a single kid, identified through a unique ID number, through their years in the system. Because the same information is collected each year, it allows for year-over-year comparisons, and analyses like the gender, racial and age breakdowns of kids in care. And crucial for this project, it allows for a breakdown of whether kids were diagnosed with disabilities and where the state sent them to live.
To reach my conclusions about West Virginia’s treatment of kids with disabilities, I uploaded a decade of national data to the development environment RStudio. First I filtered the dataset for West Virginia’s data from the most recent fiscal year available — 2021 — which returned 11,911 unique kids (confirmed because each has a different AFCARS identification number) that had spent time in the system. I then filtered the data for kids identified as having a clinical disability status of “Yes,” which means they had been diagnosed with a physical or mental disability. This was a much smaller group: 1575 kids. I could then organize that group by placement, and found that 788 of these kids (50.03%) were in group homes and institutions that year.
Rerunning the analysis for the entire U.S. helped put West Virginia’s number in perspective. Nationwide during the same time period (October 1, 2021-September 30, 2022), there were 144,066 foster kids with a diagnosed disability. But in this group, only 15.36% (22,124 kids) were in group homes or institutions.
These analyses provided the underpinnings of the story, but I ran a bunch of additional queries. The finding of a sudden increase among foster kids who West Virginia hadn’t determined whether they had a disability or not was born from looking at the demographic breakdown of kids in care each year. In 2015, West Virginia only marked 518 kids (6% of the kids in care that year) as this third disability status, indicating they had “not yet” been diagnosed with a disability. In 2016, 2,414 kids fell into that category (26%). Even by 2021, nearly one-fifth of the kids in the system were undiagnosed.
The most obvious data limitation is that now, it’s a few years old. The most recent data in the AFCARS system is for fiscal year 2021, which ends on September 30, 2022. But even though it doesn’t contain the granular level of information that the AFCARS data does, West Virginia’s monthly legislative foster care placement reports fill in some of the blanks for more recent years. And more data might be coming soon: A representative from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect — where the AFCARS data is maintained — said more recent data should be released sometime this year.
One thing the stories are clearly missing is any substantive response from the state of West Virginia. We sent a long list of questions about this story and its findings to the state, with little response. A Department of Human Services spokesperson did express skepticism about this investigation’s finding that West Virginia was sending foster kids with disabilities to group care at a rate three times higher than the national average, and arranged for an expert at WVU to review my analysis. But once I sent over the R script, that expert, too, stopped responding.
The data used in these stories, [Dataset 176, 187, 192, 200, 215, 225, 235, 239, 255 and 274, Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), Foster Care File 2012-2021], were obtained from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect and have been used in accordance with its Terms of Use Agreement license. The Administration on Children, Youth and Families, the Children’s Bureau, the original dataset collection personnel or funding source, NDACAN, Duke University, Cornell University, and their agents or employees bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.