West Virginia Senate Finance Panel Guts Foster Care Bill
Photo courtesy of WV Legislative Photography Trending
CHARLESTON -- A West Virginia Senate committee spent two days discussing a bipartisan foster care support bill after gutting it.
For its final meeting before the end of the 2022 legislative session, the Senate Finance Committee recommended House Bill 4344 for passage Thursday morning, sending the bill to the full state Senate for consideration, but not before making substantial changes.
HB 4344, as it came over from the House and the Senate Health and Human Resources Committee, required the state Department of Health and Human Resources to develop a program with child placement agencies to ensure that kinship families are assigned to the agencies that can provide support services to them.
The bill created a new foster family database to track these placements and match new placements.
It also required the department to contract with a third party to study how the agency handles centralized intake for abuse and neglect cases and to review the standards for accepting referrals.
The bill allowed DHHR to hire outside counsel for abuse and neglect cases instead of using county prosecuting attorneys. It would require that any report by a medical professional of abuse or neglect of children to the state hotline be immediately investigated.
HB 4344 also increased the pay for direct service workers by 15% and requires the Division of Personnel to increase the salary ranges for those job classifications by 20%. According to a fiscal note, a 15% raise would cost more than $9 million for the next fiscal year. The bill also created a critical positions fund.
However, the Finance Committee voted against the Health Committee's version of the bill Thursday morning, instead taking up a new strike-and-insert amendment that would remove nearly everything in the current version of the bill except for sections dealing with court proceedings and the foster care ombudsman responsibilities.
According to DHHR, the department has 1,265 direct service employees with 273 vacancies, equaling a 30% vacancy rate statewide. According to the Governor's Office and DHHR officials, they have the authority already to increase salaries for direct service workers and intend to do so.
"Rather than growing the base budget, if there are a number of positions that are available, our letter clarifies that the agencies have the authority to make those decisions," said Berkeley Bentley, general counsel to Gov. Jim Justice. "If they have (a) large number of vacancies in their department, they can collapse some of those to provide additional funds for raises where needed."
"This letter gives us the ability to look at the department in total in regards to looking at vacancies," said DHHR Secretary Bill Crouch. "It is our intention to give these increases. Our staff are so important to what we do. This is one of the most difficult jobs in government."
"Clearly, salary is one component that will be necessary to stabilize our workforce," said Jeffrey Pack, commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Resources' Bureau of Social Services, during testimony Wednesday. "I certainly prefer the pay raises. Whether they are part of the bill or not is immaterial to me as long as it occurs."
Sen. Mike Maroney, R-Marshall, questioned Pack Wednesday evening about why the agency suddenly opposed the inclusion of a data dashboard which had been taken out of the previous version of the bill. The House version of the bill did not include specific data to be collected, while the Senate Health Committee version included specific metrics to collect.
"I was just curious after the bill left Senate Health whether you thought it was terrible or just bad," Maroney asked Pack.
"I didn't think it was improved upon," Pack said.
"The fact that you like a data dashboard better that came from the House because it requires no data to be collected than one that actually requires data to be collected surprises me and makes me think we are in trouble in improving our foster care situation," Maroney said.
Senate Minority Leader Stephen Baldwin, D-Greenbrier, offered an amendment to put back in a provision requiring the immediate investigation of any reporting by a medical professional of abuse or neglect of children. The amendment was adopted.
The provision is in response to a 2020 incident in Greenbrier County where a medical professional reported what they believed to be abuse of a child they were treating, but the abuse and neglect hotline never sent the report to law enforcement. Four months later, the child in question and four other siblings were murdered by their mother, who set the house on fire and shot herself.
"If that call had gotten through a couple of months earlier, would that have changed the situation? Maybe, maybe not, but it has ripped our community apart, and we can't allow the status quo to continue," Baldwin said.
"I think it is vitally crucial that this kind of thing would not happen again without us putting as many roadblocks up as possible," said Senate Finance Committee Vice Chairman Dave Sypolt, R-Preston. "I think it's the right thing to do."
Pack, however, said he was concerned about putting the amendment back into the bill. He said it could create more work and pressure on field staff who conduct the child abuse and neglect investigations. Pack said more than 1,400 investigations are conducted annually.
"We're already underwater in regards to our staffing and struggling to get our investigations done on time," Pack said. "I think this would be an undue burden."
"We can't not let anything change ... the status quo isn't good enough," Baldwin said. "Sending all medical professionals and screening their calls in is a baby step in my opinion, but you think it causes undue burden?"
According to statistics from DHHR, the foster care program in West Virginia grew from 4,114 cases in 2012 to 6,574 cases as of February -- a nearly 60% increase over a 10-year period.