House Bill 4092 Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va Senate Restores $16.9 Million To House Bill Reforming Foster Care

West Virginia senators passed a bill from the House of Delegates on Friday, in an attempt to reform various aspects of the state’s overwhelmed foster care system.

House Bill 4092, as voted on by the Senate, sends roughly $16.9 million to the state Department of Health and Human Resources to implement a tiered system of direct payments to foster families and child-placing agencies.

The legislation also formally adds “kinship caregivers” to state code, referring to adults with an established connection to the child they’re fostering. It includes a list of more than 20 rights for foster children and their caregivers, and it increases accountability related to guardians ad litem, or the attorneys who represent foster children in the judicial system.

The bill now heads back to the House of Delegates. Earlier this week, there was concern in the chamber about plans in the Senate to drastically reduce the bill’s funding to $4.9 million.

“It addresses the crisis that we’re currently in, of being woefully short on foster families,” Del. Jeffrey Pack, R-Raleigh, said of the $16.9 million request on Thursday. “The idea behind increasing the imbursement rate was to help recruit more certified foster families in our system.”

Senate Finance Chair Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, told his chamber on Friday that lawmakers received a “revenue adjustment letter” on Thursday for $20 million.

“It gave us the flexibility for what we had in our budget, to be able to do that,” Blair said.

The House version of the bill increased monthly payments to foster families from $600 to $900, per all children, regardless of need and age.

The Senate version of the bill that passed Friday creates a tiered system to “provide higher payments for foster parents providing care to, and child placing agencies providing services to, foster children who have severe emotional, behavioral or intellectual problems or disabilities.”

In committee testimony, the state Department of Health and Human Resources has said the agency would favor a tiered system, because having different tiers would allow them flexibility to better serve older foster children and children with greater needs, who are often harder to place with families and end up in expensive group facilities, out of state or in some instances juvenile detention.

“For some reason, the department has a much easier time placing infants, very young children, than they do placing teenagers,” Judiciary Chair Charles Trump, R-Morgan, said on the Senate floor Friday. “Children who have problems, or special needs, are especially hard to find homes for. So, as a consequence of that, what we’ve got in West Virginia right now is we have a lot of them in institutional environments … and that’s wrong. Any child that could be put in a home and is put in congregate care in some institution, is not being served in the child’s best interest.”

Marissa Sanders, a member of the West Virginia Foster, Adoptive and Kinship Parents Network, said Friday after the Senate’s vote she was pleased with the body’s decision.

Since interims this year, Sanders has connected lawmakers with foster families and their perspectives. In Pack’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary committee on Tuesday, when senators were considering stripping funds, he said lawmakers began working on House Bill 4092 after reviewing data from Sanders.

“It’s just amazing to see people who have felt like they had no voice, and no real involvement in the process, step up and begin to share their truths,” Sanders said of foster families. “The feeling of being heard by legislators is just absolutely incredible. To look at that bill and see that these things are here because foster families said, “this is what we need,” and they heard us, that’s incredible.”

The bill is going back to the House, where 96 delegates passed an earlier version of the legislation in February. Should the House agree with the Senate’s amendments, the bill goes to Gov. Jim Justice for final approval.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

Foster Care Bill Nearing Passage After Senators Continue Tweaking Funding, Foster Childs’ Rights

A bill for foster care reform in the West Virginia Legislature was amended further Wednesday night, before it was sent to the full Senate for consideration.

The Senate Finance Committee voted 10-7 along party lines to pass an amended House Bill 4092, providing at least $4.9 million to the state Department of Health and Human Resources for foster care.

That replaces a line in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s version of the bill, which senators passed along to the Senate Finance Tuesday night, allocating at least $4 million to the DHHR.

The money in the bill is meant to help the DHHR implement a tiered system of direct payments to certified foster parents and kinship caregivers. In that tiered system, higher payments would go to families caring for foster children with severe emotional, behavioral or intellectual needs, and older children who the DHHR says are harder to place than younger children.

Before it reached the Senate, House Bill 4092 didn’t address how payments should differ according to the needs and age of a child. Instead, it simply increased the minimum level of direct payments to foster families from $600 a month to $900 a month, per child. The legislation also provided child-placing agencies with a minimum $75 daily per child, to help the agencies provide more services to foster families.

The DHHR estimated the financial implications of the House version would have cost the state $16.9 million total. As both chambers of the Legislature finalize a budget for 2021, the House still includes that $16.9 line item in its budget request. The Senate does not.

Both chambers’ budgets include another $14.9 million improvement package the DHHR requested earlier this year for social services. According to DHHR Deputy Secretary Jeremiah Samples, the department could implement a tiered payment system, as described in the Senate Finance version of the bill, using this money.

“A tiered model does allow us to build greater capacity than a flat increase,” Samples told senators Wednesday evening.

The DHHR currently is piloting a tiered system in a few West Virginia counties, where child placement agencies and families are paid according to three tiers. The highest tier is reserved for children with the most medical or behavioral needs.

If the DHHR were able to implement the tiered program statewide, Samples said, more families might house older children and kids with greater needs, who the state otherwise sends to expensive out-of-state institutions and group homes. Samples said of the roughly 7,000 children in foster care now, just under 500 have had to leave West Virginia.

“One of the biggest money-losers is … having to send our children out of state, pay[ing] a high price tag,” Sen. Tom Takubo, R-Kanawha, said in committee Wednesday. He suggested that the state would be able to use the money saved to implement the pay raises the House of Delegates called for with the monthly payment increases.

“We can do the same thing with less money,” Takubo said.

Democrats who ultimately voted against passing the Senate Finance version of the bill Wednesday said they wanted to reinstate the monthly payment increases, described in the original House bill.

Sen. William Ihlenfeld, D-Ohio, referred to testimony the committee heard earlier during its Wednesday meeting from Julia Kessler with the West Virginia Children’s Home Society.

“Our foster families do the hardest job in the system that we have,” Kessler said Wednesday night. “They take care of kids with the most difficult problems. We ask them to put their own personal lives aside … they really have the most stressful job of taking care of kids and learning how to deal with the behaviors and the trauma that they come into the home with.”

“We have trouble finding families who want to get involved in the foster care system,” Ihlenfeld said. “I don’t think the flexibility we’ve given to the DHHR in the past has worked. I think it’s time that we need to legislate a little bit. … I think sometimes we have to enforce our will upon agencies to make sure that problems get fixed.”

An amendment from Ihlenfeld to bring back the $900 monthly minimum to foster families failed along party lines.

The Senate Finance bill also maintains many of the changes the Senate Judiciary Committee made on Tuesday to a list of rights for foster parents and children.

The original House bill included 27 rights for children in the foster care system.

The Senate Finance bill downsized that to 21 rights, most notably excluding rights to receive confidential correspondence from biological parents and other family, to have social contacts outside the foster care system, to have storage space for private use, and to be free from unreasonable searches of personal belongings.

Senators agreed Wednesday to reinstate a right allowing foster children to maintain contact with former caregivers and other important adults, which had been removed from the House bill by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

There were 26 rights for foster parents and kinship caregivers in the original House Bill. Now there are 16. Senators on the Judiciary Committee said Tuesday night that was to mitigate any “cause of actions” those rights created for foster parents to sue the state for damages.

Regarding other legislative efforts dealing with foster care issues, the Senate agreed unanimously to pass House Bill 4415 for runaway and missing foster care children on Wednesday. House Bill 4094, elaborating on the responsibilities of a foster care ombudsman created last year, is slated to pass the Senate on Thursday.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

W.Va. Senate Judiciary Advances Foster Care Bill After Stripping House-Requested Funding

A committee in the West Virginia Senate has passed a bipartisan bill from the House of Delegates that would reform the foster care system, but not without significant amendments to the bill’s financial items.

House Bill 4092, as amended by the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday night, provides at least $4 million to the Department of Health and Human Resources to implement a tiered system of per diem payments to certified foster parents and kinship caregivers.

That tiered system would “provide higher payments for foster parents providing care to, and child placing agencies providing services to, foster children who have severe emotional, behavioral or intellectual problems or disabilities.”

Children with greater needs like these and older children are the hardest to place, according to Watts, and often they end up in group home or residential facilities.

“What we heard from families [is], families are willing to take older children,” Linda Watts, commissioner of the Bureau for Children and Families, said Tuesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “But they need a little bit more money to do that and, in addition, they need support.”

Previously, the bill increased monthly payments to caregivers from $600 to a minimum of $900, for foster care children of all ages and needs. According to financial estimates from the state DHHR, which oversees Watts’ bureau and the foster care system, those increases would cost the state an additional $3.6 million in 2021.

The DHHR says all of the fiscal items in the House version of the bill would cost in total roughly $16.9 million more from the state. DHHR representatives said Tuesday night they’ll have to assemble new fiscal information for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s updates.

Additional changes to the bill by the Senate Judiciary Committee also focused on rights that would be granted to foster care children and their caregivers.

Sen. Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell, said Tuesday he supported changes to the foster parents bill of rights. He told other senators on the committee he supported removing portions of the original House bill that risked creating a “cause of action” for parents to easily sue the state for money, property or other damages.

Most of the night’s debate was centered around the funding impacts. Sen. Glenn Jeffries, D-Putnam, made a motion to return the original funding to the bill, as approved by the House of Delegates.

The amendment ultimately failed along party lines, 6-10.

“We have money for everything else around here,” Woelfel said, who voted in favor of reinstating the House-requested dollars. “We always find the money when we need it. But there aren’t too many lobbyists out here for these little foster kids.”

During the committee’s debate on the amendment from Jeffries, Sen. Stephen Baldwin, D-Greenbrier, called Del. Jeffrey Pack, R-Raleigh, to testify to the committee.

Pack is a co-sponsor on the bill and serves as vice chair of the House Health and Human Resources Committee.

Before passing the full House of Delegates nearly unanimously, the bill passed three House committees with favorable recommendations.

Pack told Senators he and other delegates drafted House Bill 4092 over the interim session, after considering various complaints from foster families regarding a lack of services available and financial support.

“We considered that we could best address both services and the per diem rate, in a nutshell,” Pack said. “So, what we did was, through a series of discussions, we decided to increase the funding per diem to the child placing agencies.”

In addition to increasing monthly payments to foster families, the DHHR said House Bill 4092 — as originally written — would’ve cost the state an additional $7.5 million for an increase in daily amounts provided to foster child-placing agencies.

According to Pack, that proposed increase was to help these agencies set up support services for foster families that the DHHR cannot.

He added the $900 amount was only the minimum for what the House wanted families to receive.

“We understand some children require higher imbursement rates because of exceptionalities, or they’re harder to place,” Pack told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, opposed the amendment from Jeffries to reinstate the House’s $16.9 million funding. He said he thought the Senate Finance Committee would be more qualified to consider the financial aspects of the bill.

“So why did the Judiciary find it in its purview … to remove that funding in the first place?” Baldwin asked Weld. “It came to us with specific amounts, and you said it was best for the [Senate] Finance Committee to deal with the numbers, but we took the numbers out and added new numbers. I don’t understand how that fits within the framework of what you are saying.”

“No,” Weld replied. “No one’s saying that these children aren’t going to receive money for these programs. What I did say — and I think it was taken out of context and misconstrued — was that the financial side of this can be dealt with within the Finance Committee.”

“I’m not against giving increases to kinship relatives, or to the foster care providers,” Watts told senators Tuesday night. “I’m not against an increase. I’m not sure the amount that was set [in the original version of the bill] will get us the building of services that we need for the older kids.”

DHHR Deputy Secretary Jeremiah Samples said the agency still could provide payment plans to families if the amended House Bill succeeds in Senate Finance with the new tier system, the $4 million and an additional $14.9 million the DHHR already has requested for social service improvements.

According to Samples, the DHHR has been piloting a tiered system in certain counties. He said if the program were administered statewide, the state would save more money in the long run by placing older children with more behavioral needs with West Virginia families, instead of costly institutions.

“It doesn’t have to be either or,” Woelfel said in the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday night. He suggested the Senate reinstate the House’s funding and propose an amendment on the Senate floor that calls for the tiered system.

Senators rejected two amendments from Sen. Stephen Baldwin to reinstate items from the former House bill for the foster child’s bill of rights.

One amendment would’ve returned a line from the original House bill, allowing foster children the right to be free from unwarranted physical restraint and isolation.

A second amendment would’ve returned more language from the original bill, allowing foster children to keep in touch with previous caregivers and other important adults to a child, withstanding an order from the court prohibiting that.

“It is my sense that … young people who are in this circumstance, they are experiencing a certain level of trauma, and that trauma is only magnified by the chaos of it,” Baldwin said before his proposed amendment failed. “So, when you’re in that situation, you need anchors. You need guideposts, you need people you can turn to who are safe, you need positive influences in your life.”

House Bill 4092 goes to the Senate Finance Committee next.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.