Mountain State Spotlight has been deeply reporting on West Virginia’s foster care crisis for years.
So when Gov. Patrick Morrisey declared in his inaugural address a year ago that he would fix this system, we set about tracking his progress. And when his agenda for this legislative session focused on one marquee proposal — the “Bring Them Home” initiative, which aims to bring out-of-state foster kids back into West Virginia — we decided to take a much closer look.
First, 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. But the governor’s proposal would affect fewer than 400 of the 6,000 kids in the state’s foster care system. And focusing on shuffling those kids in out-of-state group care into in-state group care is missing the point.
Morrisey’s plan won’t address West Virginia’s shortage of child welfare workers
Morrisey wants a $6 million fund to renovate existing state buildings into group homes for foster kids. This might fund one project. But housing kids in-state is cheaper than out-of-state. The savings will be reinvested in the fund.
A lot of the details of how this will work are left to child welfare officials’ discretion. They aren’t sure which buildings would be good candidates, or how many kids they could house. The state could operate the facility itself, or hire a private company.
But the reason so many foster kids are sent out of West Virginia isn’t just because there are no physical beds to put them in. It’s because there’s a chronic shortage of the workers who are needed to staff these kinds of facilities. It’s not clear how the governor’s plan would fix that fundamental problem.
West Virginia told the DOJ it would get foster kids out of institutions. This plan won’t move the needle on that.
Officials running the state’s foster care system have been over-relying on group care for years. This has gotten worse under the Morrisey administration, with a 21% increase in kids in out-of-state institutions compared to the previous year.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded the state was wrongly warehousing kids with disabilities, when they should have been able to get care while living with biological or foster parents. West Virginia made a deal with the feds in 2019 to offer more community-based services.
Seven years later, the state is still not in compliance.
A Morrisey spokesperson didn’t respond to detailed questions for this story.
But for Marcia Lowry, who has sued the state on behalf of foster kids over similar issues, this plan represents a missed opportunity to move kids out of group care altogether. “That’s a much much better alternative, as opposed to just shoving these kids into big buildings.”
Data shows shuffling kids from out-of-state facilities to in-state doesn’t produce “better outcomes”
Both the governor and the Department of Human Services have referenced “better outcomes” for kids who are institutionalized in-state versus out-of-state.
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.
There’s not actually much hard data showing a large difference between outcomes for kids based on the location of their foster care placement.
There is, however, a lot of data showing that kids do a lot better if they’re placed in a foster family home or kinship care than in a group setting. The goal of foster care is getting kids out of the system into a permanent home. Sometimes that’s through reunification with their biological parents; sometimes that’s adoption or guardianship. For West Virginia kids, our analysis shows no difference in those positive outcomes based on whether kids are institutionalized in-state vs. out-of-state.