This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight. Get stories like this delivered to your email inbox once a week; sign up for the free newsletter at https://mountainstatespotlight.org/newsletter.

Support for this story came from the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 Data Fellowship and The Carter Center.

Reporting Highlights

  • Continued shortages: West Virginia is still struggling to hire and retain child welfare workers, with wide-reaching consequences for kids in the foster care system.
  • Permanency: More than half of the kids who spent a year or more in West Virginia’s system between 2012-2022 experienced more than one placement. 
  • Foster families: The ongoing lack of foster families in the state has been made worse by a lack of support from West Virginia’s Department of Human Services. 

When Olivia Frausto was growing up with her father and sister in Martinsburg, sleeping on the floor and waking up to cockroaches scuttling on the walls, she remembers frequent visits from West Virginia Child Protective Services workers. 

“Long story short, I didn’t have very good parental supervision,” Olivia, now 19, said recently. “I grew up with not a lot of parents, and not a lot of people leading me in the right direction.”

That path led to truancy and drug use. At 13, Olivia was impregnated by an adult man and the following year gave birth to a daughter prematurely. But it wasn’t until she got into a fist fight with her older sister that the state stepped in to intervene. And then, it wasn’t to remove her from a bad situation and get her mental health care; it was to lock her in a concrete cell at the Vicki Douglas Juvenile Center. 

“They didn’t even take into consideration that I was a 14 year old who was groomed by a grown man,” she said. 

For Olivia, that trauma led to years in and out of juvenile detention centers, group facilities and foster homes. West Virginia continues to rely on residential group care for kids with physical and mental disabilities — an ongoing situation that has led to years of monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice and a class action lawsuit that is scheduled to go before a federal judge in March. 

There are myriad factors, but exacerbating all of them is a chronic shortage of Child Protective Service workers.

“The system is not going to get better unless you have enough workers to do the job,” said Marcia Lowry, whose group A Better Childhood brought the lawsuit on behalf of West Virginia’s foster kids. “It’s just the most fundamental issue.”

These are the workers responsible for investigating alleged child abuse and neglect; in the most tragic cases, kids have died because they’re left in dangerous situations, like in the recent high-profile cases of Kyneddi Miller, a Boone County teenager who died of starvation in 2024, and the five children killed by their mother in Greenbrier County in 2020. For every fatality, there are hundreds of other kids like Olivia who need some kind of intervention and don’t get it until it’s too late. 

But the duties of West Virginia’s 400-some CPS workers extend beyond this initial investigation, and the shortage has additional serious implications for the kids in the state’s custody. These are the people who try to find the best places to put the thousands of kids who suddenly need a new home. They’re the ones tasked with checking on kids in care. They’re the ones who can help connect biological parents with the resources they need to regain custody of their children, and they’re also the ones who can provide support to foster parents who need it.

For years, the state hasn’t had enough people in these key positions. And when they’re stretched too thin, every aspect of the system suffers.

Key Shortages of Child Welfare Workers

When Orion Flynn thinks about the year he spent living at SandyPines Residential Treatment Center in Jupiter, Florida, he remembers tall fences and unanswered phone calls. 

Originally from Cabell County, Orion had been in the foster care system for more than a decade at that point, cycling through nearly a dozen different kinds of homes, including with foster families, in emergency shelters and several residential treatment centers. 

At 16, he was sent to Board of Child Care, a treatment center in Martinsburg, after trying to hurt himself. Six months later, he says he wasn’t reevaluated to determine whether he was still in danger before his CPS worker put him on a plane and flew with him to Florida. 

Orion Flynn has aged out of the state’s custody, but as a foster child, he spent time in several different in-patient treatment centers. Photo courtesy Orion Flynn.

There, Orion found what he describes as “juvie, but in a quote unquote medical setting.” There were fences barricading the property and all the doors to the outside were locked. He says after he was attacked by another kid there, his outdoor privileges were taken away for his role in the incident. He wasn’t allowed outside for a month. 

(In an emailed response, a spokesperson for SandyPines said their facility doesn’t “punish” individuals, and they are “committed to quality, individualized, trauma-informed, evidence-based residential services” for the kids in their care.)

Kids at SandyPines were limited to one call a day, for no more than 10 minutes. Every day, Orion would trudge to the nurse’s station to try to reach his CPS worker. Every day, her cell phone would ring and ring, and she wouldn’t pick up. 

“The person who was supposed to be on my side, supposed to be figuring out things for me, wasn’t even answering or calling me back,” Orion said.

He doesn’t know why his worker wouldn’t answer the phone — maybe she didn’t care, maybe she was overworked. But to him, it was devastating. 

“Your foster parents can only do so much, whereas in the system, your worker controls your entire life,” he said. 

In West Virginia, CPS workers are tasked with checking in on kids like Orion every month — and though there are exceptions, many of those check-ins are supposed to be face-to-face. But for years, plagued by high vacancy rates that lead to untenable case loads, workers have struggled to complete these tasks. And things are getting worse: A smaller percentage of caseworker visits are happening at least monthly, according to the state’s latest progress report to the federal government

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. The shortage of workers puts more pressure on those who remain. They get to a breaking point and leave. The problem gets worse. 

“I loved my job. I loved working with the kids, I loved helping the kids, and I loved the foster families,” former CPS worker Kathie Giboney said. She worked for more than four years in the district that covers Pleasants, Ritchie and Doddridge counties. 

It was a tough job. But as the state lost more and more CPS workers, Giboney had to shoulder more and more cases. 

When Giboney quit in August, she had about 30 cases on her plate, three times the agency’s stated goal of 10 cases per worker. West Virginia defines a “case” as one family, and Giboney says each of her cases had as many as six children, as well as their biological parents and foster parents. This is counter to what some outside groups recommend: the Child Welfare League of America argues for measuring cases by child, and to not exceed 15 children per caseworker. 

It was logistically impossible for Giboney to visit each child and devote the time that was necessary to them. “My kids were strung all over the place,” she said — Ritchie County, Cabell County, even a kid across the border in Virginia. That, combined with a lack of support from her supervisors made Giboney feel like she was failing the kids she had hoped to help. 

“I cried literally every day on my way to work and coming home from work, knowing I couldn’t help these kids,” she said. “What was my point for going to work every day?”

As recently as 2023, nearly a third of the state’s CPS worker positions were vacant. Now, the state reports that years of lawmakers’ attempts to entice more people to fill the jobs are working. They’ve repeatedly raised the pay for CPS workers; the positions now start at about $45,000, a 60% increase from where they were only five years ago. They’ve removed requirements. They’ve added incentives. And the state celebrated success: in December, its vacancy rate for CPS positions was down to about 17%. 

But even so, caseloads are still unsustainable. One recent agency report estimated even if they were fully staffed, they would need an additional 136 workers to adequately serve the state. 

“I finally got to a point where I said you know what, I'll take the pay cut.”

kathie giboney, former Cps worker

And former workers say while the pay bump is appreciated, there are more issues here that affect both the CPS employees and the kids they care for. One is the state’s lack of appropriate homes for kids, which isn’t new. 

“I don’t think that we ever had the resources we needed in order to direct the problem, get the kid the appropriate placement,” said Gary Johnson. As a Nicholas County circuit judge for 25 years, he was responsible for ultimately signing off on a kid’s placement. He said nearly all of the time he agreed with whatever the group of people convened to help the kid — CPS workers, lawyers, parents — recommended. “Sometimes we just had one option because of the bed space.”

Layne Diehl, an attorney in Martinsburg who is frequently appointed by the court to represent the best interests of foster kids, says sometimes the amount of work a CPS worker has means they don’t have the time to find a suitable home with someone who is either a relative or knows the child — what the state classifies as “kinship care.”

“When you’re a caseworker who has over 100 cases, while it might be preferable to work with a kinship home, it’s sometimes time prohibitive,” she said. “So just by nature of the fact that people are overworked and overwhelmed, kids get placed in foster.”

While the state has increased the percentage of kids in these kinship homes, there aren’t enough foster homes for kids. In the first quarter of 2023, the state reported an average of 1,427 certified foster homes in the state, though only a quarter were willing to accept teenagers. At the time, there were about 2,700 foster kids not in kinship placement.

That shortage, combined with efforts to keep kids in the state and out of group homes and institutions, has led to desperate state workers temporarily housing kids in places like hotel rooms, a Kanawha County 4-H camp and government offices.

Over the last two months, Mountain State Spotlight has shared findings of our reporting with state human services officials. A spokesperson initially responded, referring us to previous agency press releases. We then sent the agency a long list of our questions, but received no response.

But previously, West Virginia’s foster care agency has admitted these kinds of placements aren’t good for kids.

"I believe it's in desperation, the only environment that we can provide to even represent any semblance of safety,” one state child welfare manager testified in a sworn statement. “I mean, that's all we have.”

Putting kids in these sort of temporary placements requires CPS workers to take on extra overnight shifts. That, combined with what she called a toxic workplace culture, was one factor that led to Brittany Payne leaving her job as a Kanawha County CPS worker after only four months. “We were all worried about our safety,” she said. 

For both Payne and Giboney, the stress ultimately forced them to quit, even though for Giboney, she was unsure she’d be able to find a job that paid as well close to where she lives in Pleasants County.

“I finally got to a point where I said you know what, I'll take the pay cut,” she said. 

Permanency Problems

Olivia Frausto spent her teen years cycling in and out of juvenile detention, residential treatment and foster homes. Photo by Jenny Lynn Photography/Mountain State Spotlight

For Olivia Frausto, her incarceration was the beginning of a years-long spiral from which she’s only recently emerged. She got out of juvenile detention, but violated her probation by smoking marijuana and was sent back. While she was there, locked in a cell, her father died and she entered the foster care system. The next few years were marked by time in a Wheeling group facility and multiple foster care placements. 

“They just kept sending me away, acting like everything in my life, I'm supposed to be OK, I'm supposed to act right, I'm supposed to get my act together,” she said. 

“They were just looking at me as a juvenile delinquent that was just bad and had a baby and didn’t take care of her baby. But you’ve also got to remember that I had parents who didn’t take care of me and I was a minor. I was a baby and nobody took care of me.”

“It’s almost like we’re forgotten. I have no idea how in the world the state is keeping foster parents at this point.”

jessica combs, adoptive and foster parent

Like Orion, when Olivia wasn’t in a residential treatment center her behavior and repeated disobedience was often frustrating for foster parents who were trying to help. 

That’s another way worker shortages can end up affecting West Virginia’s foster kids: the lack of support can lead to foster parents giving up, and to kids heading to group facilities because there’s nowhere else to put them. Tulane University psychiatry professor Charles Zeanah says successful foster care systems need to prioritize stability — which includes responding to foster parent concerns when they arise rather than letting situations get out of control. 

“If instead at the first sign of trouble, there's a meaningful and intensive effort to, you know, to work things out then, at least some of those kids are gonna be prevented from going to more restrictive settings,” he said.

Jessica Combs knows the feeling of being ignored. She and her husband have adopted four kids from foster care and are fostering a fifth. Over her time as a foster parent, she’s navigated what she calls an “entire ecosystem of dysfunction,” managing complicated medical care for her kids and feeling like she’s alternately ignored and being pitted against the various caseworkers in her kids’ lives.

“It’s almost like we’re forgotten, if that makes sense,” she said. “I have no idea how in the world the state is keeping foster parents at this point.”

It’s an uphill battle. A 2023 survey of more than 500 foster and kinship parents around the state reported that of the parents who were no longer actively fostering a child, about a quarter said they weren’t doing so because they were frustrated with the child welfare system, they were overwhelmed or they weren’t getting the necessary support or resources.

Stacy Jacques, third from left, with some of the children she has fostered over the years and their children. Photo courtesy Stacy Jacques.

And that, Stacy Jacques says, means that kids with trauma suffer. Jacques has fostered numerous kids suffering from mental health conditions, and said learning how to do it is counterintuitive — like steering a car in the direction of a skid. And it’s something you don’t learn in a class, but only with experience. 

“If we aren’t retaining foster parents who know how to do that, those kids are going to continue to bounce through the system,” she said.

Despite the West Virginia Department of Human Services touting its success at its recent foster care recruitment campaign, a spokeswoman said as of mid-December, only one family out of the 454 that inquired has completed their certification to foster. Another 20 are actively working toward certification. 

Now What? 

As work to fix some of the ongoing issues in West Virginia’s foster care system moves well into its second decade, kids like Orion Flynn and Olivia Frausto are still dealing with the aftermath of their time in the state’s custody. 

For Orion, it’s an unsettling lack of permanency stemming from being bounced around from homes to shelters to treatment centers during his stint in the system. 

“I never really learned how to form long-term relationships,” he said. 

Olivia Frausto is now 19. She lives in an apartment in Martinsburg and is working full-time. Photo by Jenny Lynn Photography/Mountain State Spotlight

For Olivia, it’s a sense of awe of what she’s overcome from a traumatic childhood and teen years spent in juvenile detention centers and group homes. She’s determined to do better.

“I feel like I am doing very well for somebody who has gone through the things that they’ve gone through when they were younger,” she said. Her daughter was adopted by a nearby family. She now lives alone in her own apartment in Martinsburg, and relishes having her own space, decorated just as she wants it. She has her own car, and works full-time at the nearby Procter & Gamble plant. 

“I think I’m a very strong person,” she said. 

Meanwhile, the next few months will be pivotal to whether West Virginia improves its services for the state’s thousands of foster kids.

In two weeks, lawmakers return to Charleston for the annual 60-day legislative session. They’ve already flagged some tweaks to the foster care system that will be on their agenda, such as fixing problems with clothing vouchers and giving the foster care ombudsman access to confidential records. They also want to increase CPS worker pay even more, and increase compensation for foster families. 

But when asked what, if anything, legislative leaders plan to do to fix the system’s broader problems, spokespeople for both Senate President Randy Smith, R-Preston, and House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, declined to comment. 

In March, the West Virginia foster kids’ lawsuit is scheduled for trial before a judge. It’s been delayed for five years as state officials have fought it on procedural grounds. In July, the Department of Human Services pushed unsuccessfully for a pre-trial ruling in its favor, arguing many improvements were already underway.  

There are always “individual cases” in which the state could improve, former Cabinet Secretary Cynthia Persily said in a press release at the time. “However, the statistics are clear that, on a system-wide basis, West Virginia has much to be proud of.”

For its part, the U.S. Department of Justice doesn’t believe the work in West Virginia is finished: it extended indefinitely the original 2019 agreement, which was supposed to expire at the end of 2024.

And another governor is at West Virginia’s helm. Earlier this month, former Attorney General Patrick Morrisey dedicated a single sentence to foster care in his inaugural address.

“We'll take on the tough challenges, and that includes fixing foster care and looking after our most vulnerable kids,” he said.

West Virginians have heard this before. 

Last year in his state of the state address, then-Gov. Jim Justice touted his big fix for the troubled system: splitting the giant Department for Health and Human Resources into three. “Our foster care system needs us to continue to step up,” Justice said. “At the end of the day we need to do all we possibly can to help these families and help these kids and we’re going to do it.”

And before that, former Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin paused in his 2016 address to celebrate the work his administration had done to get kids more support in their local communities:

“By providing our kids with the help they need at home, we are giving them the opportunity to take advantage of the bright future that we're creating here in West Virginia,” he said. 

Now, it will be Morrisey’s turn to take on the troubled system he has inherited.

Earlier this week, when asked about foster care at a press conference, Morrisey reiterated his intent to take action.

At the same time, the new governor takes office facing a $400 million budget deficit, and has promised to cut taxes and reduce state government program spending. So far, besides suggesting there are ways to make state dollars stretch further, Morrisey hasn’t offered specifics on the ways in which he’ll support West Virginia’s foster care system, but he said those are coming soon. 

“In the upcoming days and weeks, we’ll be rolling it out,” the governor told reporters. “We’re going to be coming to you with specific plans. There is a renewed focus on it to make sure that our families are taken care of. We’re going to keep coming to you with more and more solutions to the problem.”

Reporter Erin Beck contributed to this story.

Mountain State Spotlight is part of the Mental Health Parity Collaborative, a group of newsrooms that are covering stories on mental health care access and inequities in the U.S. The partners on the collaborative include The Carter Center and newsrooms in select states across the country.

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