Foster Care Investigation Reveals Children Not Receiving Care They Need

West Virginia’s foster care system has been troubled for more than a decade, with more than 6,000 children still in the state’s care despite various efforts. 

This week, nonprofit newsroom Mountain State Spotlight is publishing a three-part series on the foster care crisis. News director Eric Douglas sat down with their editor at large, Erica Peterson, to discuss what they found. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Douglas: You’ve completed a three-part series on foster care in West Virginia. This has been an ongoing discussion for a decade or more. Tell me how you got started on this. Tell me why you decided to dive into this project. 

Peterson: It’s obviously a really important issue in West Virginia, because the kids we’re talking about here, these are the most vulnerable kids, really, in the state. And we’ve known for a long time, as you said, a decade, you know, more than a decade, that there are a lot of problems in the system. 

So as a journalist, it’s an interesting challenge, right? Like, what do you say about this that is new, that is not something that we already just know how messed up the system is? So, I started with the data for this story. There’s this massive data set. Every state in the country sends very granular foster care data about every single kid that has touched the system for any point in time to the federal government. 

I got a hold of this data set, and it was massive. It was like nothing I have ever dealt with before. I had to learn some new skills in order to make any sense of the data. But once I learned how to wrangle it, I started interviewing it and asked it a couple of questions, and what I found out was that one of the main issues that West Virginia has been under scrutiny for, which is basically warehousing children with mental health issues when there should be mental health support in their community to keep them closer to home, was really not as fixed as some of the state’s statements would lead you to believe. 

In fact, the most recent year of this data, which ended in September 2022, shows that half of the kids with any kind of disabilities were still going to these kinds of places. So that was where I started. And I started talking to people, and I found some kids who had spent some time in these places, and the story kind of went from there.

Douglas: Obviously, telling this story is difficult. One of the biggest issues is nobody wants to talk about this, whether at the governmental level, the families don’t want to talk about it, the caregivers don’t want to talk about it. How did you break through that wall to get some of the information you got?

Peterson: I found, actually, that everyone I tried to talk to, except for the state, did want to talk about it. The people who have spent time in the system, the people who are in this larger support system, the guardian ad litems, who represent kids in court, the former CPS workers, people like that, were really frustrated with what is happening to children, and in some cases, what has happened to them or people they know. 

So they did want to talk about it. All I could do was cast a really wide net and explain to all these people how important their voices were to the story. And many of them did decide to speak with me and to go on the record. There is nobody in my story who is with a pseudonym or anything like that. 

Douglas: Talk about the scope of the problem for a minute. I hate to break kids down to numbers, but for years, the state’s been saying that about 6,000 kids are in foster care. Is that still the average?

Peterson: It varies month by month, but we’re still looking at about 6,000 kids, give or take, any given month. 

Douglas: The bigger issue that you’ve delved into is, not the average kid in foster care, but kids who need some extra care, some mental health help of that sort of thing. 

Peterson: In any given year, there’s a group of kids who this federal data marks as having a disability, and that, that’s a really wide definition, right? It includes physical disabilities, it includes emotional, mental disabilities. But what I did was I really zeroed in on this population and looked at where they were going. And the bigger question here is, did they need to be in these kinds of settings in order to get treatment? And I should say, too, there are children and adults who can benefit from some time in an inpatient treatment center. That is not inherently a bad choice or a bad thing, but the question that has been raised for the past decade is whether West Virginia is over relying on these kinds of facilities because they don’t have any mental health treatments in communities, and in some cases, they don’t have anywhere else to put these kids.

Douglas: I remember one piece in your story. In the first story you talked about, there was a big change in kids being identified with mental health issues to (more kids listed as) undetermined. Suddenly that number spiked. Was that intentional? Was it we just don’t want to admit it, or was it just nobody had gotten around to doing the assessment? 

Peterson: That’s a really good question, Eric, and it’s not one I was able to answer in this story. I posed the question to the state, and they did not respond. 

But what I saw in this data set, kids can be coded as either having a disability or not having a disability, and then there’s this third status, which is kids who the state hasn’t determined whether they have a disability or not, indicating that a qualified professional has not done an assessment on them to answer this question. In about 2014 or 2015, 5% to 6% of the kids in West Virginia foster care had this kind of third status. In 2016, that number had skyrocketed, and more than a quarter of the kids in the state’s care were now undiagnosed. 

This could be a function of too many kids in foster care, not enough case workers who are ordering these assessments. We don’t really know. But I should say it does mean that we might be under counting kids with disabilities in the system, and it also raises questions about whether the kids who may have a disability are getting adequate care. 

Douglas: Where does this go? What do you hope to come out of it? 

Peterson: I hope this gets people’s attention. We know this issue is not fixed. In fact, just in the past month, the Department of Justice said it was extending its oversight over this program because it was supposed to expire, but West Virginia hadn’t gotten to a point where they felt comfortable letting the agreement expire. So this is an ongoing issue. 

I don’t think this is something that lawmakers can ignore. They split DHHR into three agencies and that was a big move that was supposed to address some of these things. They’ve given CPS workers raises for several years in a row, and I think they want to do another round of that that very well could be useful in addressing one piece of this puzzle. 

We have a new governor, we have a new administration, and he has publicly said he wants to fix this foster care system. So I think it’s going to take more than has been previously done, and I think it also has to take a little bit of something which we haven’t really seen from elected officials very often, which is humility. And admitting that previous efforts have fallen short when it comes to this particular problem, and people are getting hurt, and they are still getting hurt, and this is something that we can’t really keep kicking the can on anymore. 

Douglas: Tell me about one of the former foster children. You interviewed Sadie Kendall. 

Peterson: Sadie is a remarkable young woman. She is 27 now. She spent her entire childhood in West Virginia’s foster care system. She was taken away from her mother when she was about five, and what she experienced throughout her whole life was placement after placement in foster homes, in group homes, in inpatient psychiatric institutions, in emergency shelters – pretty much the whole universe of West Virginia foster care placements. She has experienced them all. 

What’s really heartbreaking about Sadie’s story is she’s a decade out of the system now, and can look back on it pretty clear-eyed and see who she was as that child. What would have been really helpful to her, and in her mind, it was not the kind of situation she experienced in these inpatient treatment centers.

Sadie: My name is Sadie Kendall. Sadie Renee Kendall. I’m 27. It was very scary. The things I seen in there, like all I just needed was a little bit of therapy and love. Really, honestly, you know, I don’t think that I needed to be in an institute. I mean, I, of course, you know, I had some behavioral issues, but it was nothing that I should have been locked up in a room or sedated. I think that I just had a lot of trauma in my life, and I just needed somebody to care for me. How you’re supposed to care for a child.

Visit the Mountain State Spotlight website to see more of this series.