Over the last year, the Nelson County Department of Social Services, or DSS, has faced state and local investigations and interventions over practices that led to kids being left in unsafe situations. Now, the county is working to rebuild the department – along with public trust. WMRA's Meredith McCool reports in the first of a three-part series. Please be aware that this story contains details of child abuse and neglect.
GRACE DeSHONG: I will go ahead and call the Nelson County DSS Advisory Board May meeting to order.
It’s May 19, 2026, and the appointees to the advisory board pack a small, sun-heated conference room in the double-wide trailer that currently serves as the Department of Social Services building.
DeSHONG: My name is Grace DeShong. I am the director here. I started this role as of January 1.
On August 19, 2025, the Nelson County Board of Supervisors voted to dissolve the DSS Board and shift its responsibilities to the county administrator.
ERNIE REED: … which basically changes the chain of command.
Ernie Reed represents the Central District on the Nelson County Board of Supervisors.
To understand why the board felt it necessary to change the chain of command, we have to go back more than a year – back before a prosecutor in the commonwealth’s attorney’s office raised concerns in a letter to the board. It includes details of multiple cases where the department’s actions endangered children. One involved an unresponsive six-week-old infant, who showed signs of trauma consistent with physical abuse, but whom Nelson County child protective services objected to placing under a protective order. In another, teenage sisters showed marks consistent with abuse and strangulation, but the DSS director still attempted to return them to the residence where the abuse occurred.
The state placed the county DSS on a corrective action plan, which cited ineffective case documentation, casework management, and supervisory oversight that put the safety and wellbeing of children and families at risk.
The Virginia Department of Social Services did not respond to WMRA’s emailed questions.
Understaffed and unraveling
What led to this deterioration? Reed is one of multiple sources who pointed to understaffing as a major part of the problem. He began serving on the county board of supervisors in 2018.
REED: I'm certainly aware of the staffing problems that we've had as long as I've been paying attention to such things.
For example, according to documents in one court case, a mother and father who appealed the termination of their parental rights argued that social services offered them limited visitation with their children in 2022 and 2023 due to staffing concerns. During closing arguments, counsel for the department admitted that “DSS’s actions at the beginning of this case were atrocious,” but they countered that once services were in place, the mother and father failed to take full advantage of them. The appellate court ultimately agreed the termination of parental rights was in the children’s best interest.
That family’s saga took place before Brad Burdette became the director of Nelson County DSS. He served from June 2023 until August 2025, when he resigned a day after the advisory board was dissolved. Burdette did not respond to WMRA’s request for an interview.
REED: I know Mr. Burdette as a community member and as someone that's passionately trying to make the best situations he possibly can for what jurisdiction he had.
McCOOL: Is there anything else that you can share about what was going well under his tenure, or any early warning signs that things were starting to go downhill?
REED: Until we had an incident that became extremely volatile, there was nothing that I was aware of. … We had a very, very unfortunate situation … where, not just DSS, but our commonwealth’s attorney and our sheriff were involved.
Daniel Rutherford is the commonwealth's attorney for Nelson County.
DANIEL RUTHERFORD: The breakdown has happened over several years, and it's just gotten worse. … What was small things that we kind of worked with, but didn't make a big deal, became bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. And it came to the point where DSS failed to report anything. So breakdown is an understatement. A complete failure in reporting is what happened.
In a spring 2025 letter addressed to Nelson County Board of Social Services and the Board of Supervisors, the acting commonwealth’s attorney detailed that failure in reporting. For example:
RUTHERFORD: A 18-month-old child tested positive for meth. We were never notified. The child should have been sent to the hospital. It wasn't. … If we would have known, we would have started asking those questions, has X, Y, and Z been done because we're gearing up to prosecute? We weren't told. We weren't told for months.
State supervised, to a degree
I asked Eric Reynolds, director of the statewide Office of the Children’s Ombudsman, about differences in notification practices between local departments.
ERIC REYNOLDS: Some of the bigger localities are going to have set processes in order and certain contact people within the law enforcement or commonwealth's attorney's office that DSS will call to make the reports. So it really depends on the locality. There is a lot of flexibility.
That flexibility is a function of Virginia’s –
REYNOLDS: State supervised, locally administered social services system.
While implementation varies, some requirements are clearly laid out in the Code of Virginia. Here’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Rutherford again.
RUTHERFORD: “The local department shall notify the local attorney for the commonwealth,” which is me, “and the local law enforcement agency, of all complaints of suspected child abuse or neglect involving death of a child, injury, threatened injury to a child … any sexual abuse, suspected sexual abuse … immediately, but in no case, more than two hours of receipt of the complaint.” You cannot get more specific than that. … They knew that. They knew that because that is DSS 101.
In part two of this series, we’ll learn about the Structured Decision Making tool used by agencies across the commonwealth, as well as the staffing challenges faced by small, rural localities like Nelson County.
