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Foster kids’ wide-sweeping lawsuit about West Virginia’s troubled child welfare system will not go to trial in March after the state successfully sought a delay.
The class-action suit, filed nearly five years ago, alleges that the state sent children to unsafe homes, overworked Child Protective Services workers and left kids to languish in the system. While the state Department of Human Services said there have been improvements, many of the system’s problems persist while there are 6,080 kids in foster care.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin postponed the trial until May 6.
The delay comes after a private lawyer representing the state said he couldn’t attend a pretrial meetinging scheduled for February because he would be out of the country for his mother’s 70th birthday celebration.
A Better Childhood, a New York-based nonprofit that brought the suit on behalf of foster kids, objected to the delay due to the state’s “lack of diligence in addressing this scheduling conflict,” according to court records.
“This failure to find an amicable solution is discouraging,” Goodwin wrote in the order.
The suit has faced numerous hurdles since it was filed after the state sought to have the case thrown out and it was moved to a different judge.
Attorneys for A Better Childhood said they’ve struggled to get key documents about the foster care system, and last year, the state was sanctioned for failing to preserve emails from former top foster care officials related to the case. The misstep could cost the state $172,000 in sanctions, according to fees requested by plaintiffs.
The state has paid more than $6.3 million to Brown and Peisch, a law firm in Washington, D.C. that has provided the state’s legal counsel in the case since 2020.
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