MARTINSBURG, W.Va. – This year, a main focus of the Morrisey administration is finding out ways to improve the conditions for children around the state, in particular the more than 6,000 currently in foster care.
97th District Delegate Chris Anders (R- Berkeley) recently held a listening session about Child Protective Services in the Mountain State.
This week on MetroNews, he talked about what he’s learned. “I’ve never dealt with CPS personally,” Anders says, “but over the past couple months I’ve been receiving calls and messages from hundreds of parents across the whole state about deep and serious issues within our CPS systems. So I spoke with Senator Rose and we discussed and we put together the listening session that we had.”
“It was, to be absolutely honest, very eye opening.”
He talked about some of his main takeaways. “CPS will often go to a foster family before they will go to someone beside the parents, their grandparents or great grandparents as the case may be.”
“I talked to two children,” impacted by those decisions. “They really wanted to be with their grandparents, but fighting to get there was one of the issues.”
He added poor staffing at CPS is a major factor. “I’m not pointing my finger directly at CPS and blaming the workers, but there’s something completely wrong with the system that needs to be changed,” he says. “And yes, we’re having a hard time finding CPS workers because of the caseload.”
“My question is, why is there such a large caseload?”
He questioned whether every child that falls under the foster care system should actually be there. “If you listen to the parents, a lot of times (CPS is ) using poverty as an excuse to take children away from their home,” he says, adding poverty “is not a crime.”
Earlier this year State Department of Human Services Secretary Alex Mayer conducted a series of listening sessions around the state. One in Martinsburg brought together stakeholders including CPS workers, social workers, kinship families, and those who had lost custody of their children.
This week, Mayer updated lawmakers on efforts to address the recent audit by the Office of Inspector General in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during interim meetings Tuesday at the Capitol.
MetroNews reporter Morgan Pemberton reports the audit, released in early November, stated that the state Bureau of Social Services had not complied with intake, screening, assessment, or investigation requirements for responding to reports of child abuse and neglect. The OIG ordered the review after Boone County teenager Kyneddi Miller starved to death in her home in 2024.
The audit highlighted these issues:
-74 of the 100 screened-in family reports that they reviewed, did not have documentation within its system to support notification letters were sent to each parent or caregiver
-58 notification letters were not sent to the individuals subject to the initial assessment for unsubstantiated reports
-16 notification letters were not sent to each individual maltreater via certified mail within 15 days for substantiated reports
Mayer told lawmakers they were aware of the issues outlined in the report, but are still taking them seriously.
“We take the OIG findings seriously, the report did not tell us anything we didn’t know already. These are children’s lives, families futures, and the credibility of state government,” he said. “What the audit did do was validate the steps that we are already taking, the issues we’ve identified, and the approaches to address what was outlined in the report.”
He spoke about eight pillars of issues they are mainly focusing on, including:
-adoption, foster care, and kinship supports
-residential placements
-practice, process, and case management
-faith-based and community partnership engagement
-prevention and early intervention
-technology, data, and citizen engagement
-judicial system and legal engagement
-fiscal responsibility, accountability, and sustained funding
While all of these issues are important, Mayer focused primarily on resident placements, fiscal responsibility, and agency processes.
Mayer said they are focusing on residential placement because the state had been placing foster children in hotel rooms or sending them to out-of-state facilities. He said these are not appropriate placements for children.
“We are strengthening coordination with a focus on three things: expanding in-state treatment options so youths can stay closer to home, ensuring placements are clinical appropriate and time limited, and building better data and quality monitoring systems so we can track outcomes, identify gaps and intervene earlier,” he said.
They are also focusing on improving practice standards, processes, and case management.
Mayer said they are addressing this issue not only because of the report, but also due to their own data and feedback gathered during the Child Welfare Listening Tour in May.
He said they all reached the same conclusion: the department had inconsistent practices, uneven decision-making, and processes that placed unnecessary burdens on staff.
Mayer highlighted that they are developing a new practice model, which includes several key components.
“Right now we are in the early stages of policy and intervention manual development for the intake assessment portion of the model, at the same time we are working on an initial family manual so that from first contact onward our decisions are trauma informed, structured, and consistent,” he said.
Mayer said one of the most critical issues is fiscal responsibility. He explained that they are taking measures to strengthen financial oversight and ensure taxpayer dollars are used effectively and transparently, in compliance with federal and state requirements.
“This includes reviewing and strengthening internal financial controls across the programs and contracts, enhancing monitoring of provider payments to ensure accuracy and compliance with federal liable cost principals and building stronger collaboration between programmatic and fiscal teams, and ensuring the financial decisions reflect practice realities and vice versa,” Mayer said.
Mayer stated that he hopes the eight pillars will help strengthen the child welfare system.
“Across these eight pillars, adoption, foster care, residential care, practice modernization, community partnership, prevention, technology, and judicial engagement, we’re building a child welfare system that is more stable, more transparent, and more accountable,” he said. “We’re not asking you to take our word for it, we’re building the data, the processes, and the partnerships that will allow us to show you over time that the outcomes are improving.”
