Bill would give big pay hike to state employees working in foster care system, create public information dashboard

With Gov. Jim Justice’s budget request for across-the-board 5% pay raises for state employees, and the 15% pay hike included in the bill, direct service employees working within the state health agency’s Bureau of Social Services would see a 20% total pay raise starting July 1. House Health Chairman Delegate Matthew Rohrbach, R-Cabell, is the bill’s lead sponsor, and 10 House Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors.

“We feel that this bill is a step in the right direction,” said Delegate Jonathan Pinson, R-Mason, who is one of the bill’s co-sponsors.

Pinson, who is a foster parent, said the pay raises will address recruitment and retention issues within the system. However, this is not a fix-all piece of legislation, he said, and lawmakers must continue to address the system’s complexities.

Delegate Lisa Zukoff, D-Marshall, said the bill still has a ways to go this session, and on top of that, the outlook for state employee hiring is grim.

“I think it’s a good start,” she said. “We have the will to make things better, but with the crisis we have right now in both the foster care system and in state hiring — the need to hire employees and the lack of workforce — there just aren’t enough people to go around that are qualified.”

Zukoff, a member of the House’s informal childcare caucus, said the public dashboard the bill would create is a step toward transparency. If Justice signs the bill into law, starting in October, a state dashboard showing current child welfare statistics, trends over time and progress toward established performance goals will be publicly viewable.

Zukoff said she wanted to see a dashboard that showed additional local information, where residents can see how the system is performing in their district or county. But if the bill passes this year, she said the time between its rollout in October and the 2023 Legislative session would give lawmakers the ability to address any issues or include additional data next time around.

Both Pinson and Zukoff said there is a good team of lawmakers and Department of Health and Human Resources employees dedicated to fixing the foster care system, including a number of individuals, like Pinson, personally invested in the system.

“Having that perspective, having the ability to see the system and the obstacles that face these children — biological families and foster families,” Pinson said, “having the opportunity to experience that before I stepped into the Legislature, has been very, very important in identifying what things need to be addressed.”