Attorneys Suing W.Va. Foster Care Oppose Summary Judgment

Attorneys suing West Virginia for its alleged treatment of children in foster care said the Department of Human Services (DoHS) should not be granted summary judgment because, they argue, kids in state care are still at risk.

Last month DoHS asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia to make a final decision on the case based on statements and evidence without going to trial, otherwise known as a summary judgment.

The 2019 class action lawsuit alleges the department neglected the children in its care by placing them in unsafe or unstable environments and lacked the necessary staff to serve them.

In a July 10 press release, DoHS said a jury trial would be “costly and unnecessary,” claiming the more than 3.2 million pages of documents they’ve provided over the past five years prove that the plaintiffs could not win the case, based on “undisputed facts reflected in these documents and testimony.”

The plaintiffs filed a memorandum in opposition to summary judgment on July 27, 2024, arguing the defendants are inflating the success and improvements outlined in their filings.

“They might be having meetings, they might be planning this, and they might be planning that, but the basic facts of the system are still very much in dispute, like workers having caseloads that were very, very high, like children being maltreated, like children being sent out of state in large numbers,” said Marcia Robinson Lowry, the lead plaintiff for the class and executive director of A Better Childhood (ABC), one of the groups suing the state.

ABC is counsel for the children, along with Shaffer & Shaffer, a West Virginia law firm and the nonprofit organization Disability Rights of West Virginia.

“We do think that there are a lot of facts that are in dispute, and we think that children are still being harmed, for sure,” Lowry said.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Marshall Health.