Lawmakers receive update from Foster Care Ombudsman, corrections vacancies

The position of foster care ombudsman was created in 2019 by House Bill 2010, over of several bills over the past several years to address West Virginia’s explosion of children in foster care.

Other legislation, including House Bill 3061 passed by the Legislature earlier this year, further expanded the authority of the Foster Care Ombudsman.

The Foster Care Ombudsman investigates complaints against DHHR, child placement agencies, and residential facilities involving foster children, foster parents, and kinship families. HB 3061 expanded the Foster Care Ombudsman’s authority, allowing the office to investigate the death of children in critical incidents, children within the juvenile justice system and children involved in reported abuse and neglect investigations.

According to Woodman-Kaehler, her office has compiled data from more than 1,825 complaints, thousands of child welfare case records, hundreds of meetings with providers and other stakeholders and 10,000 data searches and interviews with witnesses since she took on the role of Foster Care Ombudsman.

“It’s a busy office,” Woodman-Kaehler said. “A very important part of what we do is verify and substantiate complaints that are validate-able that come to our office, and we keep track of complaint validity by topic and by county. We are working hard to attempt back that so we can drill down to a county level so that information can be used constructively by leaders and lawmakers for problem solving.”

Despite collecting all of this data, Woodman-Kaehler said her office needs a better database system to keep track of this data. The Foster Care Ombudsman is keeping track of the data it collects through Microsoft Excel.

“Our greatest challenge currently is to create truly usable information for lawmakers and stakeholders, given that we have now collected such a large body of data,” Woodman-Kaehler said. “We continue to use what I called a souped-up spreadsheet to capture everything that we do, but we expect to convert to an appropriate case management system in the near future that is specifically designed for investigatory and ombudsman programs.”

According to the DHHR Child Welfare Dashboard, there are 6,262 West Virginia children in foster care as of April 16 — a nearly 47% increase from 4,274 children in foster care 10 years ago in April. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count report, nearly 20 out of every 1,000 children under the age of 18 were in foster care in West Virginia in 2021, giving the state the highest rank for the number of children in foster care.

House Bill 2006, also passed by the Legislature during the recent 2023 session, terminates DHHR and splits it into a Department of Human Services, a Department of Health and a Department of Health Facilities effective Jan. 1, 2024. The Department of Health would oversee several bureaus, including the Office of Inspector General.

HB 2006 also gives great autonomy to the Office of Inspector General. The OIG would oversee the Office of Health Facility Licensure and Certification, the Board of Review, the Foster Care Ombudsman, the Olmstead Office, Investigation and Fraud Management, Quality Control, the West Clearance for Access: the Registry and Employment Screening, the Mental Health Ombudsman, the Long-Term Care Ombudsman and the Human Rights Commission.

The committee also received the latest numbers on vacancies within the state’s system of 11 prisons, 10 regional jails, 10 juvenile centers and three work-release sites. The overall vacancy rate in the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation is 1,044, up from the 1,022 vacancy number reported to lawmakers in mid-April and presenting a vacancy rate of nearly 30%. For correctional officers, the vacancy rate is more than 33%.

“As you know, we’re under a state of emergency for staffing in corrections,” said Brad Douglass, executive officer of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “We currently have abnormally high correctional officer vacancy rates at multiple facilities. We have eight facilities with more than a 40% officer vacancy rate.”

Facilities with the highest number of correctional officer vacancy rates are the Potomac Highlands Regional Jail at 76% and the Northern Regional Jail at 56%. Tying for 54% were the Vicki Douglas Juvenile Center, the Eastern Regional Jail, and Huttonsville Correctional Center.

Starting pay for correctional officer 1 positions starts at $15.75 per hour. With a $1,000 appointment incentive that was put in place in October, DCR has paid 182 officers the incentive as of April but 29 officers have resigned since the incentive was put in place.

Several legislative committees passed bills to increase pay for correctional officers and staff, create bonuses for retaining and recruiting correctional officers, and creating a locality pay program for parts of the state seeing the highest number of vacancies, particularly in the Eastern Panhandle. None of those bills made it past their respective finance committees.

Gov. Jim Justice, who supports locality pay, said he was willing to call a special session to address the correctional staffing crisis. But both the Governor and lawmakers disagree who should take the lead, with Justice pointing to the Legislature to come up with a plan and lawmakers pointing to Justice to take initiative.

In the meantime, more than 300 members of the West Virginia National Guard continue to help staff the state’s prisons and jails through August, with the cost expected to exceed $20 million since Justice issued the state of emergency proclamation last August. The Division of Natural Resources is also assisting.

“We honestly rely on them. It’s appreciated,” Douglass said.