Senators passed a stripped down version of a bill to support vulnerable children, but time ran out before delegates could concur or reject it. So the bill did not pass on the final day of West Virginia’s legislative session.
House Bill 4344 removed 15 percent pay raises meant to recruit and retain social services workers after the Justice administration concluded it could shift money from open positions to the raises for current employees.
And the latest version also dropped a dashboard that was envisioned as providing more information to support West Virginia’s 7,000 foster children.
The bill still requires services be provided to kinship families, requires the agency to use updated computer systems and clarifies some of the roles of the foster care ombudsman.
Senate Minority Leader Stephen 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.
Senators voted to pass the bill 33-0. There were significant changes from what first passed the House of Delegates, so the bill went back for that chamber to concur or reject the latest version.
But that did not happen before midnight, killing the bill.
It was the dashboard that drew Senate debate during the final evening of the regular session.
Delegate Rich Lindsay, D-Kanawha, said he hopes the dashboard can be established at some point. “It would just make this information public, so that we know where these children are placed, how many placements there have been, things that have happened all across the board. This is information that I think is important to ensure the system works.”
Senator Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, rose and explained why the dashboard had been removed from the bill.
He cited testimony in committee by Jeffrey Pack, the commissioner for the state’s Bureau for Children and Families. Pack had expressed concern about what information could intrude on people’s privacy in small communities. Generally, Pack said, “I like the idea of a dashboard.”
Tarr elaborated.
“One of the things that was brought up is that the dashboard also has data that is forward-facing to the community and so when there’s a child that has been reported to foster care of there’s been a complaint that goes out and that data is submitted in aggregate form, when you have small counties, two or three that are reported, and that comes out on the dashboard the privacy of those children is then given up,” Tarr said.
“The reason is, it’s so obvious because of the public reports that come from those children, who was affected by it. And then those kids are doubly affected by it.”
Tarr continued.
“The Department of Health and Human Resources has failed miserably in implementation of programs just like this,” he said, citing an integrated eligibility system. “To drop another two million dollars into an inept agency for deploying those types of resources before we’ve got it fixed makes no sense to me.”
Marissa Sanders, executive director of the West Virginia Foster Adoptive & Kinship Parents Network, had described hope for the dashboard.
“We have to get a handle on what’s happening to them once they come into the system,” she said at a recent press conference. “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.”