MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — State lawmakers will gather at the Canaan Valley State Park this weekend for the latest set of interim committee meetings and site tours.
Senators Joey Garcia, D-Marion, and Jay Taylor, R-Taylor, said they would like to see within the state Department of Human Services (DoHS) to reform the Child Protective Services (CPS) system.
Garcia said the legislature must agree to increase funding to enable department leaders to access the resources they need. It will take more money to hire additional case workers to reduce the workload and find or develop accommodations for the several hundred children in foster care living outside the state.
“It takes money, and anyone who says otherwise I think does not understand the problem and expects it to change without doing the work, and part of that work is budgeting appropriately,” Garcia said.
Taylor said some changes have to be agreed upon about privacy issues so lawmakers would be able to ask the questions needed to assess the problems.
“Yes, we have to protect privacy, but we also have to be able to find out what kind of accountability and transparency there is so we make sure everything is happening directly,” Taylor said.
The failure to pass Raylee’s Law, the law requiring a hold on a school transfer if there is a CPS investigation for the last five years, shows how politics can prevent good laws from being passed. Lobbyists representing the interests of homeschoolers are credited with creating enough concern that lawmakers have not acted.
“It doesn’t effect homeschoolers that are doing the right thing are the majority of families,” Garcia said. “So, we have to get past this B.S. politics and do what’s right to help protect kids.”
Taylor said lawmakers failed to pass Senate Bill 543 that would have required DoHS policies to go through the rulemaking process. Current policies can be changed or adjusted on the fly by department leadership with little oversight.
“So their policies and procedures would have to go through the whole rule-making process the legislature has,” Taylor said. “Once they go through those rules, they are for the most part the law.”
Right now, the state dashboard says there are slightly less than 6,000 currently in foster care, and about seven percent of them are living out of state. The agency has a nine percent vacancy rate and nearly 12,000 referrals to evaluate.
“All of us need to actually go to the governor and tell him this is not right,” Garcia said. “We need to make sure we’re supporting investments that are making this situation better.”
Both Garcia and Taylor were guests Monday on WAJR’s “Talk of the Town.”