Administration believes bigger raises for social services workers can come outside of bill

The state Senate is advancing a foster care bill that drops a bigger pay raise boost for child protective services and adult protective services workers, but state leaders believe they’ve settled on a different way to provide the raises.

That discussion happened in the Senate Finance Committee this morning, during the final days of the regular legislative session.

Representatives of the Justice administration appeared before the committee and expressed confidence that the Department of Health and Human Resources will have the flexibility to provide the raises without needing for them to be passed in a bill.

Generally, the agency could use money from the many positions it already has open to provide bigger pay bumps meant to encourage retention of child protective services and adult protective services workers.

Bill Crouch

Although the agency wants to fill its open positions, Secretary Bill Crouch expressed confidence that shifting some money to current employees wouldn’t sacrifice that effort.

Stephen Baldwin

Senate Minority Leader Stephen Baldwin, D-Greenbrier, asked for clarification this morning. “It’s my understanding at this point that you would be able to collapse positions, vacant positions now, and provide salary supplements to existing social services workers. Is that correct?”

Crouch responded, “That is correct.” He acknowledged that a day earlier he had been concerned about eliminating positions the agency had just received latitude to fill, but a letter from the governor gave him confidence that the agency has flexibility.

Baldwin wanted more assurance that the raises could be provided and the vacancies could be filled. “I wonder if you collapse these vacant positions and then use those funds for salary supplements for existing employees, are you still going to have funding to make new hires and then make new hires at that elevated rate?”

Crouch said the ability to draw from open positions across the agency means DHHR can work toward both needs, recruitment and retention. “That’s the point of making this broader in terms of being able to look at all of DHHR and not just those specific positions.”

As originally conceived, House Bill 4344 was meant to 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.

Baldwin asked whether the 15 percent remains the agency’s goal.

“That is our intention,” Crouch responded.

The agency’s budget presentation revealed 1,400 unfilled positions of the agency’s total 6,400 full-time roles.

The highest number of openings, 836, are for people who would make less than $32,000 a year. The next highest, 573 positions, are for workers getting paid somewhere in a big range of $32,000 to $64,000 a year.

The Senate Finance Committee, on its last day of meeting, wound up passing House Bill 4344.

The bill has been stripped down significantly from a version that passed the House of Delegates 99-1. Besides stripping out the additional pay raises, this version also drops a dashboard that was envisioned as providing more information to support West Virginia’s 7,000 foster children.

The bill still requires child placement services provide services to kinship families and requires the agency to use updated computer systems and clarifies some of the roles of the foster care ombudsman.

Baldwin successfully pushed to amend the bill to include a requirement to follow up on any call from a medical professional to a child abuse hotline.

Baldwin has been particularly concerned about a tragedy that occurred in a community he represents. A Greenbrier County woman in 2020 killed five young boys, set the family’s house on fire and then killed herself. Weeks before that, a dental hygienist made a referral to a child welfare hotline, but her concern apparently went no farther.





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