Foster kids who are trying to reform West Virginia’s troubled child welfare system will have to wait longer for their day in court.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin postponed the trial for the more than 5-year-old case until May 6. The trial had been scheduled for early March.
The delay came as Mountain State Spotlight published the results of a six-month investigation into longstanding problems in West Virginia’s foster care system.
The reporting found that, despite years of reform efforts, West Virginia’s most vulnerable kids are still left behind by a system that doesn’t provide them the mental health help that they need.
Despite touting new programs to send fewer kids to group homes and treatment centers, as of 2022, West Virginia was still putting half of the kids with any sort of disability into these types of facilities, a rate three times the national average, a first-of-its-kind data analysis discovered. After the federal government began investigating West Virginia’s treatment of foster kids with disabilities, the state started screening a much smaller percentage of kids for these conditions.
Mountain State Spotlight also found that, while West Virginia’s foster care system leans on grandparents and other family members to raise foster kids, it doesn’t provide the resources those families need. And the investigation found that the state continues to struggle to provide the system with adequate child welfare workers.
Since September 2019, a group of foster kids has been suing the state over conditions in the system. That case has been repeatedly delayed, as the state has sought to have it thrown out, and has been back and forth to a federal appeals court and moved to a different judge.
Goodwin delayed the trial after a private lawyer representing state officials said he couldn’t attend a pre-trial meeting scheduled for February because he needed to be out of the country for his mother’s 70th birthday celebration. Lawyers for the foster kids said they could not agree to various alternative dates for that meeting. “Though Plaintiffs wish to be flexible and accommodating, Defendants’ lack of diligence in addressing this scheduling conflict has made it logistically impossible to do so,” they wrote in their opposition to the change.
The judge said the “failure to find an amicable solution is discouraging.”
Late last year, the U.S. Department of Justice extended its scrutiny of West Virginia’s foster care system because the state failed to show required improvements.