What you need to know about West Virginia’s child welfare crisis

In a rare move last week, top aides to Gov. Jim Justice faced the press to respond to growing concerns over the death of a 14-year-old Boone County girl.

But while the press conference to talk about Kyneddi Miller’s death was unusual for the governor’s office, the tragic event is only the latest in a long string of red flags around West Virginia’s child welfare system.

It was only last October when two Black teens were found locked in a Sissonville barn and another child – five years old – with visible signs of neglect – was found in the loft in that same home. The three children and another who wasn’t home at the time were removed, and their adoptive parents were charged with felony child neglect , human trafficking and civil rights violations based on race. And a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of West Virginia foster kids that alleges severe problems in the state system is nearing its five-year anniversary in large part because state officials continue to drag their feet .

These reports of mistreatment of West Virginia’s most vulnerable kids have stretched through the last eight years of Justice’s tenure and under multiple iterations of a Legislature run by both Democrats and Republicans, but little has moved the needle.

How are foster care and Child Protective Services (CPS) connected?

Several of the most shocking recent cases don’t involve foster kids: Kyneddi was being cared for by her mother and two grandparents, and the children removed from the Sissonville home after alleged abuse were adopted, but not from West Virginia’s foster care system.

These two systems are intertwined and share many of the same challenges and staff members, which is why they’re often mentioned in the same breath.

Under the current Bureau for Social Services — part of the West Virginia Department of Human Services (DOHS) — there are a number of workers who could potentially both work to investigate allegations of child abuse and, if a child is removed from their home as a result, become the child’s foster care case manager.

But for decades, West Virginia has had a shortage of these key social workers. At the end of 2022, a third of these positions were empty. In early 2023, the Justice administration announced pay raises for CPS workers, as well as the department’s youth services workers and adult protective services workers — with additional incentives for workers in the Eastern Panhandle to compete with neighboring states.

While the state has made progress in filling some vacancies, Berkeley County Circuit Judge R. Steven Redding told lawmakers in October that the problems persist, and have led to a backlog of 400 referrals that CPS workers haven’t been able to investigate. And in a recent deposition as part of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of West Virginia foster kids, a former state official testified about known deficiencies in the system, including the large number of child abuse referrals that fall through the cracks.

“Cases where referrals were screened out at the point of centralized intake with questions around whether or not that was or was not appropriate,” said Jeremiah Samples, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Resources who now advises top lawmakers. “Situations where workers had a responsibility to — maybe it was an active case — a worker would have a responsibility to go out and check on a child, failed to do so, a tragedy occurs.”

What happened to Kyneddi Miller?

In April, deputies found the body of 14-year-old Kyneddi Miller in a skeletal state in her Boone County home. The teenager lived with her mother and two grandparents and was homeschooled; investigators said she hadn’t eaten in months.

Since her tragic death, Kyneddi’s mother and grandparents have been criminally charged with child neglect resulting in death, a felony . In the weeks following the discovery of Kyneddi’s body, there have been competing narratives about whether the teen’s situation had previously been formally reported to CPS.

“The CPS folks, from what I understand, had no idea about this child,” Justice told reporters in a briefing on April 23. “No idea whatsoever.”

But two weeks later, Justice walked that back .

“Will I stand behind what was said two weeks ago now that I know the information that I know today?” he asked on May 8. “No way.”

The month following Kyneddi’s death, there were competing accounts of who may have known about her situation. TV station WSAZ has reported anonymous tips alleging CPS had been contacted twice about the family — in 2009 and 2017. WSAZ also reported that Kyneddi’s plight was known to state troopers; a call log documented a trooper saying he was planning to make the referral to CPS in person. But while the TV station says the West Virginia State Police stands by that call log, DoHS released a statement saying “a comprehensive search of DoHS records suggest no referral was ever made.”

In last week’s press conference, Justice’s Chief of Staff Brian Abraham said the administration’s investigation into the incident concluded that the two previous referrals didn’t have anything to do with Kyneddi, and were unfounded. He said it seemed that state troopers had gone to the CPS office in person in 2023, but it was “informal contact” and they didn’t make an official referral: the troopers hadn’t found any signs of abuse or neglect, but found it odd that Kyneddi was so scared about COVID-19 that she wouldn’t leave the house.

“When the West Virginia State Police made contact with this girl at her residence … she was in good health, she was unharmed,” Abraham said.

Abraham further noted that although GPS data showed state troopers were physically present at a Boone County-area DoHS office, CPS agents did not remember speaking to them. Thus, moving forward, to avoid any confusion, law enforcement has been instructed to call the toll-free Centralized Intake for Abuse and Neglect number.

This isn’t the only really awful child abuse case to come to light in West Virginia over the past year.

No, it’s not. Back in October 2023, social workers removed several children from a home in Sissonville, after neighbors reported they were doing manual labor and being forced to sleep in the barn. Prosecutors initially charged the kids’ adoptive parents with felony child neglect, but in May, a grand jury indictment included additional charges of human trafficking, using a minor child in forced labor and civil rights violations based on race.

One of the similarities between the Boone County case involving Kyneddi and these children in Sissonville is a lack of clarity around when CPS was alerted to the situation, and whether or not they acted.

While in Kyneddi’s case DoHS officials maintain they did not have any formal child abuse referrals, records in the Sissonville case indicate that neighbors called CPS at least once about the children in August. But DoHS hasn’t provided any documentation showing whether they followed up on the referral, before Kanawha County Sheriff’s deputies removed the children more than a month later.

Has the state agency in charge of foster care and CPS  been transparent?

No.

Journalists and the public have struggled for years to get more information about the treatment of kids in state custody and the outcome of child abuse complaints. State agency lawyers argue that most of the information isn’t subject to the state’s open records law because West Virginia code has a provision for records involving juveniles to remain confidential except in a few narrow exceptions. State agency lawyers typically argue that law applies to any child welfare records, even when the identities of kids are redacted.

Besides the specific examples in the Kyneddi Miller and Sissonville cases where state officials haven’t provided records detailing child abuse referrals or the agency’s response, there have been multiple filings in a massive class action lawsuit against the state that show other ways in which the agency has kept crucial information from the public and lawmakers.

The lawsuit was filed in 2019 on behalf of current and former West Virginia foster kids. It argues the state has repeatedly failed to care for the kids its charged with protecting — including failing to make sure they end up in the most appropriate placement settings with the services they need. But after years of litigation, the lawyers representing these kids have struggled to get all of the information they’ve requested from state officials.

In April, U.S. Magistrate Judge Cheryl Eifert sanctioned state lawyers and child welfare officials for withholding key documents from the plaintiffs’ attorneys and then destroying them, though she said there was no evidence the destruction was intentional.

And just two weeks ago, former DHHR official Samples said in a sworn deposition that agency leaders had repeatedly pushed empty talking points rather than prioritizing concrete actions and transparency. He also said that he was aware that then-Secretary Bill Crouch had applied pressure on the foster care ombudsman to withhold some information and documents from lawmakers about problems in the system.

“The tone of the conversation was that it was a threat, to be very careful about conversations that she had with the Legislature and documents that she would release,” Samples said in the deposition.

That ombudsman, Pamela Woodman-Kaehler, resigned shortly after the deposition became public.

At last week’s press conference, the Governor’s office asked state police and top officials with the Department of Human Services to gather information that could be shared publicly. Abraham repeatedly insisted that information was limited due to federal and state rules restricting what can be shared from a criminal investigation.

What kinds of action to improve child welfare are leaders promising at this point?

This past legislative session came and went without meaningful action to address the very specific deficiencies brought to light by the foster care class action lawsuit.

Lawmakers considered and advanced a handful of child welfare bills, including one to bar anyone with a pending child abuse or neglect investigation from homeschooling their kids — a measure known as Raylee’s Law — but of those, only a bill creating a foster parent information dashboard was signed into law. Lawmakers also indicated they want to add more transparency and oversight to the system; two measures that ultimately didn’t make it into law would have allowed the foster care ombudsman to view confidential CPS records and have let a legislative oversight commission hear reports of child injuries, deaths or other problems. But both bills also would have created additional secrecy , doing nothing to give the public more information about how the agency works.

After the press conference discussing the Kyneddi Miller case, some legislative leaders again promised actions to improve the state’s child welfare system.

West Virginia MetroNews described the comments from House Health Committee Chairwoman Amy Summers, R-Taylor, this way: “It is awful and I know we all want to blame someone and try to figure out what could have been done to save her, so I understand all of that” before finding herself at a loss for words and trailing off.

If you suspect you or someone you know is experiencing abuse or neglect, report your concerns to the Centralized Intake for Abuse and Neglect at 1-800-352-6513.

What you need to know about West Virginia’s child welfare crisis appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight , West Virginia's civic newsroom.