The state will close the West Virginia Children’s Home, a residential facility in Elkins for foster children, by the end of the year. The decision to close the 25-bed facility comes as the state on group homes to house foster kids and doesn’t have enough available beds.

The 25-bed , which serves youth ages 12 to 18 years old from any county, is operated by the Department of Human Services. The youth aren’t able to be served in a traditional foster home due to behavioral issues.

The West Virginia Department of Education operates a school on its premises.

“There have been six to 10 students there for the last 12 to 18 months,” said Jacob Green, superintendent of  West Virginia Schools of Diversion and Transition, adding that three children currently reside at the facility. “There is a new program in Parsons run by Genesis [Foster Care and Adoption Services], and we will be moving resources there.”

Green added that the decision was made after talk of closing the facility for more than two years.

DoHS did not respond to questions for this story about why they will close the facility. Department Secretary Cynthia Persily last year that the West Virginia Children’s Home, built in 1909, had numerous safety concerns involving windows and doors that needed to be addressed.

Hundreds of West Virginia’s 6,135 foster kids are in group homes, according to . There is a , particularly for older children.

Lawmakers and advocates have said kids are continuing to be housed in hotels due to a lack of foster families and available beds in group homes.

Shanna Gray, is the executive director for West Virginia Court Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA.

“Too many children who come into foster care in West Virginia are currently residing in residential facilities, away from family connections,” she said. “It is our hope that the closing of this and other already identified unsafe environments for West Virginia children will force our systems to acknowledge other ways in addressing and curbing the unprecedented influx of children entering [the] foster care system, including building capacity of community support.”

When lawmakers last year discussed possibly closing the facility, Persily cited a that requires West Virginia to operate an “orphanage.”

DoHS did not answer a question about if a different facility would not meet the code’s requirement to house foster children.

An , filed in 2019, alleged the mistreatment of thousands of  foster children in DoHS care; the suit said that a disproportionate number of children were sent to institutions. DoHS in the suit in July, vowing they’d made improvements to the system that included recruiting more foster families. Attorneys suing the state said the problems persist and are planning for a trial in March 2025.

Correction: This story was updated to say that hundreds of West Virginia’s foster children live in group homes.��

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

After receiving what she called “numerous” complaints about foster children in Kentucky without supervision by trained staff, state Auditor Allison Ball said Tuesday the Office of the Ombudsman will investigate.

Calling it an “ongoing crisis” that is “years” in the making, Ball said the will investigate the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to get at the root causes.

Terry Brooks, the executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, said the problem isn’t new — and solving it won’t be  simple or cheap.

It involves a “niche population” of high-needs youth who likely need specialized care, he told the Lantern.

“It’s not typically 5-year-old kids who look like they fell off a TV commercial,” Brooks said. “You’re talking about older kids, teenagers, high levels of acuity, probably some special needs, probably with a history of aggressive behavior. I’m painting a portrait of a young person who we definitely need to care for, but we know it’s going to take creativity and resources to be able to do that.”

A spokesperson for the auditor said the office thinks the practice has “been going on for two years and has affected about 300 children, but we’ll know exactly once we dig in.”

The cabinet said in a statement that it has “taken action to address the challenges that come with placing youth with severe mental and behavioral problems or a history of violence or sexual aggression with foster families or facilities.”

“We’ve publicly addressed this many times with lawmakers and have offered more funding to secure additional safe, short-term care options for youth,” a cabinet spokesman said. “When one of these placements are necessary, we work to make sure each youth has a safe place to stay until a placement can be made. We urge those interested in becoming a foster parent to help us meet the needs of all our youth, please visit .”

In 2023, The Courier Journal reported that a was a factor in the state’s decision to house some youth in a Louisville office building. earlier this year that the practice has continued, despite concerns raised by a Louisville judge.

“My office has continued to receive numerous complaints of foster children and teenagers sleeping on cots and air mattresses in office buildings, often not supervised by trained staff,” Ball said in a statement. “I have instructed the Ombudsman’s Office to investigate this issue to uncover the problems associated with this ongoing crisis.”

“The vulnerable children of Kentucky deserve to be placed in nurturing environments where they are provided with the resources, stability, and care they need,” Ball said.

Staff are still trying to confirm how many office buildings are involved, a spokesperson for Ball said, though “we can confirm that this is not exclusively a Jefferson County issue.” 

Sleeping in an office building can compound trauma youth already have experienced, Brooks said. “It certainly is not going to create a positive childhood experience,” he said. “It’s going to create more adversity to kids who have already experienced too much adversity.”

Kentucky ‘can’t do this on the cheap’

Kentucky needs more families to , but it also needs a better system to support children who can’t be placed, Brooks said. Kentucky must “incentivize” — through higher wages and reimbursements — a “willingness to take on tough cases.”.

Lawmakers can look to Tennessee, he said, which has faced and responded by increasing  payments to foster parents and wages to state staff working with higher-needs children.

“They have just owned the fact that,‘if I’m getting paid $15 an hour, I’m probably not going to be volunteering to get bitten, spit on and other issues with tough kids,’” Brooks said.

Another solution Kentucky should consider, Brooks said, would be  to — safe, secure, designated spaces — to temporarily house children who can’t immediately be placed.

“If the General Assembly cares about those kids sleeping in offices as much as (CHFS Secretary Eric Friedlander) and Auditor Ball, then they’ve got to take action,” Brooks said. “And it can’t be rhetorical. It has to be resources. So I don’t know if that is looking at existing resources, I don’t know if that’s taking the big swing (and) reopening the budget, but you can’t do this on the cheap.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on and .

At least 23 children have died in Texas’ long-term foster care system since summer 2019, according to a new report by court-appointed monitors for state agencies in charge of the system.

Six of the children died as a result of either neglect or abuse by caregivers. Another is suspected to have died from abuse. Five more deaths are also still under investigation.

“It’s the safety of these children that’s at stake here,” U.S. District Judge Janis Jack said during a federal court hearing following the release of the report. “That’s the most important thing we have … and I expect Texas to live up to its duties to keep these children safe.”

The 387-page report was released ahead of a hearing in the decade-long lawsuit over foster care in Texas. It detailed “some progress” state agencies have made toward improving foster care but stated that “serious risks of harm to children persist.”

Jack previously ordered the state to stop putting children in placements that “create an unreasonable risk of serious harm.” But the report found the state “appears to have done so repeatedly, with serious, harmful consequences to the children in its care.”

This week’s hearing comes over two years after Jack ordered the Department of Family and Protective Services and the Health and Human Services Commission to address a long list of reforms for the state’s foster care system after she found in 2015 that Texas violated foster children’s constitutional rights.

 for failing to meet reforms ordered by Jack. She did not issue another contempt order during this week’s hearing.

During the hearing, which lasted all day May 5 and part of May 6, Jack acknowledged that there has been progress but highlighted several areas that continue to endanger children.

Jack grilled several state and provider officials about placement facilities reopening under different names — a phenomenon that the monitors surfaced last year. According to the report, several operations with histories of abuse, safety and neglect violations closed and reopened under a new name to escape citations from the state.

State officials said they have addressed the issue with an emergency rule to ensure this can’t happen. A permanent rule will go into place this summer.

“I mean it’s just stunning to me that these rules are even necessary,” Jack said. “Because for something to close one day and open the next day with the same children, the same owners, the same operators and the same staff — and nobody picks it up? It’s just bizarre.”

The report also said three contractors responsible for finding living arrangements, including foster homes, for children in state care placed children in unlicensed facilities.

“We are glad to see the areas in which the state is improving,” Marcia Lowry, executive director of A Better Childhood, a national nonprofit child welfare advocacy organization, and a co-counsel in the lawsuit, said in a May 4 press release. “However, we are very troubled that almost two years after the court’s remedial orders went into effect, children are being placed in unlicensed placements and being subjected to many dangerous, damaging conditions.”

The report includes a 3-year-old boy who died after being found unresponsive on the floor, bleeding from his ear and showing signs of abuse. His day care had reported previous injuries to his case worker. One teenager died by suicide when left alone, despite her case requiring that she be under constant supervision because she was at risk for self-harm. Other cases include negligence by the caretakers for medical needs or in one case when a toddler was able to climb into a pool and drown.

Other deaths not deemed from abuse or neglect include a teenager who drowned, children with severe medical conditions and a 15-year-old girl who had run away from care and was found murdered on the side of the road. One child was in a placement in another state and wasn’t investigated by Texas officials.

Eleven of the deaths were also included in the monitor’s first report last year. The data was collected after Jack ordered that child fatalities be reported to the court monitors.

The court monitors analyzed tens of thousands of pages of documents, conducted hours of interviews and probed various aspects of the foster care system.

Texas Health and Human Services did not revoke any licenses for placements — whether a foster home, a group home or an agency — in the five years prior to July 31, 2019. But between then and April 23, the department initiated revocation proceedings or denied licenses for eight group facilities that house seven or more foster children.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services canceled contracts with three of these facilities, while five others voluntarily relinquished licenses after being placed on heightened monitoring or another type of enforcement action due to suspected malpractice.

Jack blasted one provider in particular, Family Tapestry, for failing to meet minimum standards and prevent abuse within a shelter in San Antonio.

“You are running a dangerous, unsafe operation, and now you want more money to continue doing it,” Jack told Annette Rodriguez, chief executive officer of the Children’s Shelter and Family Tapestry. “You were unprepared to take care of those children, and you’re still unprepared to take care of those children.”

The Children’s Shelter created Family Tapestry and won a state contract in August 2018 to manage and place foster children. But Jack said there were persistent problems there that “are serious and an incredible safety issue.”

The shelter was cited 239 times for failing to meet minimum standards from 2016 to 2020, according to the report. Monitors detailed “substantiated” findings including one for physical abuse, one for sexual abuse, 10 for neglectful supervision and three for medical neglect.

Family Tapestry voluntarily surrendered its license for the shelter, but later continued to place children there, according to the court monitors. Rodriguez said at this week’s hearing the organization chose to do that because of a lack of other options.

“We are diligently working with providers to try to open up more capacity, as we have done all along,” Rodriguez said.

Jack said it is “absolutely astounding” that the organization has told officials that it needs more funding when defending itself from the reports.

“I hope that that doesn’t occur for the safety of these children,” she said.

After the Tribune requested an interview, Rodriguez responded in a statement that they are “deeply concerned” and working to address the issues raised.

“It would not be appropriate to comment further at this time. We remain committed to all the children we serve,” Rodriguez said.

During the hearing, Jack also instructed state officials to take action to better protect children from sexual abuse within the foster care system and to document when children have a history of abuse or sexual aggression, so they can be placed with precautions in mind.

A future hearing date for the ongoing case has not yet been announced.

The parents of one of the children who died while in foster care is suing ACH Child and Family Services, the organization who managed their son’s case, after he died, succumbing to injuries.

Amari Boone was three years old when he died in state custody. He had two emergency visits to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth while in foster care before his death from a brain injury, according to .

“Nobody should ever have to lose a child. We are still heartbroken but making sure that Amari did not die in vain gives us a reason to get through each day,” Amari’s parents said in a written statement to The Texas Tribune. “The Texas foster care system needs to change.”

The Boone family alleges that ACH Child and Family Services — the provider that managed Amari’s case — “cut corners to focus on profits over people, ignored multiple obvious signs and warnings of abuse, and kept haphazard records that resulted in Amari’s death.”

“We remain heartbroken over the loss of Amari Boone and our deepest sympathies are with his family and friends,” a spokesperson for ACH said in a written statement. “We are fully cooperating with authorities involved in the case and wish we could comment more, but now as a defendant in this case, we are not at liberty to discuss any information in public.”

The two foster caretakers, Deondrick Foley and Joseph Delancy, were arrested earlier this year and indicted on several counts of injury to a child by omission resulting in bodily injury, according to The reported.

Neelam Bohra contributed to this report. Reese Oxner is the breaking news reporter for , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.