Judge Joyce D. Chernenko
First Family Court Circuit (Brooke, Hancock, and Ohio Counties)
The Honorable Joyce Dumbaugh Chernenko was born and raised in Weirton, West Virginia, and graduated from Weir Senior High School in 1974. She attended Bethany College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications in 1978, magna cum laude, and having been awarded Distinction on her Comprehensive Examinations.
Judge Chernenko then entered West Virginia University College of Law, and received her Juris Doctor degree in 1981. While at WVU she excelled at legal writing and appellate advocacy. She won membership on the College of Law’s Moot Court Board, was awarded membership in the Order of the Barristers honorary, and represented WVU at several national appellate advocacy competitions.
She returned to the upper Ohio Valley upon graduation, accepting a clerkship with The Honorable John H. Kamlowsky, Federal Bankruptcy Judge for the Northern District of West Virginia, and entered private practice in 1982 in the courts of the Northern Panhandle, with the firm of William E. Watson and Associates.
Judge Chernenko was elected Judge for the First Family Court Circuit of West Virginia in 2002, and re-elected in 2008 and 2016. Prior to her election, Governors Gaston Caperton and Bob Wise had appointed Judge Chernenko to the Family Court in 1996 and 1999 respectively.
In October of 1999 Judge Chernenko was elected President of the West Virginia Family Court Association, serving two consecutive terms until October 2001. During the 2000 and 2001 West Virginia legislative sessions, she was the primary representative of the Family Court Association, traveling across the state to advocate for the new court system, and interacting with legislative leadership to assist them in their efforts to establish the Court.
Judge Chernenko has been on the vanguard of family court judicial administration, with the goal of making better the lives of children and families. She implemented a family court parenting mediation program two years before it was mandated statewide by the West Virginia Legislature. She also adopted a parent education program in her circuit prior to the legislature having implemented such a program statewide.
The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals awarded one of two grants given statewide to Judge Chernenko, used to establish a children's waiting area at her court facility in Wheeling. In 2002 and 2003 the Supreme Court awarded her a two-year total of $100,000 in grants for the purpose of establishing monitored parenting and exchange centers in Wheeling and Weirton to protect victims of domestic violence and children in high conflict parenting cases.
Since the passage of the Family Court Amendment to the West Virginia Constitution in November of 2000, Judge Chernenko has been named to the Supreme Court's Family Court Legislative Committee, and the Committee on Transfer of Domestic Violence Jurisdiction. She has been selected by the Supreme Court to train new Family Court Judges in domestic violence law, shared parenting law, and other areas of family law.
In 2001 the Judge represented West Virginia's judiciary at a national conference in San Antonio, Texas, on the relationship between domestic violence and child abuse. In 2017 she was one of 15 West Virginians awarded the Lawyers and Leaders Award from the West Virginia University College of Law and West Virginia Executive Magazine. This year Judge Chernenko enters her 27th year on the bench in Family Court.
Judge Chernenko and her husband, Marc (Bethany College Class of ’78), have remained active at their alma mater, where he served on Bethany’s Board of Trustees for 20 years before his election to emeritus trustee status last year. Judge Chernenko served, from 1996 to 2004, as the general advisor to Bethany’s Theta chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha national women’s fraternity, the chapter having been founded at Bethany in 1905. The Judge founded two annual scholarships for Theta chapter members in memory of Bethanian Beth Mayer Hersh (Zeta ’79), who succumbed to breast cancer in 2008. She and her brother, Jack, (Bethany Beta Class of ’74), also founded annual scholarships for members of Psi Chapter of Beta Theta Pi fraternity in memory of their father, William C. Dumbaugh (Bethany Beta Class of ’48).
In the past Judge Chernenko has also been an alumnae advisor to both the Bethany College Panhellenic Council and the Bethany College Student Court. In 2004 Judge Chernenko was named outstanding alumna for her service to Bethany, in 2012 she and her husband were jointly awarded alumni of the year honors, and they have each been inducted into the Bethany College Greek Hall of Fame.
Judge Chernenko is active as a member of the Supporters of the Brooke Pioneer Trail, a “rails to trails” organization that works to maintain and advance recreation trails for hiking and bicycling in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia.