CHARLESTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday changed the funding components of the foster care bill from the House, causing Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee to find ways to re-insert the provisions.

Judiciary amended House Bill 4092, a bill designed to address the ballooning foster care and kinship care system in West Virginia.

HB 4092, as sent over from the House, would create the foster children’s bill of rights and the foster parents and kinship bill of rights. The bill places duties and responsibilities upon foster parents, including not violating the rights of the foster child and providing all children placed in their care with appropriate food, clothing, shelter, supervision, medical attention and educational needs.

The bill also sets a reasonable and prudent parent standard, which gives foster parents authority to make daily decisions regarding a foster child’s extracurricular activities, including sports, arts and other activities. Violation of any of these rights would be investigated by the foster care ombudsman.

The House bill also updated payment rates. Child placement agencies will be paid a rate of $75 per day, per child, with foster parents receiving at least 40 percent of the rate, or a minimum of $30 per day. For kinship parents, at least $900 per month per child is set. The fiscal note attached to the bill was nearly $17 million for the increased reimbursement rates.

The Judiciary changes removes the new funding rates for foster and kinship families. It includes a $1,000 payment to child placement agencies for each completed adoption and requires the rate paid by placement agencies to foster parents to be evaluated every two years.

The amended bill would create a tiered foster care system to be implemented no later than July 1, 2021. The tiered system would allow DHHR to provide a higher reimbursement for the placement of children with special needs or older children who are typically harder to place.

It would create a pilot program for using unmatched state dollars to augment Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to uncertified kinship parents in an amount not to exceed $150 per month per family. During fiscal year 2021, DHHR would be directed to spend $4 million for the pilot.

The Senate version of the bill authorizes the Department of Health and Human Resources to increase services to prevent removal, identify relatives of children, train staff providing kinship services to become certified foster parents. Several of the rights in the bill were also changed.

After a break for the Senate’s evening floor session, Senate Democrats on the judiciary committee attempted to amend the amendment to put back in the House’s reimbursement rate system.

“I’ve had a number of families who have contacted me who have foster children and they need financial help,” said state Sen. Glenn Jeffries, D-Putnam. “I believe it should be the state’s obligation to provide that funding. We have so many children in foster care, and we want to encourage families to open up their homes.”

Senate Majority Whip Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, spoke against the amendment, saying it should be a matter for the Senate Finance Committee to consider.

“That’s all new language, the prioritizing of funding,” Weld said. “That’s well within the purview of the judiciary committee to set priorities for funding. However, what I don’t think is within judiciary’s purview normally is coming up with the amounts within the budget for this bill. This bill is going to (the Senate Finance Committee) next.”

“I am not on the finance committee and neither is (Jeffries),” said state Sen. Mike Woelfel, D-Cabell. “We might say let the finance committee work on that, but we’re not on that committee. We want to work on it here…I take that as a cop-out.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Trump, R-Morgan, said the bill was on a time crunch with the 2020 legislative session ending Saturday, March 7, at midnight. Trump said he hopes the Senate Finance Committee takes a thorough look at the bill.

“We’ll hope for the best, as this bill moves now to the Senate Committee on Finance,” Trump said.

“We don’t know what else may be possible for the finance committee to do, but I think we can all agree in a bipartisan fashion that finding funding to help this system…to be established is a priority for West Virginia.”

Foster care placements have increased by 74 percent from January 2011 to January 2020 to more than 7,000.

Steven Allen Adams can be reached at sadams@newsandsentinel.com