Protecting Our Most Vulnerable
The Child Welfare Crisis
JAMIE NULL
There is no single defining moment for West Virginia’ s child welfare crisis. Yet Joanne Boileau remembers when the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources( DHHR) turned its focus to kinship and relative care homes and charged her organization, the Children’ s Home Society of West Virginia( CHS), with the overwhelming task of recruiting and certifying non-relative foster homes for children due to the increasing needs of children taken away from their families.
“ This occurred two and a half years ago,” says Boileau, the director at CHS.“ We have been playing catch up on foster care recruitment, certification and staffing ever since.”
Boileau began working in child welfare in 1983 and joined the CHS in 1987. She, along with other organizations around the state and the DHHR, is trying to win the war against the state’ s child welfare crisis.
A Growing Crisis
As of November 2017, there were more than 5,900 West Virginia children in the care and custody of the DHHR. These children are in foster homes, kinship / relative homes, emergency shelters, treatment facilities or group settings.
“ The challenges confronting child welfare are unprecedented in both volume and complexity,” says DHHR Cabinet Secretary Bill Crouch.
According to Allison Alder, a spokesperson for the DHHR, West Virginia leads the nation in children removed from the home, and the state is 48th in the country in the number of children in congregate care. Eighty percent of children are removed from the home due to the growing drug epidemic. In 10 years, the number of drug-related home removals has jumped from 970 in 2006 to 2,171 in 2016.
“ At this point, it feels like we are going into a second generation of parents who are unable to parent because of their drug addiction,” says Boileau.“ When you consider that what we know and learn about being a parent comes from our parents, it is reasonable to project that future generations will continue to struggle with how to parent. Another consideration is for those children who are born drug addicted or drug affected and what their health and mental issues will be throughout their lives.”
Boileau and her staff don’ t chart the reasons why children are removed from the parent’ s custody. However, she feels the predominant reason kids are not safe in their homes is the parents’ drug abuse and domestic violence.
Challenges in Child Care
The impact of the child welfare crisis is significant. Alder says children coming into the system are younger and have complex physical and behavioral issues. These issues will affect their education and their journey from adolescence to adulthood.
“ One trend is that it used to be 90-95 percent of children who came into foster care were reunited with their families within a year to 18 months, but now it is a 50 / 50 proposition at best that children will be able to be reunited,” says Boileau.“ It is also taking longer for children to be able to return to their families when they are able to because drug addiction is
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WEST VIRGINIA EXECUTIVE