 Hi, my name is Jerica, and this is Josh. We are students at CCB, and we are studying DCF and its involvement in our community. Josh, any thoughts on what DCF is? DCF is a system that helps people, families that need help, whether it's from food to domestic to children services. That's correct. DCF also has six tiers, so they offer anything from food, cash, child development, child safety, DCF interactions, and the Child Development Division, it's for integrated services, children's with special needs, so they're a pretty good service for our community. We've come up with their few questions for our community last week, and we asked people if they even knew what DCF was. And to our shock, many of them didn't even know what DCF is, and those that did definitely didn't prefer their interactions. So we got very interesting results. We decided to do some research on that, and we came across a website. It's called dcf.vermont.gov, and it is very informative for those who didn't know what DCF is, or the services that it provides to our community. If you look on the left-hand side, there's definitely different options for a variety of different people, from parents to childcare providers to people that are involved with DCF. One of our favorite links was the family services. So this is resources for the people that are involved with DCF. There's plenty of different choices to pick from, from childcare to child safety interventions, many different links that can help you become informed and aware, and if you need to find other services for your child or family member, you can click any of those links, and it will bring you right to a phone number, or somebody that can help you. We also learned that 2-1-1, if you just type that in your phone and press, it will take you right to a person that will show you where to go, so you can get anything from childcare applications to food services to somebody to come to your house and do evaluations. Lots of different options. They can help any walk of life from birth to elderly. It was a great choice. Definitely a good link. If anybody's trying to find a quick resource, I would definitely recommend 2-1-1. Josh, what was yours? Josh's favorite link. We go to the child of a division, and if you scroll down one second, you can contact us, press any of the law options. There's also, I'm sorry, my computer is acting funny. I'm sorry. It's like not working. So we're just gonna skip that. Now you know how to use this. It's a beautiful resource tool. It's not working with me very well right now, so I don't want to waste anyone's time, but I will try to keep going with that. We did meet with a DCF officer today. He is a supervisor in the Chittenden County. His name is Dan. He was great. We asked him lots of questions. Josh, do you remember any of the questions that we asked? I don't remember at all. Not at all. Well, let me refresh your memory. We discussed a little bit about what DCF was. We learned that he supervises six caseworkers. He, of his caseworkers, each one is assigned 25 cases, which is an abundance of cases, that they range from one case could have one kid or one case could have six kids. So it's kind of to whose discretion is whoever, how we're gonna say how many kids is actually on their caseload, but there's 25 cases per caseworker. Which is ridiculous if you actually think about it. Like one person can definitely not oversee 25 people. It's impossible. So I can imagine how they're feeling and how overwhelming that experience has to be for any person. So I can understand now, after talking to him, why some of the cases feel like they're being like overshadowed or overlooked because so many people, I mean, you can't have 24 hours a day on the phone with somebody checking in when there's that many kids. It's nuts. So he said that, according to the registration, they got three more positions and they're trying to fill those with new caseworkers. So that would drop the caseload to 15 instead of 25, which would be huge. He also said in kind of a condescending way that the caseworkers currently are kind of like sure because they haven't seen that and it's been 25 cases per caseworker for the last five years. So I can see where they would feel like that's a joke. Like, yeah, we'll believe it when we see it kind of a mentality and that's totally appropriate. I would feel the same way. We also learned that there's a lot of different case plans for each family member. So trying to like decipher who's is the most high risk in which one needs the most attention. Also plays a huge factor on how much time they're devoting to each case. So ones that are more high risk clearly take more time and that would be more where their energy is spent. Each case plan looks a little different, but always starts with how is the parent going to fix the situation. Which is interesting to me because some parents are super involved and some parents could care less, is a personal feeling. So it's interesting how that would play out into what ones get TPR'd and which ones don't. TPR meaning termination of parental rights for those that didn't know. And that definitely happens a lot more and he discussed a little bit about that. TPRing is a problem right now because even though there is minimal or high-risk interactions with the parents, the courts are not TPRing parents. Which is terrifying to me because how long do they let the parents come in and out of children's lives that are not healthy? Like if they haven't been clean or don't plan on getting clean or refusing help or they're in a domestic abuse situation and refusing to leave the home, how long is that window open for those kids to be an option, so to speak? Like how long do they just let the kids kind of like figure out they have to stay at a different house with a faster home that they've come to love and then they're going to be ripped out when the parent just decides to get their life together. Like there needs to be a cap on how long that window is because bonds will be broken and that's really detrimental to children's development. We also talked about substance abuse and its factor on the kids that are placed. They have kids that are a lot of the cases he said that he's seeing are substance abuse cases in situations where maybe the parent is being abused also by someone and has a little bit of fear in her heart. So she usually will kind of like decide to stay with maybe the abuser and kind of let the kid get out of the situation when she's feeling torn and can't get out of herself. So they're seeing an uprise in that and that's kind of scary to me. Like what happens to the people in that relationship? Like where's the kid? Where's the mom? How do they mend that broken system? Like how do they help the mom get out of a situation? That she's feeling like she's obligated to stay in or it's kind of like already like adjusted to so to speak. She's already there and she's accepted that this is her life, but she knows enough to let her kid get out of the situation. That's really sad to me. But she did say that Burlington PD has their own officer there who helps specifically with domestic abuse situations and that she goes first on call or first hand to the domestic abuse calls and helps with the woman and they will meet there there and work with the child so it's less detrimental to the child, which was interesting to know how quickly Burlington PD works to interact with DCF and make sure that everybody's involved and safe. But overall it was pretty easy to talk to him and he was super informative and very personable. I appreciated his time. How do you feel, Josh? Learned a lot about DCF, learned about programs that are available, phone number, also learned that there's a program that'll help males that are victims of domestic cases as well. Hope everybody else learns just as much. Thanks for your time.