In West Virginia, the bad bills keep on coming

First came the bill that would send caseloads skyrocketing. Now, there’s another well-intentioned bill that would produce horrible results.

UPDATE, APRIL 24, 2025: Good news! This bill did not pass.

ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN, 2022

This is what we mean by "Child Rremoval Capital of America

Of all the options for placing children torn from their homes, among the very worst are so-called “shelters.” These are first-stop dumping grounds where children are parked while agencies that took too many children needlessly in the first place try to figure out where to put them all. 

Of course, that’s not how they are described by backers of such institutions and the “providers” who usually run them (and often are paid per day per child for every day they hold children in them). Nope. It’s always treacly rhetoric about how “loving, warm, inviting” they will be, and of course how “home-like.” 

After nearly 50 years of following these issues, I am so sick of people describing their institutions as “home-like.” I’ll bet not one of the people who casually call their institution “home-like” would tolerate having their own children dumped in such places for so much as a minute.  Children damn well know the difference between “home-like” and home. 

And no matter how “inviting” they seem at first, shelters have a horrendous history of deteriorating – as with this shelter and this one, and this one, and all of these. 

All of which brings us back to the Child Removal Capital of America, the state that tears apart families at a rate more than quadruple the national average:West Virginia. 

As in many states, West Virginia takes so many children it has no place to put them all.  So some wind up sleeping in hotel rooms or campgrounds.  According to West Virginia Watch, Jonathan Pinson, a member of the state House of Delegates who also is a foster parent, declared:  “I cannot fathom losing my child to a hotel room.” 

But apparently he can fathom institutionalizing them in shelters – because he’s introduced a bill to require the state family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) 

on its own or through a contract, a “central reception center” and emergency resource homes for foster children for up to 72 hours. 

And here comes that gooey rhetoric, about how, magically, this shelter is going to be different: 

“As s children are being taken into custody, there’s a loving, warm, inviting atmosphere for them to have as their first stop in this very emotional journey,” Pinson said while presenting the bill on Thursday in the House Committee on Health and Human Resources. 

A representative of an agency that says it will gladly run such a place did the rest: 

The space would be home-like, he explained, with medical staff and therapists on site. 

The West Virginia family police agency, which already runs emergency shelters warehousing 156 children, opposes adding another.  Again from the story:

Lorie Bragg, interim commissioner for the state Bureau of Social Services, told lawmakers this bill wasn’t addressing the overall lack of appropriate child placements, something she said the agency is currency working on. A center like the one outlined in the bill could put children at risk because the center may shelter in one room both a toddler and a teenager with an aggression issue, she said. 

“Making a temporary housing or shelter doesn’t really fix the problem of having a placement for these children,” she added. 

But neither does anything Bragg mentioned – which apparently consisted largely of telling the lawmakers that they’re holding lots and lots of planning meetings, with the idea being ultimately to create better institutions. 

As usual in West Virginia, no one is talking about the only thing that works: Stop taking so many children needlessly at the highest rate in America. Odds are West Virginia Watch is never going to tell readers about that, or about how it can be done, or about how other states do better – not in this story or any other – since it is wedded to the myth that West Virginia’s horrible distinction is mostly because of drug abuse.  It isn’t.  

And Pinson is quick to buy into and amplify vile smears about any parent who loses a child to foster care, telling MetroNews that when the West Virginia family police rip apart a family it’s

oftentimes for excellent reasons — these children are at risk of danger, they’re at risk of harm, they’ve already been harmed. 

So let me repeat a few things West Virginia lawmakers probably don’t know – because neither the family police agency nor media focusing on these issues is likely to tell them. 

● West Virginia takes away so many children that if all drug abuse disappeared in West Virginia, and only West Virginia, tomorrow, the number of children taken for reasons unrelated to drug abuse still would leave West Virginia tearing apart families at a rate double the national average. 

● 85% of children torn from their homes in West Virginia were taken in cases in which there was not even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of sexual abuse. 

● 51% of children torn from their homes in West Virginia were taken in cases in which there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse. 

● Not all drug abuse compromises parenting.  Not every case of drug abuse involves a fentanyl overdose.  West Virginia even tears apart families when a parent is on medication-assisted treatment for drug abuse. 

● In 14% of cases, the family police agency admits it tore apart a family because of housing.

So now imagine what would happen if West Virginia stopped being worst in the nation.  If West
Virginia could reduce its rate of removal to only double the national average that would mean 2,235 fewer children taken in a typical year.  If West Virginia cut the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day in half, that would mean 3,450 fewer children in foster care. 

That would open up lots of spaces in family foster homes, so no child would need to be institutionalized anywhere, let alone parked in a shelter. 

But while West Virginia Watch and another online site, Mountain State Spotlight, stereotype the parents, Bragg, from the Bureau of Social Services, stereotypes the kids. Again from the story: 

“These kids are not the kids that foster parents are willing to take in,” Bragg said. “These are your autistic kids, nonverbal, [children with intellectual and development disabilities], physically aggressive teenagers, kids that may be doing self-harm, the kids that are difficult to place. That’s the kids [who] are ending up in a hotel.” 

That’s the standard party line from the shelter/group home/residential treatment industry.  And while it’s true the most difficult kids are likely to end up in a hotel, it’s not true that few families will take them.  Few families will take them without help. 

But if West Virginia actually focused on providing the help, that would change dramatically. 

● First, the family police agency could focus on intensive help to birth parents so the children never need to be taken. 

● When children really must be taken, they could provide that kind of help to extended families providing kinship foster care, so more of them can step forward. (West Virginia actually has a good record of finding such families but a lousy record of supporting them. Even Mountain State Spotlight, which seems to view all birth parents on a continuum from unperson to sick person to monster, is ok with extended families.) 

● When kin aren’t available provide the intensive help to stranger family foster homes. 

You do it with intensive Wraparound services.  Want to know how that works? Watch this short video of remarks by the father of wraparound, Karl Dennis: 

But in West Virginia, lawmakers don’t know it, most media don’t want to tell them, and the family police agency doesn’t seem interested. 

And don’t believe for a second that if West Virginia builds still another parking place shelter the children will be there for only 72 hours.  

Because here’s the first rule about what usually happens with a parking place shelter: If you build it they will come.  If you keep it open they will stay.  If it stays open long enough it will become a hellhole.

Just what West Virginia child welfare doesn’t need: A 48.7% INCREASE in “child welfare” investigator caseloads

West Virgina State Capitol (Photo by O. Palsson)

But that’s what West Virginia likely would have gotten had a well-meaning, but ill-thought-out proposal by one legislator become law. (UPDATE, APRIL 25, 2025: Fortunately, it didn't.) 

It’s entirely reasonable that West Virginia Del. Adam Burkhammer is horrified by the fact that some children who are horribly abused are overlooked by the state’s family police agency. All of us should be. Given that in some cases, there are plenty of seemingly obvious warning signs, It’s entirely understandable that he would propose a solution that is simple and obvious. 

Unfortunately, that solution is simple, obvious and disastrously wrong. 

Indeed, were his proposal to become law, I estimate that it would lead to a 48.7% increase in the number of allegations caseworkers would have to investigate over the course of a year.  That estimate is rough; based on multiple assumptions. But it’s also conservative. (The full methodology for deriving it is explained at the end of this post.) 

Every state child abuse hotline screens out a certain percentage of “reports” that operators believe are clearly false reports or don’t meet the threshold in law to be considered abuse or neglect. But Burkhammer wants to prohibit West Virginia’s family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) from screening out any report from a “mandated reporter” – and they make the overwhelming majority of reports. 

If there’s one thing everyone following West Virginia child welfare agrees on, it’s that caseworkers already are terribly overloaded. We disagree profoundly on why that is happening and what to do about it, but no one doubts that there’s an overload and this has terrible consequences for West Virginia’s children. 

Earlier this month Mountain State Spotlight, one of the two worst offenders in falsely stereotyping families wrote an editorial disguised as a news story called “5 ways lawmakers could help foster kids right now.” West Virginia is the child removal capital of America, tearing apart families at more than quadruple the national average even when rates of family poverty are factored in. But none of those “5 ways” involved not taking so many children in the first place or returning more children to their own homes.  The first two recommendations were: Hire more caseworkers and lower caseloads. 

But instead of lowering caseloads, the no-screening provision of Burkhammer’s bill would send them skyrocketing.  That means less time for every investigation and more snap judgments – in all directions. So even more children will be needlessly torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care.  More will emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone. More will be abused in foster care. 

But it also means something else: With workers making judgments that are even more rushed, more of those few children in real danger will be missed.  Burkhammer told The (Wheeling) Intelligencer that the legislation was 

borne from several incidents over the years where child abuse and neglect cases fell through the cracks

But this approach won’t seal the cracks.  On the contrary, this proposal would turn those cracks into fissures.

There is no approach that will find and rescue every child in genuine danger. It is true that as long as states have screening mechanisms some children in real danger will be missed. And when that happens, news accounts lead to demands for less screening. That backfires, there’s another tragedy and the cycle repeats. 

That’s because without screening, even more children will be missed. 

There will always be screening in child welfare: The choice is between rational screening by a hotline or irrational screening by overloaded workers based on which case floats to the top of the pile among the deluge on a worker’s desk or what looks worst at first glance. 

The way to make sure fewer children “fall through the cracks” is to go in the opposite direction from what Burkhammer proposes. 

● Mandatory reporting itself has been shown to backfire, overloading workers and driving families away from seeking help.  It should be replaced with permissive reporting.  Allow professionals to exercise their professional judgment in determining when a family should be reported to the family police. That would be the safest and most effective screening mechanism of all. 

● Revise the training for what would now be permissive reporters to help them better distinguish poverty from neglect, as New York and Washington State are doing (though they’re not doing it all that well). 

● Bolster basic, concrete help for families and teach permissive reporters how to help families get the help – in other words, as Joyce McMillan puts it: turn mandatory reporters into mandatory supporters. 

● Improve the screening protocols at the hotline, to help hotline operators better distinguish poverty from neglect – and help them explain to people who have reported when it’s a poverty case – and how they might help the family. 

● Narrow West Virginia’s breathtakingly broad definition of “neglect” which currently encompasses any child 

Whose physical or mental health is harmed or threatened by a present refusal, failure, or inability of the child's parent, guardian, or custodian to supply the child with necessary food, clothing, shelter, supervision, medical care, or education. 

But Del. Burkhammer has no reason to know any of this. I’m sure he reads the same constant de facto demonization of families from Mountain State Spotlight and West Virginia Watch (the only places that “cover” these issues regularly) as anyone else. Both sites systematically shut out dissent from their skewed master narrative. 

West Virginia Watch, for example, repeatedly claims that the state’s foster-care-capital-of-America status is mostly because of drug abuse.  That is demonstrably false. 

So once again, a failure of child welfare is worsened by a failure of journalism. 

See also our post about still another bad bill in West Virginia.

How we calculated the increase in investigations that the Burkhammer bill would cause

 

Unless otherwise noted, all data for this section come from the federal government’s most recent Child Maltreatment report, which covers 2023. In some cases, where the 2023 report doesn’t have the relevant statistic, we used the report for 2022. In both cases, a search for “West Virginia” will lead to the relevant tables. One caution: Among the reasons to consider this a rough estimate: submitting data for this report is voluntary, and so prone to error.  And in some cases, though not the items discussed below, what is being measured is, itself, subjective.  As a result the report rightly urges caution when comparing states. 

As noted above, investigations of alleged child abuse or neglect typically start with a call to a child abuse hotline. As with every other decision point in child welfare, from initial call to termination of parental rights, West Virginia has a hair trigger. West Virginians probably call the hotline at one of the highest rates in the country. Given that West Virginians are drenched in false media stereotypes about child abuse and neglect, it’s no wonder. 

That makes it even more important in West Virginia than in most states that the hotline does a careful job of screening out reports that obviously are false or obviously do not constitute abuse and neglect. Every state does this. Given the extreme rate at which the hotline is deluged with calls, West Virginia should screen out at a rate above the national average. Instead, it is probably below that average. In 2023, the last year for which comparative data are available, West Virginia’s family police agency says it screened out 41% of calls.  The national average probably was about 50.5%) 

In 2023, West Virginia says it screened in 20,873 reports – 59.3% of all reports. That means 14,327 reports were screened out. 

Of course, not all of those 14,327 reports were from mandatory reporters.  We could find no figure specific to West Virginia, but nationwide, 71% of reports come from mandatory reporters.  If that also is true in West Virginia, it would mean that, if Burkhammer’s bill becomes law, an additional 10,172 reports would have to be investigated every year – 48.7% more than are investigated annually now. (By early 2025, according to the state’s own dashboard, the screen-in rate had fallen to 53%, still above the national average.  But that means even more reports would automatically have to be investigated under the Burkhammer bill.)