A sobering number is often used to sum up West Virginia’s child welfare system: about 6,000 children in state custody.

There are more sad numbers too. There are 471 West Virginia children placed in out of state residences, according to legislative testimony last week by representatives of the Department of Human Services.

West Virginia’s child welfare system is so troubled that although a federal judge recently concluded it would be overreach for the courts system to prescribe specific fixes, Judge Joseph Goodwin also bluntly called it a mess.

“West Virginia’s foster care system has cycled through inaction, bureaucratic indifference, shocking neglect, and temporary fixes for years,” Goodwin wrote.

His kicker: “The blame squarely lies with West Virginia state government.”

Mark Drennan, a former state senator and current vice president of the National Youth Advocate Program Inc., thinks West Virginia has been getting its approach wrong.

More focus, Drennan has come to believe, needs to be on providing training and support for West Virginia families to keep kids home.

“What I think we probably should do is turn our focus toward the families. When you bring a life into this world it comes with some innate responsibilities. We’ve had this drug crisis, and we have people who are working through a bunch of different issues,” Drennan said in an interview at the state Capitol.

“So what if we as a system could really help to retrain and train those parents and those caregivers and those kinship caregivers and grandparents on the best route to raising that child?”

Drennan, whose wife Sarah now serves in the House of Delegates, has served as chief executive of the West Virginia Behavioral Healthcare Providers Association and also as chief strategy officer for the Children’s Home Society of West Virginia.

Over time, his thinking has shifted over what might work best in West Virginia’s child welfare system.

“In our industry, we talk about the concept of trauma and how kids are traumatized. And they are. When you are raised in that situation with abuse and neglect and exposed to drug use, removed from your natural family, you’re going to have trauma. What we need to do as a system is try not to pass that trauma down to the next generation,” he said.

“And I think that by focusing on people with natural connections and bonds and strengthening those, we can go a long way to preventing that trauma from being passed down to the next generation.”

In West Virginia, as many as 22,000 children live with relatives instead of their parents. And 16,757 grandparents raise grandchildren without a parent present, according to census data from 2021.

But Drennan said parents shouldn’t be dismissed from responsibility.

“The way the system works now is, who sort of gets punished in this? The child gets removed. The child starts going around the cycle of various foster homes and relatives and people they know at church and their neighbors and that sort of thing,” he said.

“What I’m thinking about is, we need to support those people but we also need to support the biological family members: get them healthy, get them well, give them the tools that they need so that they can raise their own child because the state, frankly, has always been a poor substitute for families raising kids.”

West Virginia puts significant financial resources into its child welfare system, and for years it’s been running short on child protective services workers.

To put greater emphasis on support for parents and families could mean additional funding. But Drennan put it a different way.

“I think the cost of taking custody of 6,000 kids is enormous. You’ve got to pay for their foster care, their healthcare; you’ve got to pay court costs in terms of guardian ad litem fees, judge time, court time, CPS worker time; you’ve got to pay for their housing and clothing,” he said.

“But the cost of those things well outweighs the cost of any of the programming that I would be expressing.”

The Legislature has made a priority to continue addressing child welfare in West Virginia, said Delegate Jonathan Pinson, a Republican from Mason County.

Pinson is either the sponsor or co-sponsor of 15 different pieces of legislation that deal directly with the foster care crisis.

“There have been a number of us that have spent the last, really, several years working on this issue, meeting once a month, sometimes twice a month, even when we’re not in legislative session to try to come up with some items to try to move the needle,” Pinson said last week on MetroNews’ “Talkline.”

“We realize there’s not going to be one bill that fixes the problem for over 6,000 kids in foster care and all the kids who will be in foster care, but we’re going to continue to chip away at it.”

One of the bills Pinson has pushed, House Bill 3382 , would require the Department of Human Services to create a “central reception center” and emergency resource homes for foster children for up to 72 hours for children who don’t have a home right away.

Pinson said the bill could address the recurring issue of children in state custody being housed in hotels.

“I think most people would agree, it’s just unacceptable that the state would move in and take custody of a child, oftentimes for excellent reasons — these children are at risk of danger, they’re at risk of harm, they’ve already been harmed,” he said.

“So the state moves in and takes custody of a child, but we don’t have anywhere to put that child so we’re going to send that child to a hotel or a motel or a 4H campground where the only thing they can do all day is sit there and stare at a television?”

Senator Mike Stuart, R-Kanawha, proposed a comprehensive, independent study of West Virginia’s child welfare system.

West Virginia’s new secretary of Human Services, Alex Mayer, he promised that the agency would work toward improvement and suggested that no study would be necessary.

“Child welfare, the crisis we have in child welfare in West Virginia, to me is number one,” Stuart said last week on “The Dave Allen Show” on WCHS Radio.

“When you have federal judges and state judges and people in the system saying the foster care system, our CPS system and the court system don’t work together, it’s broken, we’ve got a problem. This should be a red flag, SOS, going out to all West Virginians.”

So, Stuart said he’ll offer expanded legislation this coming week.

“It’s going to be a bigger bill. I think we need this roadmap. We’ve got to fix this system. It’s in crisis,” Stuart said.

“And when you have 6,000 kids in foster kids, when you have the top state in the country for grandparents raising their grandchildren, when you have the opiate crisis that we do, this is a critical point in time when there is buy-in across the board. We can’t miss this opportunity.”