Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get independent accountability reporting on the politics and policies shaping our state. When Olivia Frausto was growing up with her father and sister in Martinsburg, sleeping on the floor and waking up to cockroaches scuttling on the walls, she remembers frequent visits from West Virginia Child Protective Services workers.
That path led to truancy and drug use. At 13, Olivia was impregnated by an adult man and the following year gave birth to a daughter prematurely. For Olivia, that trauma led to years in and out of juvenile detention centers, group facilities and foster homes.
West Virginia continues to rely on residential group care for kids with physical and mental disabilities — an ongoing situation that has led to years of monitoring by the U.
Department of Justice and a class action lawsuit that is scheduled to go before a federal judge in March. There are myriad factors, but exacerbating all of them is a chronic shortage of Child Protective Service workers. These are the people who try to find the best places to put the thousands of kids who suddenly need a new home. When Orion Flynn thinks about the year he spent living at SandyPines Residential Treatment Center in Jupiter, Florida, he remembers tall fences and unanswered phone calls.
Originally from Cabell County, Orion had been in the foster care system for more than a decade at that point, cycling through nearly a dozen different kinds of homes, including with foster families, in emergency shelters and several residential treatment centers.
