A lawsuit against West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and officials with the state Department of Health and Human Resources alleges the government has violated the rights of nearly 6,800 children currently in the state’s foster care system.
The 100-page-plus complaint alleges the state’s foster care system is failing to protect its most vulnerable and defenseless citizens. It says West Virginia’s foster children are housed in temporary shelters, hotels, institutions, or expensive out-of-state for-profit facilities where they never see a caseworker and are subjected to abuse.
Twelve children in West Virginia’s foster care system — ranging from ages 2 to 17 — are named as the initial plaintiffs. Advocacy groups A Better Childhood and Disability Rights West Virginia — and the law firm of Shaffer & Shaffer PLLC — are representing those children who are all currently under the legal guardianship of the state, according to the complaint.
An embargoed copy of the complaint — which seeks to represent all foster children under the state’s guardianship — and other related materials were provided to West Virginia Public Broadcasting before its official filing.
Attorneys involved in the case said the suit would be filed early Tuesday, October 1.
Groups representing the 12 children in the lawsuit provided basic information about each of the plaintiffs in the initial filing. With all of the plaintiffs being minors, they are identified — in the lawsuit and other associated materials — only by a first name and last initial. Many of the stories about the children allege abuse, multiple placements across the system and other shortcomings by the Department of Health and Human Resources.
Gov. Justice and state health officials, including DHHR Secretary Bill Crouch, DHHR Deputy Secretary Jeremiah Samples and Bureau of Children and Families Commissioner Linda Watts are named as defendants.
West Virginia’s foster care system has been under scrutiny by state lawmakers and federal officials in recent years.
Earlier this year, the West Virginia Legislature passed a bill to allow a private, managed care organization to run the state’s foster care system.
In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice began an investigation state on its handling of mental health services within the state’s foster care system. In May 2019, the DOJ and the state officials entered into a settlement agreement to improve the system.
DHHR Secretary Bill Crouch said changes were made to the child welfare system starting in 2013 and efforts have increased every year since.
Crouch said the lawsuit will cost the state millions of dollars “and was filed by a company that has never contacted us to ask the question: ‘What are you doing to fix these problems?’ We welcome the opportunity to make our case in court.”
Gov. Jim Justice is also listed as a defendant in the lawsuit. A spokesman says the governor declined to comment on the suit.
West Virginia's Health and Human Resources Department says 651 foster care children, mostly teen boys, have run away from group care settings or schools…
West Virginia’s Health and Human Resources Department says 651 foster care children, mostly teen boys, have run away from group care settings or schools in less than a year.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports that as of Sept. 12, 72 children in state custody were still missing and classified as runaways. They’re just a fraction of the more than 500 others that’ve escaped from less-secure state care facilities or schools since December 2018.
Health Department official Jeremiah Samples told the legislature’s Joint Committee on Children and Families Tuesday that these numbers are on track to surpass last year’s.
The newspaper reports West Virginia has the country’s highest number of children in state custody per capita. Lawmakers have been assessing solutions to address what the outlet calls a “burdened” foster care system.
Lawyers, lawmakers, about two dozen foster families, and others put their heads together Tuesday evening to discuss what’s working and what could be better inside West Virginia’s foster care system.
The forum is one of a series of listening sessions being hosted across the state by the non-profit child welfare organization, the Children’s Home Society of West Virginia.
The group, which helps certify foster families, is compiling policy suggestions ahead of next year’s legislative session, where foster care is once again expected to be a top issue.
The number of West Virginia children in foster and kinship care has doubled since 2015 largely due to the opioid epidemic.
Brandi Davis, regional director with the Children’s Home Society, said there are nearly 7,000 kids currently in the system.
Credit Brittany Patterson / WVPB
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WVPB
“We wanted to hold this forum just to get everybody together to be able to talk about foster care and adoption and kinship care to make sure that we make sure that the people who put bills in place [sic] that could impact our foster care system later on really understand what these families need,” she said.
Participants generally praised the hard-working case workers and child advocates involved in the foster care system.
Many expressed concerns over the sometimes burdensome paperwork required from foster families and long wait times for approvals from West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources staff for things ranging from final home visits to approving babysitters.
“We’re eight months in and I might have one babysitter,” said Emily Tanner, whose almost 9-month-old foster daughter was bouncing on her lap. She said the requirements to babysit foster children can be onerous and includes state residency requirements as well as a background check and being fingerprinted.
Tanner is fostering with the hope of adopting, and said, for her, the uncertainty and drawn out process — both to get final approval to be a foster parent and now waiting to adopt — has been challenging.
One foster family said they submitted paperwork for a final home inspection in January, but didn’t receive it until June.
Dianna Dickins, regional supervisor for Child Protective Services in Monongalia County, said she understood frustrations with CPS. She said the agency in Monongalia County is fully-staffed for the first time in three years, however case workers still have, on average, 45 cases each at one time.
This was the Children’s Home Society’s second listening event. The first was held in Madison, Boone County, on August 15th. The next event is scheduled for Thursday, September 5th, from 4:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. at Ritchie County High School in Ellenboro, Ritchie County. Other events are in planning stages.
West Virginia youth who need intensive non-family residential treatment have traditionally been served out of state. Now, the West Virginia Bureau for Children and Families will try and move some of those kids back in state to comply with new federal regulations.
In February, President Donald Trump signed the Family First Prevention Services Act, which included major reforms for child welfare. The legislation is essentially designed to help keep kids with their families or in a family-like setting.
Under the new legislation, states must take steps to reduce the use of group homes and other group care facilities. When children need residential services for “behavioral, intellectual, developmental and/or emotional” disorders, those must be provided in a child-care institution with no more than 25 children. The legislation lists a number of options the state must provide in order to qualify for federal funds including establishing Qualified Residential Treatment Programs.
According to a press release from the WV DHHR, the agency is seeking to establish these treatment programs for youth ages 12-21 by converting beds in existing residential treatment programs.
No new beds are to be created. Instead 100 beds – 25 in each of the bureaus four regions – are to be converted with the help of start-up funds from the state.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Marshall Health and Charleston Area Medical Center.
During the 2018 regular legislative session, West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (WVDHHR) Cabinet Secretary Bill Crouch told legislators that our state was experiencing a “child welfare crisis.” The agency reports this year that emergency has only continued to grow. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention anticipate the opioid crisis alone will claim 1 million lives nation-wide by 2020 if no corrective action is taken, which is to say nothing of the havoc that would wreak on the quality of life for families and kids.
But professionals in the state passionate about child welfare are determined to change the trajectory.
According to the state DHHR, West Virginia is the number one state in the country for children removed from their homes, and around 85 percent of these Child Protective Services (CPS) cases involved drugs. As of September 2018, almost 7,000 West Virginia children are in foster care. DHR estimate that to take proper care of our kids we need more social workers, psychiatrists, health care facilities that could cost more than 150 million dollars.
“There just aren’t enough people out there. We’re overwhelmed. The whole opioid epidemic, the need for foster placements, has just spiraled,” Amanda McCreary said. A social service coordinator at the WV DHHR in Wheeling, she’s among the state employees on the front lines of the foster crisis in the Northern Panhandle. McCreary explained that her agency has seen a 34 percent increase in Child Protective Services cases, but staff to handle those cases has not matched that increase.
She said the complicated needs of children makes placing them especially difficult.
“There is often difficulty matching certain child needs with foster parent specifications,” she explained. “Children of certain ages, specialized treatment requirements, or even large sibling groups can be harder to place.”
“It is a huge complex issue that is going to require a lot of money that West Virginia as a state probably doesn’t have,” she said.
NEEDED: Trauma-Informed Foster Parents
Foster parents today are desperately needed, but with such a strained state system, parents have to be prepared. David Johnston is a United Methodist pastor. He and his wife are foster parents in southern West Virginia. He says kids are coming into the system with a lot of trauma.
“That’s a lot to deal with as foster parents,” he explained. “And to try to help kids walk through that at the same time, navigating a really over-burdened system is difficult.”
Johnston went on to explain that in addition to normal routine parenting responsibilities like doctor visits and extracurricular activities, foster parents have to tend to additional meetings like court hearings and visits with biological parents, as well as special mediacal needs to deal with behavioral issues they’ve often developed.
Johnston said foster parents today need extra support from communities and workplace flexibility in order to properly be present for their charges.
“It’s going to take a coordinated effort between child services, between law enforcement, the courts, churches and other religious communities, and everyday people. I think trying to reach out to employers as part of this, to help them understand a role they can play both in giving people in recovery jobs, as well as being compassionate towards workers who are dealing with kids in foster care or kids who are navigating behavioral difficulties born of trauma.”
NEEDED: Trauma-Informed Institutions
Experts across disciplines — health care, schools, courts — have all observed the landscape of their workplaces change drastically in the last 20 years. People throughout the region who work with children all report observing increases of children coping with traumatizing experiences.
“We’ve got to find a way to put them on a different path in life,” Jessica Watt, a school counselor at Madison Elementary in Ohio County said. “If we do not do that, they’re going to repeat history. It’s going to be generational.”
Watt was at a roundtable series focused on the state’s child welfare crisis this fall. Watt spoke about the “new normal” she’s experiencing at her elementary school where children are routinely recounting violent acts at home as if they are ordinary occurrences. Madison Elementary has since embraced trauma-informed practices where teachers and staff have all learned to recognize and respond to traumatized children, and all school employees work together to provide a consistent, safe, and compassionate environment.
“This is life or death for these children,” she said. “If we don’t start addressing these kinds of things, we’re not going to have any little people left to teach to read and write anymore. And I’m fortunate to be in a building where I have a principal who gets that.”
Health care practitioners and mental health experts in the state are calling for not just schools, but hospitals, workplaces, recreational spaces, and all institutions in the state to become trauma-informed.
Anyone interested in foster care and adoption opportunities can learn more though the WV DHHR or contact Mission WV at 866-CALL-MWV.
Throughout the Ohio Valley and West Virginia, thousands of children are in foster care — and the opioid epidemic is sending thousands more to join them. In fact, in just the past year, West Virginia’s foster care system alone saw an increase of 1,000 children entering care.
In 2016, West Virginia Public Broadcasting spoke with the Holbens, a former-foster family in Kearneysville, Jefferson County, to shed light on the struggles the opioid epidemic brings on foster care. We now check back in with that family and explore what lies ahead in combating this crisis.
Be sure to tune in for more on this subject during our nightly television program, The Legislature Today beginning January 11, 2018.
The Holben’s Experience
Stay-at-home mom and daycare provider Jen Holben lives in Kearneysville with her six kids. They’re like any other family – they joke with each other, share meals, laugh, play, and watch movies together. They love church and they’re actively involved at school and within the community.
But Jen is also a former-foster parent, who, for 14 years, along with her ex-husband, fostered 27 children ranging in age from infant to 18.
“I had heard adoption stories, and I really started to think I would like to adopt,” Jen said, “and when I started to research, I really didn’t know much about the foster care system at all, but when I would type in adoption, foster care would come up, and I educated myself, and I thought, that’s what I want to do, I want to help children.”
Jen also has two biological sons who are in high school. Of the 27 children she’s fostered, she adopted four – three of whom were exposed to drugs or alcohol in utero.
“My youngest was born addicted to three different drugs, and he was in the hospital for three weeks, and when he came home from the hospital, he screamed for four months straight until he really got off the drugs,” she remembered, “Right now, he’s on target. He’s really excelling and doing really well.”
The two other children impacted by drugs or alcohol are biologically related sisters.
The 9-year-old was born while her mother was addicted to heroin. Jen says she’s doing well, but will likely need ongoing help in school.
Jen’s other daughter, who’s 11-years-old, struggles a bit more.
“She’s probably on a second or third grade level and should be in the sixth grade, and she has fetal alcohol syndrome. She suffers from epilepsy from the fetal alcohol syndrome and is severely delayed.”
Both girls also have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and take medication for it.
Jen says despite medical and academic struggles, she loves being a mom and watching her kids grow.
But there are other kids in the West Virginia foster care system who still need help. For Jen, the solution is making sure these kids are placed in a secure environment, early, and for the long term.
“We just need to get these kids in permanent homes as fast as we can, so that they can just heal,” she said, “I mean, if they’re drug addicted, then they need to overcome that. If they’ve been taken away because of neglect and abuse, then we need to get therapy, and let them do that, but they can’t do that if they’re jumping from placement to placement, or going home and coming back, I think we just really need to put the kids first.”
Credit Toby Talbot / AP Photo
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AP Photo
The Opioid Epidemic & Foster Care
But finding permanent homes is rarely easy.
The West Virginia Children’s Home Society, or CHS, is one of 10 agencies in the state that handle foster care referrals from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
The organization works to find the best matchups for children who need temporary or permanent placements – whether that’s in traditional foster homes like Jen’s, or in other placements, such as with a relative or in emergency shelters.
Chief Executive Officer of CHS Steve Tuck notes that in just the last few years, there’s been a dramatic spike in the number of children coming into care – this has made it harder to ensure these kids find adequate home environments.
He also says the opioid epidemic has played a major role in that rise.
“The need has only gone up,” Tuck explained, “The number in care had gone up close to 6,000 from what it had stabilized for many years at around 4,000 kids, state kids in-care; it’s even in these last few months, it’s gone up almost 100 a month.”
DHHR reported in November 2017 that nearly 6,400 West Virginia children are in foster care. That’s about 1,000 more kids in care than the previous year.
Tuck says it’s hard to pinpoint just how many of those children are coming into care as a direct result of substance abuse.
For example, if a child is pulled from a home because of some form of neglect, the role substance abuse played isn’t always clearly noted. Likewise, when children are born with drug related issues, there’s no consistent methods for determining the extent of parental substance abuse.
Tuck says to improve these situations, there needs to be more communication.
“We all need to get together from the medical, especially the hospitals serving those situations, and the ones that might need to take custody for children,” he noted.
Despite the difficulties, Tuck argues the general consensus regarding the number of children coming into care due to substance abuse is at least 50 percent.
“And I’ve seen numbers as high as 90 [percent], but that’s really probably people’s more anecdotal, you know, who’ve worked in this work a long-time, acknowledgement that it almost affects every placement of children coming into care.” – Steve Tuck
Tuck says one way to help limit the number of children needing to enter care is to start with the families.
CHS, Marshall University, DHHR, and the behavioral health and addiction treatment center Prestera are all working together on a pilot project to help addicted mothers get the care and therapy they need to get off drugs and keep their children.
The pilot project has been launched in Cabell, Lincoln, and Wayne counties first, but Tuck hopes if it’s successful, it will expand to all 55 counties.
Tuck asks state lawmakers to keep the foster care system in mind during the 2018 state Legislative session.
“My encouragement to them is really just to acknowledge that there’s a lot higher cost to taking care of these kids,” he said, “and they are our West Virginia children that we all are responsible for, so they really have to look at that one when most of the discussions are around budget cuts and reduced funding and things like that.”
Back at the Holben’s, Jen encourages more West Virginia families to think about becoming foster parents.
“You hear all this stuff, and it can scare you away, but is the most rewarding; every kid I’ve had has been a blessing to me, but definitely educate yourself, so you’re prepared for what you might deal with, and just always remember that a kid that comes to your house through foster care, through adoption, through anything; their story goes beyond the day you bring them home,” Jen explained, “And whether you bring them home as a baby, they still have biological parents that, it’s part of them, and it’s part of their story; their story isn’t just being in your home.”
Still, Jen’s biggest concern is ensuring the children who end up in West Virginia’s foster care system are placed in permanent homes as soon as possible.
According to the West Virginia DHHR, of the nearly 6,400 children in foster care, 51 are available for adoption.
