Over the last year, a group of lawmakers have met dozens of times in another effort to find solutions to the longstanding crisis in West Virginia’s foster care system.
As another legislative session began, those lawmakers recommended just three relatively minor pieces of legislation.
Lawmakers said that more bills would follow, but legislative leaders also conceded that their efforts so far haven’t rescued a troubled system meant to care for some of West Virginia’s most vulnerable kids.
House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, acknowledged that bills they’ve passed over the years haven’t resulted in the transformative change they’ve envisioned.
Hanshaw said past legislation was hindered when lawmakers found health officials and judges didn’t or couldn’t implement them.
Hanshaw said he hopes his plan for committees to spend more time on specific bills will help.
“We need to spend a whole lot more time talking,” Hanshaw said. “I don’t mean that as a delay tactic.”
But Marissa Sanders, founder and former head of the West Virginia Foster, Adoptive & Kinship Families Network, isn’t hopeful about more discussion.
“They didn’t solve the accountability problem and the implementation problem,” said Sanders, who spent years in policy advocacy before moving out of state in late 2023.
Requiring health officials to enforce those laws, Sanders said, is the “$64 million dollar question.”
Angel Hightower, spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services, said new Cabinet Secretary Alex Mayer has met with state officials, lawyers, care providers and judges to learn more about the challenges the system faces. She said he is aiming to find ways to “work collaboratively with these groups to implement meaningful and impactful change.”
Workgroup recommendations for a broken system
Last month, a Mountain State Spotlight investigation reported that as recently as 2022, West Virginia was still institutionalizing foster kids at a rate more than three times the national average, as well as failing to employ enough CPS workers and meet the mental health needs of kids, grandfamilies and other kinship families.
During a November meeting before dozens of lawmakers, the Legislature’s foster care work group proposed three bills. One is a bill to make it easier for foster and kinship families to get kids’ medical records. Another bill proposal would require more timely additions of some information about child fatality or near fatality investigations to a state website.
The third bill specifies how kids removed from their homes receive clothing and other necessities and states that they can keep the clothing the state pays for when they’re removed from their families.
Del. Clay Riley, R-Harrison, said that the clothing voucher program bill is an example of “things that begin to chip away at solving that problem.”
West Virginia has led the nation in child removal rates since 2010. And despite lawmakers’ efforts, the foster care system remains under federal oversight and the subject of a federal lawsuit.
Sanders also wants to see health officials work on preventing child removals by helping parents become better parents, with services such as drug treatment and financial assistance.
“It’s a system that doesn’t work even for people who are paid to be in it, which is why they have a workforce shortage, because nobody wants to be taking kids away from families,” she said. “They need to address poverty, they need to do prevention, there’s all kinds of things that they could do besides tweaking around the edges.”
The workgroup did outline other approaches to system problems. Like Sanders, they suggested more focus on prevention, as well as data collection and CPS worker funding. However, the task force didn’t put those into draft bill form.
And last year, lawmakers did not allocate the more than $9 million in additional funding the human services department requested for new CPS workers.
In his inaugural address last month, Gov. Patrick Morrisey promised to “take on the tough challenges, and that includes fixing foster care and looking after our most vulnerable kids.” Then last week, in his State of the State address, the governor proposed no new initiatives aimed at improving the foster care system.
But Adam Burkhammer, R-Lewis and one of the presenters, said that more bills will be considered this session
“That was just what we were willing to present at that meeting,” he said.
Burkhammer added that other state challenges contribute too. He said that even if child welfare workers did have more time, they can’t refer families to services that don’t exist, such as mental health care and substance use treatment in communities. Churches could also step up, he said, and people in recovery could help others through peer mentoring.
Burkhammer said, “I think there’s a community answer to all this, and that everybody’s got to stop sitting around in their community and saying that Charleston needs to fix this, or that Washington, D.C. needs to fix it.”