At the start of this week, as lawmakers started pushing through the last week of the regular legislative session, Senator Mike Woelfel rose at the end of a 90-minute floor session and requested permission to make some remarks.
“Briefly,” he said. “It’s important.”
Woelfel, D-Cabell, was highlighting what he characterized as the urgency to consider a broad-ranging bill seeking to provide more support for West Virginia’s most vulnerable children.
Last month, the bill passed the House of Delegates overwhelmingly, 99-1. “I believe this might be one of the most important bills we consider all year,” Delegate Jonathan Pinson, R-Mason, said the day the bill passed that chamber, Feb. 23.
Then, last week, the Senate Health Committee discussed the bill thoroughly, making some changes before passing it with bipartisan support.
But, with deadline approaching, the bill had not yet made it onto its final assigned committee, Senate Finance. It is assigned to that committee because it has an estimated cost of about $11 million.
Time is drawing short to consider bills in Senate committees as the session’s 60th and final day approaches on Saturday.
With public pleas to consider the bill, House Bill 4344 was placed on this afternoon’s agenda for the Senate Education Committee. It was at the bottom of a very long agenda, but it was there.
Senate Democrats had a press conference this morning to draw attention to the bill, pushing for it to hop onto its final committee agenda. “We’re here today to sound the alarm bell, about 4344, the foster care that came over from house,” said Senate Minority Leader Stephen Baldwin, D-Greenbrier, today.
“We’re very excited that it has such broad support, and we expected it to move forward pretty quickly. And it has stalled.”
Baldwin said he remains hopeful “the Senate leadership will do the right thing” and place the bill on the committee agenda. Another option would be a floor motion to discharge it from committee, but Baldwin acknowledged that’s a longshot move.
House Bill 4344 would require pay raises to encourage recruitment and retention for employees that include adult protective services and child protective services workers. The raises are 15 percent per employee in addition to the average 5 percent pay raises for state employees being pushed by Gov. Jim Justice.
The bill also makes a range of changes to the state policies governing foster care, including requiring child placement services provide services to kinship families and requiring the agency to use updated computer systems and clarifying some of the roles of the foster care ombudsman.
The bill would also establish databases and dashboards meant to make it easier to provide a range of useful information to assess and improve support for at-risk children.
Marissa Sanders, executive director of the West Virginia Foster Adoptive & Kinship Parents Network, today said all those elements are important, particularly the dashboard meant to provide more useful information about who is in the foster care system and how they might receive more support.
“We have to get a handle on what’s happening to them once they come into the system,” she said. “How many times have they moved? Are they stable? Are they adopted when they leave? Are they going back to their birth parents? Are they aging out? All of those things are things that we need to know.”
Sanders said she would love to know more about whatever concerns might be holding up the bill.
“What are the concerns? I would love to know what they would like me to tell the foster families that I’m hearing from who are calling me wanting to know what’s going on with this bill,” she said.
Woelfel spoke on the Senate floor at the start of the week about what he considers essential aspects of the bill.
“It provides some pay raises to protective services workers, but more important to me it provides transparency to the DHHR. It provides a dashboard under which people of this state can determine how prevalent child abuse and child neglect and child sexual abuse is in our communities.”
He continued, “How does a kid turn up in foster care? A child turns up in foster care when they’ve been sexually abused, physically abused or grossly neglected. We have system failures in this state within that department. I know each of us is for accountability, transparency.”
Baldwin, in this morning’s press conference, said it would be unacceptable to lose the bill entirely.
“This is going to show what our principles and our values and what our priorities are,” he said. If the bill were to fail, he said, that would demonstrate “that our values and priorities really do not lie with the most vulnerable among us.”