BY CHRIS LAWRENCE
CHARLESTON — State Sen. Mike Stuart (R-7th) believes the time has come for the Legislature to take a much closer look at the internal workings of West Virginia’s Child Protective Services Division.
The agency had already been the subject of scrutiny in recent years, but its operations have been called into greater question by a recent case in Kanawha County where two children were found locked up in a shed.
Deputies found the two adopted teens, ages 14 and 16, locked in an out building near Sissonville with no running water, no food and no adequate toilet. Investigators said in the event of a fire or other emergency, the pair would have been trapped in the building.
Neighbors have said they called CPS repeatedly, but the calls were never answered.
“I think we need to take a deep dive into CPS, to make sure that not only with respect to Sissonville, but across the system we need to make sure we’re serving our children and families as well as we can,” said Stuart.
Repeated attempts to learn more about the case from CPS have been resisted. The agency stands behind a state law that disallows disclosure of any information in a case involving children for confidentiality issues. Reporters have been repeatedly denied attempts to FOIA information in the case and even Legislators have been denied access to the information.
“CPS is a concern for many of us. There is no reason we have to in any way compromise confidentiality while also getting to all of the facts in the matter,” Stuart said.
He formerly served as the U.S. attorney for the southern district of West Virginia. He said by far, calls and emails about CPS actions outnumbered any other types of calls he would receive as the federal prosecutor.
“It’s critically important that we have full transparency to understand exactly the circumstances of that matter, what calls may have been made and what the reaction from CPS was to those phone calls,” said Stuart.
During the 2023 regular Legislative session, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 273 and House Bill 3261, both addressing issues with CPS. Following passage of two new statutes and the implementation of multiple initiatives, the state’s CPS worker vacancy rate has decreased 14% since January, according to West Virginia Department of Health and Human Services Bureau for Social Services Commissioner Jeffrey Pack. The CPS vacancy rate was 33% in January. Now, that rate is 19%.
“The time has come to take a deep dive into this system that we’re providing more resources to and hiring more employees into to see if it actually works. If it doesn’t work, we’re just going to be putting more employees and more resources into a system that’s broken and it will just be a bigger, broken system,” said Stuart.
