A foster care system in crisis: West Virginia faces a legal reckoning
Ravaged by the opioid epidemic, West Virginia has seen its foster care population balloon by 57% in the past decade, overwhelming an already strapped system.
During her roughly four years in West Virginia’s foster care system, Nahomi Bennett says she bounced around among more than a dozen facilities — so many that she lost count. But there is one she can't forget: the group home where she was living when, she says, an older boy raped her at age 14.
“I have dreams about it sometimes,” Bennett, now 20, said in an interview. “So I can’t really escape it in a way.”
West Virginia has the country’s highest rate of children in foster care—a figure that’s four times higher than that of the U.S. as a whole. Ravaged by the opioid epidemic, the state has seen its foster care population balloon by 57% over the past decade, overwhelming an already strapped child welfare system.
West Virginia has implemented reforms in recent years, such as hiring more Child Protective Service workers and launching a campaign to recruit foster parents. But its efforts have fallen well short, according to a review of public records and interviews with more than two dozen former foster children, foster parents, ex-case workers and others connected to the system.
They paint a picture of a system that continues to expose vulnerable children to harm due to a rush to institutionalize those needing the most support, a pattern of high caseloads and chronic understaffing, a culture of concealment and retaliation, and a shortage of foster homes so dire that kids are living in hotel rooms and even cabins in a recreational area.
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