Parents Struggle to Find Affordable Childcare in W. Va.

Childcare costs are high no matter where you are in the country. But in West Virginia, it’s even worse – according to a 2016 report by the think tank New America and Care.com, parents in the Mountain State shoulder the highest cost burden, spending about 45 percent of the state’s median household income on childcare.

“Caring for children has a lot of fixed costs,” said Sara Anderson, an associate professor at West Virginia University who studies pre-kindergarten and childcare. “Because our average wages are lower, it’s just going to be a higher portion of our income.” 

Childcare costs are so expensive largely due to the labor required to run a day care facility. Younger children, especially infants, are required to have a lower caregiver-to-child ratio, meaning that they require more caregivers than older children.

Because they’re so expensive to maintain, the childcare industry also doesn’t fit into the typical supply-and-demand market. The demand is high, but parents – especially young parents who haven’t reached their full earning potential yet – can’t afford to pay the true costs of enrolling a child in daycare, instead opting to have a relative or neighbor babysit for cheaper prices instead. Daycare employees are among the lowest paid, because they can’t charge more than what the parents can afford to pay. 

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Morgantown Early Learning Facility, a nonprofit childcare center in Morgantown, subsidizes its revenue with earnings from monthly fundraisers. 

“We do (candy sales), we do a book sale, we try to do something every month to help us get additional funding,” said Karen Ferrell, the business manager at ELF. 

But even if costs were lower, the options are few and far between in the state – especially for rural areas. In an email, Janie Cole, director of early child care at the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, Bureau for Children and Families, said public funding in the state simply isn’t enough to support public day care. 

“West Virginia does not have enough high quality child care to meet the demand.  There are rural areas in our state that have no formal childcare options,” she wrote. “Parents often have to drive out of their normal commute path to locate child care, which adds to the impact on the family budget.  This also means that some families can’t find child care at all when it is needed.”

The Haeders in Morgantown are one of those families. When Professor Simon Haeder officially accepted a job at WVU in Morgantown over a year ago, he and his wife Hollyanne Haeder immediately put their now two-year-old son on the waitlist for the childcare center provided by WVU. He was 45th on that list. Six months later, when it was almost time to move to Morgantown, their son was nowhere close to being able to enroll at the center. 

“We called about the waitlist and they’re like, ‘There’s still 30-something kids ahead of him.’ And we said, ‘We have to find something. What are we going to do?'” Simon said. “We got on the website, we looked for every childcare they had in town. We called every single one.”

But few other centers in the area had room for their son. So now, Simon and Hollyanne drive 80 to 120 miles a day taking their son to daycare across the border in Pennsylvania. It adds up to about $100 a week on gas, and a lot of time away from work and family. 

And that can have a negative impact on the happiness of a family. In a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, parents said that having access to affordable quality childcare benefited not only their child’s development, but their own wellbeing. 

“The idea that it improves their overall well-being, that it improves their relationships with their spouse and partner, those are things that are added benefits that we need to think about from the perspective of enhancing childcare,” said Gillian SteelFisher,  the deputy director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program at the School of Public Health and the director of this poll. 

Historically, there hasn’t been a large push for public childcare in the United States since World War II, when women took their husbands’ places in the workforce after their husbands left to fight. So today, parents have to make do. When Simon and Hollyanne checked last month, their son still had 28 kids ahead of him on the WVU daycare waitlist.
 
Now, the two have advice for others who are considering becoming parents – if you’re even thinking about having a child, it might be time to put him or her on a childcare center waitlist. 

 

DHHR Continues Source Water Protection Plan Hearings

Since July 1, the state Bureau for Public Health has been holding public hearings across West Virginia to discuss proposed Source Water Protection Plans.

The plans are the result of legislation approved after a 2014 chemical spill in Charleston left hundreds of thousands of people without usable drinking water for days.

Monday evening was the second time citizens in the Kanawha Valley—those who were directly impacted by the spill—were able to comment on their local plan.

The public hearing in South Charleston focused on West Virginia American Water’s proposal submitted this summer. The company is one of 125 utilities required to submit the proposals, and Scott Rodeheaver, Assistant Manager for the Source Water Protection Program at DHHR, says public hearings are being held to discuss each one.

“It varies from place to place what the exact issues are,” Rodeheaver said, “but I think the people that come are concerned about the long term quality of the water supply in their area.”

Only six people attended Monday’s hearing, including Phil Price. He’s a semi-retired analytical chemist who works with the Charleston-based group Advocates for a Safe Water System. Price claims West Virginia American Water’s plans are not adequate.

“Many, many, many, many of the hazards upstream from our intake are excluded from the plan,” Price explained. He points to Yeager Airport as one of those hazards. But Laura Martin, the company’s External Affairs Manager, says her utility is prepared.

“What is outlined in state law is a zone of critical concern and then a zone of peripheral concern, and if we feel that there are entities or aboveground storage tanks or other facilities located outside of those, we have included them in our plan,” Martin said.

The plans need final approval from the DHHR before taking effect.

Drug Epidemic Takes Toll on Foster Care System

The drug epidemic in West Virginia affects more than just the work force, or the number of people in a prison cell or treatment center. It’s also had a major impact on the state’s foster children. West Virginia Public Broadcasting introduces the Holben family who has seen the impacts of the drug epidemic first-hand.

Meet the Holbens

 

Alyssa Holben is 8-years-old and in second grade. She came to live with the Holbens as an infant; first as a foster child and was later adopted.

 

Alyssa’s older and biological sister, Aaliyah, was also adopted by the Holbens, at 2-years-old. She’s now 10, in the fourth grade, and is shyer than her little sister.

Both girls love church, gymnastics, Disney movies and their 2-year-old brother, Brayden.

You would never know, but all three kids were exposed to drugs or alcohol in utero.

 

Alyssa was born addicted to heroin. Her older sister, Aaliyah, was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. And their little brother, Brayden, who’s not biologically related to the girls, was born addicted to three different kinds of drugs.

 

 

Jen and Jamie Holben, the children’s parents, live in Kearneysville, Jefferson County, with their six kids, four of whom were adopted through the state’s foster care system. The Holbens have been foster parents for nearly 13 years and have fostered almost 30 children during that time – ranging in age from infant to 18.

 

“We wanted to help out in some way, I mean, because I think we’re all here to make a difference,” Jamie said, “and we were very driven, whether it’s from our past hurts from us growing up as kids, or just seeing this world be cruel to people, you know, just wanting to make a difference.”

 

Jamie is a police officer who works in nearby Loudoun County, Va., and Jen is a stay-at-home mom.

 

The Holbens say one of the biggest struggles they’ve found raising their three kids who were born addicted to drugs and alcohol is the medical and academic problems that come with it.

 

“The three children we have in this house that have been affected by drugs and alcohol are totally different,” Jen noted, “They all have their own different disabilities and struggles. Brayden has three holes in his heart; Alyssa had a heart murmur when she was little, and academically, both girls struggle in different places.”

 

Alyssa and Aaliyah see their doctor every six months. Both girls take medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Alyssa also takes medicine to help her fall asleep at night. And Aaliyah takes one for epilepsy.

 

While Jen said Brayden seems to be developing in line with other children his age, she and her husband, Jamie, wonder how the kids’ individual struggles will affect them when they’re older.

 

“I think one of our biggest battles is, is there gonna be a plateau? Are they gonna reach a certain limit, and then, that’s it?” Jamie said. “We don’t know, and there’s no doctor that can give you that answer, there’s no psychologist, psychiatrist that can give you that answer, just because they don’t know.”

 

Effects on the Foster Care System in West Virginia

 

At the end of August, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources had 5,068 children in foster care, 274 of whom are in out-of-state placements.

 

Only about 1,500 of those children are available for adoption, according to the West Virginia Supreme Court. Justice Brent Benjamin said that’s because some are placed in foster care  temporarily.

 

“In many cases, they’re in temporary situations because maybe mom or dad are going through an improvement period,” Benjamin said, “because there’s been an abuse-neglect issue, or there could be any number of issues there, but they’re in foster care on a temporary basis as opposed to something that is more long term.”

 

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But just how many of those children are in foster care because of their parents’ problems with drugs or alcohol?

 

Linda Watts, Deputy Commissioner for the Bureau for Children and Families at DHHR, said that number is difficult to track. 

 

“Sometimes the reason that you’re removing a child for abuse-neglect is not necessarily the primary reason is substance abuse; it could be for another issue say physical abuse; it could be neglect, it could be some other related issue and then as you continue to do your investigation, it may then surface that it was substance use and abuse,” Watts said.

 

“What we’re seeing is that drugs may not be the primary issue in the abuse-neglect case, but it is certainly a driving issue in over 95 percent of those cases, so it’s a profound driving force in issues related to the welfare of children.” – Justice Brent Benjamin

 

Abigayle Koller is a clinical coordinator with the West Virginia National Youth Advocate Program, which is one of 10 specialized foster care agencies in West Virginia.

 

Koller said it can also be difficult to provide foster parents with the information they need to deal with the possible medical or developmental issues associated with substance abuse, because sometimes children’s birth or medical records are never provided to the agency and can’t be tracked down.

 

“So we often treat what we see,” Koller said, “which doesn’t do justice when a lot of the needs are underlying, and we have to dig, and we have to start with what we see in order to uncover what we don’t see.”

 

Being a Foster Parent

 

Jen Holben said she and her husband knew when they adopted Alyssa, Aaliyah and Brayden, that drugs or alcohol had been in their systems before birth, but she said that doesn’t always make addressing their needs any easier. While the demand for foster families in West Virginia is growing,  Jen said it takes special people to do it.

 

“If you’re gonna go pick up a baby from a hospital, know that baby can scream for four months, because he’s addicted to drugs,” she said, “or know that, that child might have developmental delays, and be okay in accepting. You’ve got to be accepting of not just the children, but be accepting of their biological parents, and you have to support what that biological parent is doing to get their kid back.”

Jen and Jamie say they never expected to be where they are today, but they’re grateful for each of their kids — adopted and fostered. They hope the state can make the overall foster system better, especially for the kids who slip through the cracks.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.

Report Blasts Plan to Change At-Risk Kids Psychiatric Care

The state Juvenile Justice Commission is accusing the West Virginia Department of Health & Human Resources of operating under a “cloak of secrecy” while negotiating new contracts to place youths in residential psychiatric facilities.

The commission released a report Monday saying that the DHHR intended to “unilaterally” overhaul the residential placement system without consulting key figures in the juvenile justice system or considering how the changes would affect residential centers’ finances.

The Supreme Court has placed a stay on a pending contract that would include a 180-day limit on juveniles’ stays at the facilities and change how services are billed.

The DHHR has said its changes are aimed at ensuring children with behavioral problems are assigned to a community-based setting, rather than the traditional group setting.

State Agencies Release Major Plan to Improve State's Healthcare System

The Department of Health and Human Resources and the West Virginia University School of Public Health released a major plan this week to improve the state’s healthcare system.

The two agencies recommend that a third, independent nonprofit group be founded. This nonprofit would coordinate state and federal healthcare resources and oversee the transition from fee-for-service payment (you pay based on the services you receive) to value-based healthcare (you pay based on your health outcomes).

The WVU School of Public Health developed the plan on behalf of the DHHR over the course of 18 months. The two agencies submitted the plan to the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which originally awarded funds for the plan’s development. The CMS federal grant program provides funding so states can develop plans to improve quality of care and reduce costs to consumers. West Virginia received almost 2 million dollars.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.

Second Application Period Opens for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program

The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources has announced a second application period for the federally funded Low Income Energy Assistance Program. The program is available to state residents with income at our below 130 percent of the federal poverty line in need of assistance paying home heating bills.  

Applications are being accepted from February 29, 2016 – March 11, 2016 from new households that were not previously approved for assistance.

The maximum allowable gross income levels for LIEAP FY 2016 are listed below:

HOUSEHOLD SIZE

MONTHLY ALLOWABLE INCOME

1 Person

$1,276

2 Person

$1,726

3 Person

$2,177

4 Person

$2,628

5 Person

$3,078

6 Person

$3,529

7 Person

$3,980

8 Person

$4,430

9 Person

$4,881

10 Person

$5,332

For each additional person, add $451.  Households whose countable income exceeds the maximum amount are not eligible.  However, some types of income may be excluded for LIEAP.

Applications can be found at local DHHR offices, community action agencies, or senior centers operated by any Area Agency on Aging.  Applications are also available online at www.wvinroads.org.  Completed applications should be delivered or mailed to the DHHR office located in the applicant’s county of residence.

All applications must be received by DHHR or postmarked by March 11, 2016.  Applications received after this date will not be approved.  Mailing the application to any other office or to a utility company may delay receipt by DHHR and prohibit processing of the application. 

Adapted from a February 29, 2016 Department of Health and Human Resources press release.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.

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