Far from home: West Virginia ships foster children out of state to face uncertain fate
Our investigation found 22 serious accounts of abuse and neglect at out-of-state facilities West Virginia has paid to care for its foster kids.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – If children have to leave home and enter the foster care system, the hope is they will stay with a loving family or in a nearby group home. But in West Virginia, hundreds of foster kids end up in out-of-state group homes far from the watchful eye of the state agency that’s supposed to take care of them.
Even worse, some children end up in facilities accused of abuse and neglect.
Our investigation found 22 serious accounts of abuse and neglect at out-of-state facilities West Virginia has paid to care for its foster kids.
In a Pennsylvania facility, children were placed in a "time out chair" as punishment for hours or even weeks. At a group home in Ohio, children were forced to use sharp blades to cut down fields of weeds. Several sexual assaults of children at the facilities also have been reported.
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We found that, from 2011 to 2020, the misuse of restraints was flagged at 75% of the facilities we reviewed.
Children are placed out of state because West Virginia lacks enough foster families and facilities that can care for children with certain mental health issues. The practice continues even though state leaders have said for years that out-of-state placements need to end.
In the past decade, as opioid abuse soared, West Virginia's foster care system experienced a 71% increase in the number of children it serves.
Our yearlong investigation laid bare the lack of transparency in the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, the agency in charge of the state’s foster care system.
The department, responsible for the welfare of nearly 7,000 kids in foster care, agreed to only one interview in the past year, despite our multiple requests. The one official we interviewed directly was unable to answer many questions central to our reporting.
Instead, we were directed to submit questions to agency officials by email. Their answers often left us with more questions.
Information hard to obtain
We also filed 50 requests under the Freedom of Information Act, and those documents revealed that West Virginia had failed to remove children from out-of-state facilities even after inspectors flagged mistreatment.
The agency did at times end contracts or remove children from facilities facing serious allegations. But the records also show instances where the agency failed to act or took months to remove children from troubled facilities.
Still, it was impossible to compile a comprehensive accounting of how the foster care system cares for children placed out of state because officials repeatedly denied or delayed records requests and failed to provide documents.
If state officials weren’t talking to us, we wondered how they were addressing the concerns of West Virginians. It turns out we weren’t the only ones having trouble.
Communications complaints from families – biological and foster – involved in the system are pervasive, according to the department's 2021 report. Foster parents told the ombudsman tasked with fielding complaints that they “cannot get a return text or telephone call” from state-employed Child Protective Services workers.
Caseworkers visit children in their care once every three months or less often, according to more than 40% of respondents in a survey of 1,000 foster families. One parent we talked with had seen their foster daughters’ CPS worker only once in a year, which she called “hard” and “infuriating” since West Virginia has custody of the child.
There are bright spots in the state’s foster care system: The Safe at Home program that aims to get kids help in their communities so they don’t have to go to a treatment facility in or out of state seems to have had success. Still, the agency declined an opportunity to discuss the program, citing an ongoing lawsuit.
State lawmakers with the most power to hold the agency accountable would not talk to us or demonstrated a limited understanding of the problem.
Child poverty rate is high
When this investigation started a year ago, we knew the stakes were high: Nearly a fifth of children here live in poverty, and more children in West Virginia are affected by opioids than in any other state.
As Beth Cook, a social worker in the state’s southern coalfields who used to work for the state agency, put it: “We’re talking about lost generations. We’re talking about the future economy of the state.”
With more West Virginians having died of drug overdoses in 2020 than in any previous year, top officials at the agency expect another wave of children to enter the foster system.
Nationwide, child abuse and neglect referrals dropped as students were learning at home, but child welfare experts warn that the referral numbers will jump as kids return to in-person learning.
Foster care is an undercovered topic nationally and in West Virginia. Much of the reporting on the system has come from national outlets with a big-picture view or local news reports highlighting the need for foster families.
What’s missing was accountability – local journalists meeting foster families and children, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and asking hard questions. In 2020, Mountain State Spotlight, a nonprofit newsroom focused on accountability journalism, launched in West Virginia, and soon the newsroom paired up with The GroundTruth Project to help fund this project.
Reforming the system and increasing the quality of care is not an easy lift in the state, especially with its high level of poverty and a decreasing population that reduces potential foster families.
However, transparency from the agency tasked with caring for these kids is key to the public understanding whether our state is protecting its most vulnerable citizens.
Amelia Ferrell Knisely covers poverty for Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia as a corps member of Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. She can be reached at ameliaknisely@mountainstatespotlight.org. Molly Born is a freelance journalist and documentary producer in Charleston, W.Va. She can be reached at molly.born@gmail.com.
