A little more than a year ago, Gov. Patrick Morrisey outlined an ambitious agenda in his inaugural address: jumpstarting the state economy, slashing taxes, cutting regulations. Then he devoted one line to one of West Virginia’s most stubborn problems.
“We will take on the tough challenges, and that includes fixing foster care and looking after our most vulnerable kids,” Morrisey said.
Nearing the end of his first year, in December, the governor called a press conference. His staff was vague, saying only that Morrisey would make an announcement about “child welfare initiatives.”
The sign on the governor’s lectern was more in keeping with his ambitious promise. It read, “Fixing Foster Care.”
Morrisey outlined a one-item plan: a special fund to bring foster kids living out-of-state back to West Virginia. The money would go toward renovating existing state-owned facilities.
“One of the major problems we have faced and we’ve seen is the fact that there are a lot of kids that are out-of-state,” he said in December. “I believe that’s a terrible problem, and I think we need to fix it.”
Morrisey’s major legislative child welfare proposal would affect fewer than 400 of the 6,000 kids in the state’s foster care system, far short of the massive fix that was promised. And even now, with the end of the session fast approaching, details of the governor’s plan remain vague.
Here’s what we know: Sure, closer is better. When all things are equal, it is better to keep kids close to their families, friends and communities when they enter foster care. This allows them to maintain any relationships they may have. It also could give kids easier access to their social workers, in a system that struggles to keep up with required monthly visits.
But for many West Virginia foster kids, the issue isn’t that they’re out-of-state. It’s that they’re institutionalized in the first place.
Officials running the foster care system have been over-relying on group care for years. Their actions leave the state still in violation of a federal agreement to send fewer kids to group facilities. This means that while there are kids who can benefit from residential care in a treatment center, there are other kids who are being put into these settings unnecessarily.
And over the past year of Morrisey’s administration, the state has relied on these out-of-state institutions more than ever before. In January, there were nearly 400 kids living in these kinds of places, a 21% increase from a year earlier.
As legislators consider Morrisey’s proposal, key questions have emerged about the availability of workers needed to staff more group homes and whether the amount of money he’s proposing is enough to make a dent. But so far,, absent from the conversation is whether there are more effective ways to help kids in group care than shuffling them from one institution to another.
“Group care is just not good for kids,” said Marcia Lowry, the executive director of A Better Childhood, who has sued the state on behalf of foster kids.
She said the state’s resources would be better spent on helping recruit and train foster parents to help kids with a range of behavioral or mental problems.
“That’s a much much better alternative, as opposed to just shoving these kids into big buildings.”
Where are the workers?
At any given time, there are several hundred West Virginia foster kids living in other states. Some of them are in kinship care, living with family or friends. But the majority are living in out-of-state psychiatric hospitals or group homes. The state has put them in these kinds of places because there isn’t anywhere in West Virginia that either has room or can meet their needs.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with facilities outside West Virginia’s borders, though a 2021 investigation by Mountain State Spotlight and The GroundTruth Project found multiple occasions where the state was aware of abuse and neglect at out-of-state facilities and still left kids there. But if kids have relationships with friends or family members, it’s best to keep them as close to their support communities as possible.
Under Gov. Morrisey, the number of West Virginia foster kids living out of state has reached its highest point since at least 2011. Most of these kids are institutionalized.
Morrisey is pushing several different pieces of legislation that are tied to the child welfare system. One bill focuses on truancy diversion. Another lets the state contract with faith-based child welfare providers. But his main effort has been the creation of this fund, seeded with $6 million from general revenue. It would use the money to renovate state-owned buildings, with a goal of increasing the number of foster kids who can be housed in West Virginia. Because out-of-state care is more expensive, the proposal argues the state will ultimately save money, and the cost savings would go back into the fund to renovate more buildings. Department of Human Services Secretary Alex Mayer estimated for 20 kids, that could be about $2.78 million saved annually.
The proposal is moving, but still needs to clear finance committees in both houses. And at the West Virginia Legislature, lawmakers annually promise to tackle foster care problems, only to see the system’s crisis continue.
In a legislative hearing held on the proposal before the House Health and Human Resources Committee in January, legislators focused on the bill’s technicalities, but got few specifics.
Who would run the facilities? It depends.
How many kids could be moved back to West Virginia in a year? It depends.
Where will we get the workers to staff the renovated buildings? It depends.
The lack of a plan around staffing concerns Mark Davis, the CEO of Table Sense, an institute that focuses on youth policies.
“Not all youth need to be institutionalized,” he said. “Often the barrier to serving youth in-state can be a lack of qualified staff.” Instead, Davis suggested training foster parents to care for kids with special needs, beefing up the services available to kids in their communities and focusing on recruiting and training specialists to help them.
Currently, there aren’t enough of these workers to serve the state’s young people. Researchers at West Virginia University reported that only 36% of mental and behavioral health service providers serving youth in the state had the capacity to serve all of the youth referred to them in 2023; that was down from 57% in 2021. They had difficulty hiring licensed clinical social workers and therapists, case workers and psychiatrists.
But speaking to lawmakers during the committee hearing, Mayer shrugged off questions about the workers.
“I think it would just be the ongoing recruitment and hiring process that everyone else would be using,” Mayer said.
Despite these questions, committee members unanimously agreed to advance the bill to the Finance Committee. A similar bill cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Not mentioned in either meeting: That West Virginia still struggles to meet the terms of a federal agreement that requires an overall reduction in institutionalized foster kids.
A long history of ‘just dumping these kids’ in institutions
More than a decade ago, the federal government concluded West Virginia was wrongly warehousing kids with disabilities in these types of facilities, both in and out-of-state. Many of these kids, the Department of Justice found, should have been able to live with families and gotten care in their homes and communities. By not providing these services, the DOJ said the state was both wasting money and violating these kids’ civil rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
West Virginia and the DOJ reached an agreement on steps the state needed to take to fix the problem in 2019. It was set to expire in 2024, but because the state didn’t show the required improvements, the federal government extended its scrutiny.
A spokesperson for Gov. Morrisey didn’t respond to detailed questions for this story, including one about how shuffling kids from an out-of-state facility to an in-state one will help meet the terms of that agreement.
Curtis Capehart, the governor’s policy director, has acknowledged the proposal is not a cure-all for foster care’s problems.
“It’s not the silver bullet in the whole solution,” Capehart told a House committee last month. “But we think this incremental step is a first step in that right direction.”
As recently as December 2025, the DOJ found that West Virginia was still not in full compliance. While the state initially reduced the percentage of kids in residential care, it missed its latest benchmark. And the federal officials noted: they’re still in the dark on how well the state is doing in some key areas. Those include whether community-based mental health services are available all across the state, and whether West Virginia child welfare officials have assessed all the kids in residential treatment to determine what level of care they need.
“Because of that gap in information, it is unknown how many children currently in residential treatment facilities could be served appropriately with in-home and community-based care, if they elect, after an informed and meaningful choice regarding where to receive services,” the DOJ wrote.
When the state made that DOJ report available publicly, it added a note that said federal officials had missed some information that showed West Virginia met some of the benchmarks. But a spokesperson for the state didn’t respond to a request for details about which ones.
Outcomes cloudy
Neither the ongoing DOJ agreement nor murkiness around staffing prevented Gov. Patrick Morrisey from touting the proposal during his second State of the State address. In front of a crowded House of Delegates chamber in January, he devoted a whole section to the bill he planned to ask lawmakers to introduce.
“Those placements are costly. They separate children from their families and communities. And they often lead to longer stays and worse outcomes,” he said of West Virginia foster kids placed out-of-state.
But what are those outcomes? Seems those details are murky too. Spokespeople for Morrisey didn’t respond to questions about what specifically he was referring to. Department for Human Services spokeswoman Angel Hightower could only send a general statement.
“In general, kids in out-of-state placements potentially have more disconnection from their family and community due to distance alone, which can make integration/discharge more difficult,” Hightower wrote, directing further questions to Morrisey’s office.
A Mountain State Spotlight analysis of the data West Virginia sends to the federal government found whether a placement is in-state or out-of-state doesn’t seem to make a difference on the percentage of kids who are discharged from the system to a permanent home — whether reunited with parents, adopted or released to a guardian. But when kids were never placed in a treatment center or group home at all, they were more likely to find permanency.
That analysis is backed up by a strong body of evidence that shows better outcomes when kids are in family homes, rather than group settings. There is not a similarly-large amount of evidence that suggests there’s a large difference between kids’ success based on the location of their foster care.
In theory, West Virginia should have a ready pool of data about foster care outcomes, giving the state a quick way to evaluate kids’ post-foster care lives. Nationwide, every state contributes to the National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD), which requires them to interview cohorts of foster kids three times: at age 17, 19 and 21. The youth are asked questions about their education level, employment, reliance on public assistance and whether they’ve ever been incarcerated or experienced homelessness.
But in West Virginia, add this data to the long list of missing information. In the most recent survey, only 51 21-year-olds responded to at least one of the questions about outcomes, less than one-third of the kids who were eligible. The federal government penalized West Virginia in 2022 for not completing the survey as required.
For Marcia Lowry of A Better Childhood, Morrisey’s proposal is missing the point. Lowry has spent years forcing changes in child welfare systems across the country. Many of the lawsuits have been successful.
West Virginia officials have spent seven years fighting the lawsuit that Lowry filed on behalf of a group of foster kids. Among other things, the suit says they were unnecessarily warehoused in both in-state and out-of-state group homes and treatment centers.
Lowry said rather than moving kids from out-of-state institutions to in-state ones, it would be more useful to their well-being to focus on making sure group care is absolutely necessary for them. If so, their stays should be as short as possible.
State officials had the case dismissed, only to have it revived by an appeals court. It was dismissed again, and is back at that appeals court again. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in September but has yet to rule.
In the meantime, Lowry cautions that the problems that tend to cause West Virginia child welfare officials to put kids in group facilities in the first place, like behavior issues, usually only get worse in these types of settings.
“Just dumping these kids into fixed-up buildings is not necessarily a good approach.”
This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by Arnold Ventures and the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.