BY CARRIE HODOUSEK
CHARLESTON — An Eastern Panhandle judge told state lawmakers Monday that despite improvements in pay for Child Protective Services workers in his region, there is still a 400-referral backlog in connection with child abuse and neglect cases.
Berkeley County Circuit Judge Steven Redding told the Joint Committee on Judiciary there have been issues of understaffing and under-trained new hires and that many of those issues are due to delayed response times, delayed referrals and no court reports filed.
Redding said when the state Department of Health and Human Resources is behind, it creates further delays for the courts.
“The significant issues we are experiencing involve the department’s inability to complete critical tasks in a timely fashion. Examples include making referrals in abuse and neglect matters as well as juvenile delinquency cases,” he said.
Court reports are required by law to be filed every 60 days in every abuse and neglect case, but Redding said that hasn’t happened in his court for a while.
“I can’t recall the last time I received a court report. As a consequence, I have no idea what’s happening with the children or their parents between hearings. This places the court in the position of being reactive instead of proactive, which doesn’t serve our families,” he said.
Redding said his circuit sees more than 200 new abuse and neglect cases per year with two judges scheduled to hear the cases. He said the CPS workers he deals with have more than 125 cases when they should only have 30 cases each.
“We’re in a situation where we’ve been so understaffed that things are falling through the cracks. Things that need to happen aren’t happening. I know that there’s no malintent on part of anybody at the department. It’s simply numbers and perhaps we have some local issues that need to be addressed in terms of leadership,” he said.
State DHHR Commissioner of the Bureau for Social Services Jeff Pack also addressed lawmakers Monday and said the state continues to experience issues of workforce recruitment and retention.
“Just recently as the end of calendar year 2022, we were experiencing a 33% vacancy rate in our Child Protective Services workforce across the state,” Pack said.
Pack said initiatives have been put in place to improve those issues. He said if a CPS worker was employed before June 2022, they received a 15% pay increase and will receive increases at two and five years of service. If hired after June 2022, then a pay increase will happen every couple of years of employment with 10% happening in the second and fourth years of employment and 5% in the sixth and eighth years.
The starting salary for a CPS worker in West Virginia is between $33,000 and $50,000, depending on location and experience.
Redding said it’s too soon to say whether those efforts to increase pay for CPS workers will work, but that there are concerns with the amount of time it takes to train a new hire since the process can take several weeks and even months.
A major issue in juvenile delinquency cases is the lack of in-state treatment facilities for more severe cases, he said.
“Unfortunately, some of our children exhibit behaviors that are so out-of-control and dangerous that no in-state facility will accept them. We waste precious time requiring the department to exhaust all in-state possibilities prior to ordering those out-of-state referrals be made, usually knowing beforehand that no in-state providers will accept these children,” Redding said.
“We’re in critical need of an in-state facility for these children, yet it appears that need is being ignored or overlooked,” he continued. “That is a travesty for our children.”
Children in these cases are typically placed in department custody and have to sit with CPS workers at DHHR offices or stay in hotels with workers while waiting for out-of-state facilities as no facility is available in West Virginia. According to the DHHR, providers have expressed interest in coming to West Virginia to provide specialized services for more severe cases.
Interim committee meetings at the state Capitol run through today.
