 Thank you very much. Kelly is unable to be here today, so we are going to do it. Yeah. She OK? She's fine. You know how people have other lives and other things they need to do or whatever in the silly source of that. So we're one of the things that we were sort of looking at in terms of child protection and the lack of their term change reform. And there have been people who have been in the business for a while, people who have retired from the business, who have thoughts. And the first person is William, who's the former commissioner of what was then SRS and then followed by our host, who is the executive director of the Relent Parent Representation Center. We all got a report and to hear more about that in terms of suggestions and areas of concern followed by Christine Johnson from DCF to sort of round out the different perspectives for them. We've got about an hour for that. So I would ask the first two people, Bill and Larry, to keep that in mind so that Christine has time as well. So Bill. For the record, my name is William Young, an opportunity to testify. And I'm going to ask you to speak up because while you're speaking to the microphone, that's only for the copy and that for the people in the back. I can do that. Thank you. My comments this morning are based on my 20 years of experience as a district director and the last year of being as the commissioner of social rehabilitation services that now reorganized to DCI. As well as my work to understand the report of the Relent Parent Representation Center. My own work in the past has driven my understanding of the use and neglect that happens to some of our state's children, some of it horrific as we all know it. Our responsibility is to protect them and to work with parents in trouble. Also known as the Committee Children or the Committee in their homes or the return there. As many child protection systems, actions must not be just the requirements of law, but also ethical standards, fairness, honesty to all involved. And understanding that the most awesome power I believe exercised by any state is the power of separate children and their parents. I know we don't understand penalty, but as a parent, I would still say most awesome power is that the state exercises is to separate kids from their parents. I did that a lot, but it was always with an understanding of just how significant that was when we have to do it. I don't work for the center and was in fact not aware of its existence until Larry Cris about the colony and asked my position about taking the physical position that I did and ultimately took against my advice of an executive director of the not parent representation center. I didn't know if you'd do a grade report or advising Larry about it. I'm speaking to you today about I know concerns and recommendations obviously Larry speaks for himself. Larry did work for me as director of the S.R.S. Licensing Division many years ago. We kept in touch once every maybe two to five years that lunch should catch up. I didn't support his taking the job but he took it anyway. Some months later he asked me to have lunch regarding to talk about his discussions about products he was seeing in the system. I met with him to concern through Troubleson but I told him I was a bit tired. I avoided getting embroiled with goings on in my former agency and as a former commissioner my default position was to support the department and the commissioner. When the report was published Larry contacted me and sent me a copy wanting to meet and discuss it. I read the report I developed my own little list which I think I sent everybody of the seven findings that I thought were the most serious. I found them to be unbelievable frankly. Kids separated from their parents with incomplete investigations with no investigations. Parents coerced into placing their kids with somebody else without a court hearing. Social workers lined in the court and affidavits are providing skewed information so judges lack of due process and appeal to these kids and children are not necessarily placed in custody or it is unbelievable. So I went home and thinking about it realized that in the last couple of years two families have come to me and asked for advice from their experiences and my inquiries matched two of the major findings on my list so it still seemed beyond for me. So I went back to Larry and said I don't believe this. Prove it. Prove it to me that you're not just repeating complaints to the Russian parents trying to avoid the responsibility for their actions. So over the course of about a month of my satisfaction and as continued to do that to this day, while he was going through with intelligence from DCF or to compel records many of these findings don't require that kind of authorities if you have a substation or record activity that makes a particular statement or fact in many cases you can go out yourself and verify whether that statement is true or not and if it's not the conclusions forward. So he's worked very hard not to take anything for granted to be able to demonstrate the truth of his findings. And I found in my discussions that he's also not a chauffeur for the parents. He's quite capable of saying to the same people if you're not going to work, you're looking at the sex offender, you're not going to be able to give you your children a pat. You're an addict, you're committed to going to treatment and you're still using it. Nobody's going to place you as a single parent. Nobody's going to place you as an addict until you get yourself straight. So he's not easily taken in as sometimes people do not tell you the truth. This gets me to my main point this morning. I don't think I need to read you the seven major findings I already said, I'm talking about. But I know that Larry gave a copy of the report to the commissioner and I don't know the results he knows of. Two meetings were scheduled with the former secretary of human services and were canceled with the promise of a third that was never held and never heard from him again. The copy of the meeting there was no acknowledgement. He testified with a couple of committees. He met with several legislators during the session and since then. There's been no action to it specifically addressed but those, my seven concerns or his report that I know of, I had two very likely meetings with representative Pugh, which I greatly appreciate. And of course we're here today as to talk. This has been a topic of discussion since November. To my knowledge, I think I'm the only person in Vermont who's gone back to Larry and said, I don't believe this stuff. You prove it to me. And as I thought about it because it troubles me, the only reason I can think of it that action hasn't been taken is like, people don't believe it. It is pretty unbelievable. So I can't be critical of you or anybody else around action. I didn't believe it. So really my strong recommendation to you today, since it's not very efficient for a large group of legislators to go there individually and say prove it, is to immediately act to find somebody independent of UCF and the administration to go ahead and essentially say prove it. You show me the cases. Because a lot of that work has been, I found, has been done by him. You know, show me how you verify them. I'll talk to the sources myself directly or review them if necessary. Herein I think, which is the usual legislative way of getting facts and matters, I think it only leaves you with what he said and she said is very difficult as a group to ascertain what's really going on. I recommend an independent review, not to the Sparrons Commissioner Schatz or Deputy Commissioner Johnson, who's new on the job, but to her credit has reached out both to myself and Larry independently to talk with him. But these are serious charges. It's just not credible to expect the department to investigate itself or oversee that kind of investigation. It took me about 20 or so hours over about a month. I took Larry's word for some things that you would probably want somebody to go out themselves and verify. You know, for example, there's a, I don't want to take up a lot of time with you, but there's a whole lot of examples of a mother's little kid came home with the bruise and I won't go into the detail about that. You've got it, but you know, nobody talked to the, supposedly it was a study accident. School, that's what she told the mother, played out in a different way than there was substantiation of the child into the testimony for a while three weeks before possible. Larry, she went to Larry. He says, anybody talk to the school? No? What's the nurse? She said, what are you talking about? She heard herself study the letter to me. I saw her, and I guess I kind of moved, and I didn't tell the mother it didn't seem like a big deal. I took his word for it that he talked to the nurse. You would probably want somebody to go out themselves and talk to her verify. So that's really my only point. So it would probably take a little longer than it took me, but I don't think, I don't, I used to think this would take a lot of time, but I don't think it would necessarily. So Billy, you said you have seven recommendations for us? And they're attached to my testimony, which I just got the notice I was not available for the last few days, so I'd have a copy of for the full, my testimony and those. But can you go through those quickly? Okay. Maybe I can just quickly finish up and then go through those with you. I think it should take me about 15 minutes. Ten minutes. Okay. Let's see. I said earlier the power of the state is the most to separate kids and families is the most awesome power that we can exercise in this country, I think, and in this state. We recognize that government power, uncontrolled, unchecked, sooner or later is always abused. I believe that. So, you know, like other states and other areas, we've put in place checks and balances to control that. If these things are true, it means that that system of checks and balances is not working as well as we would want it to. And with the disastrous impact on families, on the budget, and potential liability for the state. Blamance, it was in five already, wouldn't surprise me if there were more. So, the essential step is to immediately act to prove or disprove this. I don't recommend what sometimes is often done, which is to conduct some kind of a punitive review to identify faults and point to the use of punished people. I think we got to this point through a cascading, in my opinion, series of events and decisions, some of which would be on anyone's control, and other decisions made for very good reasons, with perhaps some unintended consequences that couldn't necessarily have been foreseen. And my only exception to that is that if there's instances where people are specifically lying in affidavits to the court, that's a crime a lot of you don't, but that, I don't have time to turn the kind eye to. So, just to quickly end and go to those seven concerns, I was pointing out, there are two of them when I went through these, I can mention two of them, but I think regardless of what you do, they really call for immediate action. The concerns I felt were the, it's a long report and I tried to pull out what I thought were most important. The first one was that there were cases where investigations were not fully completed or not performed, the children were removed, also where parents were forced to place their children somewhere, like if you don't place your children with your mother or with somebody else, I'll have to take them to the custody, but it means kids are removed without a court judge having a little of that thought being done. Second, commissioners reviews of human services for appeals of substantiations where parents are supposed to be given a fair hearing. The numerous instances of hearing officers having private conversations with the DCF staff often the parents don't know about. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but in many cases they don't know what was said, and with no opportunity to rebut it. And there was a Supreme Court case about a year and a half ago, Justice Robinson wrote a footnote to it and said, this action, this has to stop. But it's still continuing and that, I believe, was a common practice almost in many cases there's no doubt about it. There were cases where positive information about a parent was not mentioned in substantiation proceedings where the faculty had to report and show removal proceedings, or where, in other cases, the false statements really misstated things as almost just as bad. If you have a 35-year-old mother who, of course, if you told the social worker you requested a perfectly normal request about a problem with on-call or other drugs, yes, 17 years old I got addicted and became a pest for two years to outlaw other drugs and I got myself recovered from AA. I'm at an AA meeting every day of my life since then, I'm now 35 and I share my local AA meeting, you know, a friend of Bill, she goes to AA meetings and kind of works the program and that's how she's maintained her recovery. What's the app today to say? Mother has a history of drug abuse or substance abuse problems. You know, it creates, you kind of get a sense it's ongoing or off and on. A couple more. Regarding our two-track system, there's lots of cases of social workers threatening parents to apply with family services, assessment instructions of plans that face transfer to an abuse of their own track, possibly be substantiated in that problem with custody. I know that the law specifically says refusal to agree with the plan may not be just by itself a reason for transfer but it seems to me that there's a gap that's being driven through all the time. I was told, I called somebody because of one of the families I was working with, I didn't understand the system just after I left and of course the conversation was describing the conversations with the family or asking for help for my place and this is the person or the position that needs to really understand the system and they said to me, look, it sounds like you've got to get your folks have a line worker, you know, maybe not very good but tell them not to get angry at her or get their face about this or they'll find themselves transferred over the abuse of their own track, it happens all of the time so I believe that. There are instances of children being taken into custody and placed in a foster home but when confident role is we're willing to take care of them and it seems that there's a concern that frequently there's not the attention paid to that that is expected of us. And finally, it seems to me a circle of elegance culture, it's been some little tough cases over the last decade, a bus races then, we're off two out of them parents have seen as the enemy before the investigation was concluded, sometimes to be feared, it's a very dangerous culture in this business because we only substantiated about 46% of the investigations I went to the 2017 DCF report, I think they substantiated 28% of the cases, different systems so it's going to be fair but nevertheless you're dealing with a lot of families that have their kids and in many cases you don't substantiate abuse so it's a, I can understand perhaps how that can develop given the variety of circumstances over the years but it's a dangerous culture. If you have people saying we don't have to do an investigation, we know who these people are but that's a problem and if these things are real the impact on the state's budget is significant and perhaps some of the questions about numbers it gives in custody for example can be seen in a different life if you're able to prove these or disprove them but I really think it's important, I don't see how you can move forward without something to your satisfaction you know, is this, are these things real or not, that's my testimony Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Are you going to get the testimony to Shirley? Yes, yes I saw about in a class last night I apologize and thank you for being so flexible and comfortable. Good morning and thank you on this record, my name is Larry Chris I won't go into my background, I know everyone on the panel I have a lot of miles under my belt so to speak so there really aren't many secrets in this room. In the interest of time I'm going to summarize the testimony that you have a copy of and I think that that summary also includes a couple of things on the front in the first is I want to thank the new deputy commissioner for reaching out to me and agreeing to actually offering to me and I'll note that she is the first DCF manager in three and a half years including the year that this report has been present who has made that offer and followed through so she is committed for that. The second is in all reference to my friend Marshall Paul I'm going to say some nice, not nice things about his program but it has no reflection upon Marshall because he does the very best if he does in the circumstances that he works. Ten months ago we identified 60 problems in the system and 80 recommendations Can I just ask you one question because everyone does not know can you outline the staffing and who is the parent representation? Sure. Parent representation center incorporated so Vermont based nonprofit based out of Burlington operates statewide and has been in operation for roughly ten years now. My predecessor was a woman by the name of Trina Beck who served as one of the founders and executive director and this changed over that ten year period in the early days of the program it staffed with an attorney and a social worker plus a board that was an active board. In the middle section when I first came on board it continued with an executive director, an attorney and social service personnel assistant. I currently am the only full time staff person we have several volunteers who work with me and board members in their capacity as attorneys and social service personnel. Of the 80 recommendations I'm going to focus on one recommendation and that has to do with parent and child defenders. Vermont's current system of providing defense counsel for parents to a lesser extent for children is beyond abysmal. It is terrible and the reason it's terrible is because the payment scheme for contract attorneys who are the people who provide for the most part parent representation pays them too little or too much work. As an example the ABA standard their goal standard for this kind of work is 60 cases a year with social service support. I have yet to meet a contract attorney who had less than a couple of hundred of these cases in Vermont. What that equates to is most of the people that I work with and have worked with for three and a half years and I've engaged roughly 400 to 450 families in that three and a half year period almost never meet with their attorneys other than for a couple of minutes just before they go into court. The majority of these attorneys don't have the time to file motions, they don't have the time to understand the cases, they don't have the time to contest the information that's presented. And as a result the entire system has become sloppy. DCF writes sloppy affidavits, no one challenges them. The state's attorneys don't have the ability to discern truth from fiction when they're reviewing whether to go forward with a chance case. Judges have to work with the information they're giving and if they don't contest it then the judge has to accept it. We get bad outcomes. What we typically get is attorneys who tell their parents because it's the best job the attorney can do, given the amount of time and the resources they have, do what DCF tells you to do and you'll get your children back. That is a lot. It does not work that way. It is not because there are bad people in the system, it's because the system itself is bad. It does not work. And we have great examples now that we can use and we have an opportunity to change this system. Washington State has a system in which there are dedicated parent defenders and dedicated children's defenders. They work with supervision, they work with performance vendors, they work with adequate salaries, and they work with support. Their outcomes are dramatically better than our outcomes. More recently, this year, well, yes, this year the City of New York completed a 10-year, a 4-year study working with 10,000 families using a system very comparable to what it is that happens in Washington State in the system that we have proposed in our report. Those outcomes are, and here's the first outcome, kids who need to be adopted are adopted faster. In our system today kids get adopted. We can't say whether it's faster or slower or anything else. What we know is that our system does not adequately represent the parties and many of the adoptions occur simply because cases have gone on too long. If you go back and look at the file, that's what you find. It's not that the parents didn't do what they were supposed to do. It's not that the department didn't do what it was supposed to do. It's that too much time passed. Why did it pass? Because we have delay after delay after delay. Cases have gone for two years that should have been resolved in a matter of months. We have an opportunity with Federal Governments Change and Social Security Act, Title IV EAP. They are now, the federal government is now going to make new federal dollars available for the State of Vermont to be able to access that money. And for the very first time, that money can be used for the creation of dedicated children's defense programs and dedicated children's defense programs. It's there. It's an opportunity. There are complications. Are you talking about the Family First Prevention? Family First Prevention? Yes. But I will add this. There is a complication that's been raised saying, well the feds want certain things done with the money. When you look closely at the Family First legislation, it doesn't affect this program. You don't have to do this program based on money that's going to be shared with other programs. There is an opportunity here for us at a 50-50 match basis to dramatically improve our system. We will get faster resolution of cases. We will get more accurate resolution of cases. And we will have things that we can actually look at and measure and say are we doing better or are we doing worse? I would be happy to talk a greater length about this. Time doesn't allow in this context. So the second piece of this is in addition to creating those dedicated people to work on the CHEN's cases, those same individuals should be charged with representing parents in substantiation hearings. In today's system any one of you can be substantiated on the word of a UCF investigator and a supervisor. That investigator may have two years experience. Supervisor may have four or five years experience. This system is set up so that you basically have to prove you didn't do it. Not that the state has to prove that they did it. You will be granted an opportunity after the substantiation has been proposed to appeal that to the department. The statute you created gives the department 30 days within which to hold that review. Right now reviews are happening between nine and 14 months after your substantiation. If you are a social worker and you are substantiated you cannot practice. If you're a teacher you cannot practice. If you're a medical professional you cannot practice. Then when you get to the hearing you don't have an attorney to assist you with the hearing. You're provided with a redacted investigation report that usually runs 12 pages, six pages of which are totally redacted. When I review those reports with parents I can't tell you what happened. I can't even tell you what's alleged. I can't tell you what the evidence is. But you're supposed to be able to defend yourself. You then get hearing with the Human Services Board and people look at that and say that's due process. Well it is due process except that it follows the Vermont Rules of Evidence. Any attorneys on the board here who would be able to say just what the rules of evidence are? Not likely. Do you know what it costs to hire an attorney to go to the Human Services Board? Between $5,000 and $15,000 for a viewer hearing. Most of the people we work with do not have those kinds of resources. Now the reason it's important that attorneys are assigned to work, I have taken the first six cases of clients we work with. I didn't cherry pick. I took the first six cases that came forward of people who had commissioner reviews coming up. In three of them I had gotten them reversed. Because the department had no evidence. There was a substantiation. It didn't match the statute or there was no evidence presented. In two of them they have been sent back to the department for reinvestigation because I was able to provide a witness list that said here are seven people who were presented as a witness. None of them were ever interviewed. Or here are five people who were presented as witnesses. One was interviewed but they now had made a statement that what is said about what they said is not true. One I've lost. That one is on appeal. And based on a decision in Washington County Criminal Court yesterday, that one's going to be overturned also. Because there is no evidence that there ever was abuse of a child. These kinds of cases ruin people's lives. There is one client I'm working with who was a state employee, the sole support for five children. She has been substantiated. She's been terminated from her job because of the substantiation. Her children went into custody for a period of time. She had no income. She lost her housing. And guess how she survives today. She's a welfare mother. The substantiation was overturned. But it took a year to do that. Her life is wrecked. This is not helping families. By creating a dedicated group of attorneys who focus on this kind of work it will give people like Marshall Paul a tool to actually be able to effectively represent people on a consistent basis. Because there are some attorneys who do phenomenal work. There are some attorneys here that they've been assigned to a case highlight up. Because I know that they are going to do a very good job. They may not win but they will do a good job. And that's what this is really about. The last thing I would like to do is I'd like to tell you a story. You will see several stories in here. But I'd like to tell you a story. Teenage mother gives birth. The father or described as being overly nervous of DCF as they begin to learn how to breastfeed. I don't know about any of you but I was overly nervous when I got involved with my first child and I wasn't doing the breastfeeding and I was not a teenager. DCF petitioned the court for emergency custody based on nervousness of the mother and the mother's quote unquote long history with child protection agencies. That's what went to the judge. That's what the judge saw. That's what the state's attorney saw. The infant is placed into custody. It's placed in a foster home. A pre-adoptive foster home with parents who had no interest in seeing reunification because their interest was in adopting a child. Mother and father are granted five day a week visitation with the infant which is really nice. They set it's a two hour round trip each way round trip for them to do their visitation five days a week during the winter using public transportation. They do this for seven months. Seven months later at the conclusion of the merits hearing the judge rules that there was absolutely no reason for DCF to have taken this infant from its parents in the first place. That's what the judge said from the bench but it took seven months to get to that point. The reason it took seven months the parents had to fire the first two appointed attorneys because they did nothing except tell the parents to quote agree with DCF do what they say you will get your child back and even these teenagers were smart enough to know that wasn't going to happen. Seven months of separation from their infant. Seven months lost forever solely because a dysfunctional state agency fought a teenage mother appeared nervous while learning to breastfeed and a mother having a long history with child protection. That was a euphemism. Anybody know what the euphemism was for? She had been a foster child. That was her long history with child protection. Attorneys who had virtually no contact with them but they were smart enough to terminate them which they can do under the current system and then they were fortunate enough to have two attorneys appointed who actually looked at the case, realized this is insane, adequately represented them and they walked out of the court with their child but it wasn't a newborn anymore. It was a seven month old child. To our knowledge no one, not a supervisor, not a director or anyone else in DCF found this egregious and never an apology or acknowledgement of what DCF had done. That's my testimony folks. The report speaks for itself. I have hundreds of these stories. You can see three or four of them in my written submission here. The system we have today does not work. There are too many things broken in it but one way to begin to be fixed is to move to the point of giving adequate representation to both parents and children. That's the only thing. It's the only check and balance. There's no other check and balance in this system because there's no one else responsible for it. It's not just DCF. It's the court system. It's the defender general's office. It's the state's attorneys. There is no one in charge of that system. These attorneys can hold the system accountable and they can speak truth to power. That's it. Thank you. I appreciate it. The person who testified before had about eight, had seven recommendations. You have, he starts to say, eight recommendations and you're giving one. The report outlines all of it. Well, you are here to perhaps pick out a few more that you think are... Okay, I'll be happy to point out. There needs to be some oversight body. The system that we have in operation today is a shrouded and confidentiality. And I'll give you a quick example of how that works. If you're involved in a chin's case and you're the parent and your attorneys don't represent you well, or there is information that's provided that simply isn't true, never was true, and because of that, you wind up losing the chin's case and you wind up losing custody of your child. The moment that chin's case is closed, no one has access to that file. If you decide, wait a minute, there were lies that were told that weren't true. You can't get access to your file. The confidentiality was designed to protect children. That's not the way it works. It protects everyone who works in the system. And I know because I've made requests for parent's files and been told, sorry, you can't have them. The law doesn't allow you to have them. There is no way to look at DCF's work except to take DCF's word for it. And any system that is based entirely on the honor system, even if it's West Point, we know doesn't work. It just doesn't work that way. So some kind of oversight entity. There is no way to trap complaints that are available for a body to look at and say okay, there are 500 complaints that have come in. 250 of them are about the same thing. Maybe we should be looking at whatever that same thing is. Our office really serves that purpose. Since the announcement of a lawsuit that had been filed in federal court two months ago, I've received over 90 phone calls from families. I don't mean multiple calls from the same family. I mean 90 different families. Granted, a number of them are people who whose cases, who knows whether the right thing or the wrong thing was done. A few of them I know the right thing was done. But there are far too many who say I've read that lawsuit. That's what happened to us. That's exactly what happened to us. Our attorneys never met with us once. The affidavit, there was nothing in the affidavit that was true. And I can believe that because I've read hundreds of affidavits now. Because as long as the chance case is open, the parents have access to that information. And when we meet with them, they share that information with us. There just is no check in balance. There seems to be no system of accountability within the system because of confidentiality. You can't hold people accountable if you can't look at what their work is. I want to make two comments. I do have some questions. But this is all very familiar. Bill Young was the commissioner of SRS and we had similar complaints about the system. We are a small state with inadequate, inadequate resources to try to deal with some of these problems. This is our staff right here. They report to 180 legislators. We don't have the power to investigate DCF. We don't even have the ability to do it because we had the power. So we look at things and we have to trust the administration, the courts, and our state's attorneys, the defense bar and all to protect people's concerns. I worked in the system for 35 years. Maybe it's longer. I have to figure that out something. You did too Larry. Bill did. It seems to me that we have certain individuals who don't do a good job and have certain individuals who do a great job. When we looked at what started this committee was the deaths of two toddlers. And when we looked into deeply into those deaths, we saw a system that was inadequate but also an office in Rutland to a great extent that just didn't do the things right. You talk about oversight now, but how do we not just create another layer of bureaucracy on top of, to investigate the investigators, how do we not create another layer of bureaucracy that will be the same? We go along, we say, oh yeah, we did a wonderful job. And now DCF is afraid to take kids out of a home when it's appropriate and then the kid dies and we say, oh DCF it's your fault. Ken Schatz, Bill Young. I would offer a solution senator. Thank you. And that is that when DCF believes and it's wisdom that a child is in danger and should be removed they should have to prove it. That prove it in a setting in which the parents are equally represented. So that there actually is a real connection of here is the issue and here is the other side of that issue. Now in an open and closed court in this instance then a judge can in fact look at something and say, okay I've seen this information I don't believe that we should have removed this child. Or this information and absolutely this child should be removed. I would argue Larry, that's the way the system is supposed to work and I'd like to know why it's not working. Rather than creating another bureaucracy. I'm not proposing another bureaucracy. What I'm proposing is we have a defender general office. They have contracts with individuals. That's the problem. The contract system doesn't work. You cannot pay someone as much as $90,000 a year like a great deal of money in Vermont to run a law office. It doesn't work. It just doesn't work that way. So you believe that when it's non-contract defense attorneys that you know like in Bennington there's five or six I don't know how many you have in Bennington. Five attorneys. Five attorneys. One that's full time juvenile. The rest one's full time juvenile. The rest cover criminal. The attorneys that work for the state, they work for the defender general. Right. Is that typically those? We went around, we found that Bennington office was one of the exemplary offices reported by foster parents, reported by people who've been in the system. And I think that there are some areas of the state that work much better. But the reality is that we need to have attorneys who have the time and the compensation and the resources to actually be able to look at each of these cases the same way that I do. I'm one person. I'm one person, but I take the time to look at these cases and will not take anything for granted. You know, show me, prove to me, let me get the information. If you have five witnesses listed, why weren't those five interviewed? That's an easy question for an attorney to ask, but they don't ask it. Because they don't have time. They want to process these cases as quickly as they can because they're not paid by case. They're paid for a percentage of their time. This system just doesn't work. And when you talk to attorneys who are successful at it, they will tell you that they will not take any of these cases because of how much time they do report. Okay. It gets much more complicated. We don't even have guardian-enabled items enough in the system to help the kids who are supposed to be working with the kids. We have an underfunded system and we have a budget that doesn't meet the needs of the criminal justice and juvenile justice system. And you know what, I was in Bennington yesterday talking with judges, defense attorneys, probate judge, everyone, about cuts to courtroom security because we don't fund it or not. And so we've cut the hours so that the average person can't go into probate court right now at, if they were, past three o'clock in the afternoon. They can't get there. It's a system that my frustrations from there is with the budgeting process. Judges, you know, all my judges in Bennington travel from Rotlet. Now we're going to have one travel from Brattleboro. Why? Because we can't get a judge appointed in Bennington. I guess we've got nobody qualified. So I would offer this. The changes in Title IV allow us to double the amount of money that we are spending now on parent and child defenders without spending any more money. I would just add to your frustration, you identify this as the juvenile justice. And I would add that you really are talking about the child protection system as well. And so we are, you talked about judges. We're also talking about the number of juvenile justice. We're saying the same thing but also talking not solely what I'm talking about is not solely the legal profession but you are making some statements that relate to the quality of service provision that is being provided and whether that is. And we know that we have what we call an aspirational caseload size that has not been met and people even argue about that. And we know from the review that you were talking about that one of the bigger issues is community providers and communications. And so across the board we are talking about immense needs and where do we prioritize. And with that we have a question. Actually said a lot of what I was going to say going back to caseloads, I remember Bill Young coming in and I sort of ran to the little bit about caseload issues at DCF. And that for me continues to be a problem because if you have busy people too busy, too much of a workload, then they're not going to go to the witnesses and they're not going to do their job. And so the question is do we plug the whole down the stream or do we go back up the stream and look to see if we should be doing that. Your number one priority seems to be further down where the dam is located. And that's perfectly legitimate as long as the title form funds for e-funds are continuous. If it's a continuous flow we can maintain the system if it's not going to fall apart. I haven't asked my question yet. And I know I'm going to ask you to come in on all of this. And then finally you've listed a whole lot of things and your key steps. And each of those key steps is a part of the system. And so you're talking about systemic change but if we're going to start with systemic change then wouldn't we want to go upstream first and then slowly downstream so that when we get to the public defender the family defender we know what our estimates are. And that is an outstanding point with one exception. It is not upstream where we take people's children. It is downstream when we take their children. If downstream DCF is held to a higher standard of performance you will see less work upstream. Oh more to work upstream because DCF is going to get tired of having cases sent back. And I will give you one quick example of that. I was asked this past week by a family if I would accompany them to a meeting with DCF where they had an assessment. There had been nothing found in the assessment but they were told that because the risk assessment tool rated them a very high risk that they had to have an open family services case which we know will go from three to six months and will tie up resources. So I said they found nothing in the assessment. The answer was no. I said call the district office, ask for the supervisor tell them that you would like a meeting to discuss the legal basis for them requiring an open family services case and tell them that you will have a support person coming and it will be me. A few hours later the mother called me back and said I got a call from the supervisor who said it was all a mistake. There doesn't need to be a meeting because there won't be an open family services case. The reason there wouldn't be an open family services case is because the law doesn't allow for it. In fact the law says you can't do it. But in the district offices if you are found to have no problem then you go through a risk assessment and if the risk assessment says you're high or very high then they open a case. That is contrary to Title 33. It's a workflow creator. That technique was supposed to be used on the front end before you decide not to investigate. If you say no we're not going to investigate this report you should do a risk assessment to make sure you're not making a mistake on the front end. Not on the back end. You have over a thousand open cases now. And you are now going into what you... There may be someone else and this may be part of what the senator was talking about. Whose assessment of when and how the people who work for the state work with families so that their kids are not removed. Maybe different than what you are putting forth. And that's fine. And I'm going to clearly... Hi Brenda. We're a little late so we're just legislative time. We're not getting to you for a bit. Thank you. I appreciate your time. Thank you for your work. I see a lot of holes all along the system and problems and we need to focus on each one. And some of these are one discussions that we had during committee discussion and some of it is in terms of some of the recommendations that both you and the prior witness talked about are not necessarily always but they're all important. Which ones do we do? What is an oversight body? Do we want to have another bureaucracy? Is that a barrier or is that something that in fact can address things? How do we have an independent review so it is... that perhaps is better understood and heard? And where do we put our resources? All our resources with the defender general? What about the families? And what about with the judges? Because I might suggest that some of the issue is not just the defender general but in fact they don't have judges and the delays are that they don't have space, time, energy. I thank you. I would leave with this last note two things. The first is I'm not proposing a new bureaucracy I'm proposing a use of federal funds to bolster the system we currently have, not a new bureaucracy. And the last piece is the difficulty I think for the courts is the same difficulty you have in technology, garbage in garbage out. Thank you. Thank you. Christine. That wasn't my fault I took so long. Look we're out of time. Sorry. I would be not doing use diligence. Thank you Christine Johnson, Deputy Commissioner, Department for Children and Families Family Services Division. I think what I'm going to do is respond somewhat to what Larry and Bill has just presented and then also talk about some other pieces in terms of a child protection oversight update and hopefully can hit on some of the points although I don't know if I can do it justice but I'm going to try it. First I would like to say I have total agreement with Bill and Larry about the impacts of taking a child into custody and away from their parents. It is something that every single one of us who works in the division lives with every minute of every day. It is what causes trauma, if you will for the people that work in our system who go home and can't sleep together. So I want to be crystal clear about the impacts we know the impacts and we take them very seriously. So all of us desire an optimal child protection system and I would take it one step further and say we really want an optimal child welfare system and we know that this division of Family Services is one piece of that system. So because we all have the same goal and that was certainly what drove me to meet with Larry and with Bill and I do have to say I have a huge level of respect for their experience, for what they know and for how they understand the systems. So to that end how do we get there? How do we fix it? And I think largely that is what you are calling upon us as leaders to do and frankly that is a job that we were up to the task. You've heard me say that we need certain things to do this work optimally. We need a new data system. We need adequate staffing and we do know that the 14 positions that were legislated last session are really starting to have that impact. I will share with you our case load data from October 2nd and I will tell you for the first time in several years our case load is finally adjusted under 15 which is what we are statutorily required to do and I'm very happy that that's happening. So you can see from the data that we are adjusted at a case load rate of 14.7 unadjusted and I'll explain what that means in a second is 17.9 How we get to those numbers is we take all the cases, our open cases and we divide it unadjusted means it's just simply the number of workers we have divided by the number of workers in cases essentially and that's how we get to the 14.7 The 17.9 though takes into consideration when we have new family services workers and they're in their first six months. We don't count them as having a full case load. We count them as a half FTE as well as when we have vacancies we count that as a zero. So the adjusted gets us I think to a more realistic perception or reality of what our family services workers are holding. I will tell you that we have been doing our road shows, our visits with district offices and we've gotten through half of them now as of yesterday and we are starting to hear our staff say that they're starting to feel the effects of having additional staff and they're starting to feel like casals are becoming more manageable but what I want to caution us about as well as I was just meeting with Middlebury yesterday and their numbers look fantastic at an adjusted 13.3 cases. What I'll tell you is because these are new positions and they're not fully up to speed they're not necessarily feeling that all across the board and so I do have some level of caution in thinking about where we're getting in their casals. My optimism is that we're getting there in terms of the capacity that we have because when I was hired I focused on three specific issues and I think they were very true for this conversation and the first is capacity and I was crystal clear in my interview and I have been with staff as we've been doing our road shows about how I perceive my job in helping our staff have the capacity to do their jobs and so that is why you're going to hear me continue to say we need a new data system to realize efficiencies and be able to I don't think you're going to have any argument here. I think you need to talk upstairs to others because they keep saying five years and I've been a legislator for more than five years and I think that's right but I think the message is that I think we have to recognize and I've asked staff to send me examples of where they can recognize, where they can realize efficiencies if they had a better data system. As a matter of fact in conversations that we had last week with Don Winstead who's doing consultant work on behalf of the Family First Services Prevention Act he is crystal clear that the data system that we have is going to be prohibited in terms of realizing Family First. So again another example of how we need to do that. But when I think about what Larry and Bill were presenting in terms of some of the issues that we're having in child welfare and our child protection system I cannot stop saying that we need the tools to do the job at the level that is going to help address these issues. So in terms of capacity though it's not just about staff, it's about foster parents, it's about having a continuum of options for youth when they are in their highest needs whether because they are sex offenders or because they are violent or because they are traumatized at a level that we may or may not have services in Vermont to address and so we have to think about this in terms of the continuum. So capacity is a huge issue that I certainly in my role I'm taking very seriously. The second is morale and as all of you know very well we had the two toddler deaths and we had the death of Larry Sobel and do you know very well the impact that that has had on our system and we are I would argue we are still dealing from that death of a social worker in our system is very much alive and well in the minds of every single person that works in our system. So morale is a huge issue. Morale feeds of course capacity, it feeds the ability to retain staff and I want to point out that we have a 25% staff retention rate in Vermont and we are one of the best in New England so other states in New England are staying 65% turnover. We are at 25% which I would not argue is optimal but I do find comfort in knowing that we are despite our challenges retaining people at a higher level than even some states around us. In terms of the third item being safety this is a huge again it feeds morale, it feeds capacity. We have to have safety for our staff and safety for our kids and our families that we are working with. Senator Seusser pointed out security in the building is a very good one because when I was in Hartford last week I was reminded about law enforcement letting us know, state staff know that that building in Hartford is the most unsafe building in all of the town and we have department corrections working there we have department for children and families there and we don't have security at the door and so again these issues continue to kind of weave together to address some of the challenges that we face in our division. I will say though that we are seeing a number of cases of kids in custody drop again for the first time in years and this includes our family support cases and so you know it's hard to know what to make of that. I do hold out hope though that what that means is that the increasing numbers that we've seen over the last several years potentially in response to the opioid crisis we're starting to see that turn around. My hope is that that's a result of the medication assisted treatment that we now have capacity for at the state. Right it's too early to know it's really hard to say but I do think it's hopeful that we have fewer kids in custody. I think in addition to those three things I feel like we, I've said this a lot for a long time we do need to create a system of prevention in the state and I think Larry said it really well that when we're intervening it is not prevention it is intervention and so we have to really think as a system about how we get ahead and how we start working in an environment that has the resources available so that we can start preventing this way upstream that would certainly be the best case scenario. I do want a family and child centered system and there are ways that we can go about doing this and I think that that's, I have to say I don't think that the work to date so far to the work that has been done to date has not been family and child centered but how do we think about what that means for how we move our work forward I'd love to see us include youth and family voice at higher levels and ensuring that we do have youth and family at our tables and we are hearing their voices and hearing their concerns and understanding when things don't go right. I'd also like to see us include fathers at a higher level. I don't think we've done that well here, I don't think we've done that well in the country but really making sure fathers are at the table and that fathers are held accountable and that fathers are expected to be a part of the solution with our families because let's face it they make up certainly 50% of the duo. In terms of the use of our family support cases I know we've had a lot of conversations at least I have about you know should we be involved in cases with families that assesses being high risk and what the message that I have to share with you today is that I think the answer is yes and what I want to share with you is that nationally the country is being held to a standard of states that are considered high performing are states that are using the family support cases the most and what that means is that families children are not coming into custody but families are being worked with as the child remains in the home and so while there's been a lot of debate about whether or not I've heard the word coercion used today I do think it's a fine line and when we're working with somebody who has allegedly abused or neglected a child it's a fine line between how long we work with that child in the family and when does the safety issue arise that child needs to be taken out of the home and so that is a fine line that we live with and it is one that we can continue to discuss and improve upon but I think it's I think that this concept of having our open cases with our family support cases is going to be an integral part of the work that we're doing we know that in New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York City those are three jurisdictions that serve more than 80% of their caseload within home services, 80% and we have gone from I believe about 40 several years ago to right around 500 today and so I think that that's something that we as a system need to really be proud of and think about for every open family case that exists as a child that we have not had to take into custody, we have not had to remove from their parents so I also want to point out that serving families in this way is the intent of the Family First Prevention Services Act legislation and that prevention really is the focus of this new path forward. I also wanted to let you know that we are in the process of forming a workgroup that we intend to have a tri-branch representation in order to really gear up our implementation and planning around Family First. So will that tri-branch include legislative branch? You bet it will, that's one of the tri-branches. I'm just reinforcing that really it's to the point of Tim Decker and voices at the last hearing talking about really the some of the tenants of Family First and thinking about who do we need to have at this table and so we met this week, I met with Jim Forrest and we outlined who we would want to have at that table including our congressional delegation and making sure that we have the federal government voice at that table. What are the number of kids in custody in the moment matched with like Pantry A? In all of them, you are citing the number, I see them in rural in terms of numbers in custody. Percentage for capita, numbers in custody, are we higher, are we lower, are we... We are higher, we're higher than, we actually are one of the highest states in terms of you know I think it's incumbent upon us to understand why that is. Are they not doing, we have more kids in special ed than those states. Why is it... And I think that's some of what the money that I would say the two of you put in the budget that Senator Kitchell did to begin an evaluation and looking at it. But I don't know if we know the answers to those questions. We don't know if they're fundamental to understanding how to move forward. We're either really good or... Well, we're really good or maybe we're identifying kids better and maybe they're out but our outcomes better. Our kids you know, better. I mean we heard last week about the time we met about having an August person in an office. That was three hundred and seven thousand. So you know this... I can't tell you how many times I've sat in appropriations and listened to your problem with IT. It doesn't get anywhere. I am well aware of that because the legislature has supported the administration's proposal that any federal funds related to to match around records has gone to more traditional health care. And that has been our priority. Yeah. We like to point fingers but we have to look at our own. So your point is well taken. I would like to hear at some point either in this committee or in support to other committees what the real numbers are per capita as compared with Maine and New Hampshire. And then a little bit of looking at why isn't that we're taking more kids into custody or fewer kids into custody? Is it because we have more social workers now? I mean you know there's a line about the more cops you put on the street, the more people get arrested, the more people end up in court, the more people end up in jail. Well in the back up to that is our outcomes better. Yeah. In the back up to that is our outcomes better. We're a little different in cops in that we have case workers that have less reported child abuse and neglect has been made. So we're not out looking for business. Business really does come to us. A little bit different you know in terms of that. Yeah but I'm just trying to understand. Sure. And Dick what I just want in terms of what I understand in terms of the beginning of looking at what was put into the budget in terms of people are not at a place where they can be working on it and my hope is that we in November that we can have a progress report on where that contract and where the work is and when and what we can expect. So can I just add one thing to the New Hampshire piece? Obviously they do have a healthcare ombudsman and there's some data that they can share with you about what happened what their numbers were prior to the ombudsman and post ombudsman and if there are other changes that they put in their system. I think it's really difficult to compare systems that are different but if we can get at a couple of things that would be really helpful. Yeah I know. I have a question about the affidavits and I have concerns you know the former witnesses talked about those affidavits really being prepared in a way that shows all of the deficits and there being no kind of recognition that you know there is progress or whatever and I'm wondering how do we improve that process? How does that process how do we get a more, how does a judge ultimately end up with a more authentic sense of the case? How could that be improved in the DCF system? In your view? You know I think it really gets to training and how are we training and my question would be how are we training to write affidavits how are we retraining, are we once as we learn how do we write an affidavit, do we have the type of follow up over time is where I would go to immediately and I do think it's something worth taking a look at and thinking about you know we do want to be a strands based system but I you know I think that involves kind of having a high level awareness of what that looks like all the time so I do think that's something we can think of. And when those affidavits are written and like does that get a review does that get a review beyond just the supervisor like if someone is going to be removed like does that come to your level to look at that affidavit? It does not come to my level and having just hit my four month mark I would defer to my phone a friend but I don't know if you want to address that? Certainly. Thank you. So the facts of the affidavit speak to the reasons why the child is in need of care and supervision and so I think it is valuable to be clear about what is the purpose of the affidavit. Affidavits are written by family services workers and then reviewed by the family services supervisor and many of our district offices is actually a leadership team review that affidavit is then shared with the state's attorney or deputy state's attorney who then reviews that and submits the petition to the court. It is then brought before the judge who then decides whether or not to issue the temporary care order so there's three levels of review before there is an order to remove a child from the home. Thank you. I hear Christine saying that this might be something to look at and I hear you expressing some interest and my knowledge of the SRS family services system is that there's 150 pages of rules and there's probably a format or a template and we could look at that which is getting I want to say into the weeds but it may not really be our role and so maybe we're going to take a step back from that and rather hear for instance from the child welfare training partnership and we may not have time this summer to do that but that put that on the list in terms. I think that's all I have for today. Thank you Christine in front of you. Thank you for beginning with setting the stage in terms of how these varied hard and painful decisions around removing a child are not only for the families which we all know but also for the people who are proposing that recommendation and that is something everybody is going to come with. Is it possible to get your testimony in writing? Yes I am. I'll get you a clean copy. And I think in particular some of the procedures that Mary Beth was asking about that is a good place to launch us off. I'm sorry some of the people that I know in my other life I would be remiss if I did not comment that there is an ongoing discussion of counting and what is the case of their mom and two kids and that's a case. If it's a case of mom and step-parents and grandparents and the neighbors next door and the three service providers that that's a different level of work. There is a question out there as to where in our addressing the findings we are and there has been a question as to whether or not there was the fact that we have not met them all but we are now at a point where we might be fine and so there might be a budgetary impact and so that is why I have been asked to ask Brenda to come. Did you hear that? This is good to meet everyone. I'm Brenda Looley. I'm the Director of Operations for the Family Services Division and it's my pleasure to share with you information about the federal review process within the Family Services Division. And you will get to the point of whether or not we're going to get fined because that is what has been translated and there's a possibility of a budgetary impact. So what we'll want to get to more quickly is what are the findings and where we are. Yes, I absolutely will cover the findings in detail with you. We do not have details regarding whether or how much we would be fine but I'll explain that in greater detail toward the end. Yes, that's right. The federal government, Children's Bureau specifically and so all states have what's called a Child and Family Services Review, that's the name that the federal government has given the review of states child welfare systems and that was put into effect in 1994. Vermont had the first federal review in 2000, another one in 2007 and then the most recent federal review occurred in 2015. Does the federal government contribute resources for that review? We get any money from that. We don't get money. We do have federal participation in the review. So the federal review, this most recent 2015 review, we used the online services review instrument, that's the tool that is used nationally at this point in time for those federal reviews and that tool looks at seven outcome areas and measures a total of 18 different items. So this first slide just gives you a snapshot of what some of those items are to see that it looks very specifically and not surprisingly at areas such as safety, permanency, well-being, you know, measures that are looking at that children are safe, that they're maintaining safety in their homes, that they have permanency, that they have family continuity, they have lifelong connections efforts to ensure that children's needs are being met, that they have the appropriate services to meet their needs. So that's just to give you a sense in general of the kinds of questions that are looked at for those reviews. And I wanted to let you know Vermont is actually the first state in the nation to go through this most recent round of federal reviews. So we did volunteer to be the first state in the nation to go, which is something that we're proud of and it's a review where we chose a traditional review path meaning that we used the federal instrument. The review was done in partnership with folks from the Children's Bureau that came to Vermont and conducted that review side by side with family services staff. We reviewed 65 cases as was required and that was done in Burlington, St. John'sbury and Bennington. Burlington was a requirement. States are always required to have their largest metropolitan area be a site for review. And as is typical of all states, we fail and that's it's intentionally designed that way, that the bar is set very high, you have to pass 90% for each item to pass and the intention behind that is really that the purpose of the federal review is to help states to set goals and achieve those goals. We'll fix the cases. Random. And so we we did pass two items in that first review and we're not giving you services to protect you. So the two items that we did pass are that we have evidence of documentation in place that there are services to protect children and we passed the item regarding placement with siblings. So after that first federal review that occurred in 2015, then states are required to develop their program improvement plan. We developed our plan. The plan is required to lay out what the goals are, what the strategies are to achieve those goals and the action steps. So we wrote our program improvement plan, submitted that and it was approved in July of 2016 and then we went about the business of carrying out that program improvement plan, which we have completed now. So the program plan itself, we had to select out of the total items nine items as our benchmark to pass and these are the nine items that we chose. So this slide here represents Vermont's program improvement plan. So can I just ask a question? Yes. Who are we? So who was involved in writing, developing and providing input to the PIP? So the PIP was written by Suzanne Shedley, who leads our program. A name I don't know. Who don't care about? What are the constituencies? Whose voices, whose information do you seek to keep? So the process basically is Children's Bureau comes to Vermont, sits down with Family Services Division leadership and states these are the areas that you can choose from. Here's the range of percentage to pass that you must put into your plan. So then from there Family Services Division leadership met, reviewed. This is where we pass. This is where we think that we have opportunity to pass based on areas that we've been focusing on to grow our practice and wrote the plan from there and then it's a lot of back and forth between the federal government and leadership to land on something that they would approve. Is the Children's Federal Government and the state? Yes. This power cap, this was identified and then ultimately approved, correct? Yeah. And these nine items I will go into in more detail in just a couple slides to show you for each item whether we passed or not, how we passed and I'll tell you as well so that you know up front, out of the nine items we passed six we did not pass three. So part of the program improvement plan is the states need to actually demonstrate to the Children's Bureau how we will improve our practice and it is required that it is an ongoing review of cases by the states. In Vermont we chose to have a review process that mirrored the process that the federal government required when they did the federal review. Meaning that we continued to use the same review instrument and we used the same random sampling of 65 cases each year. We continued to be required to review Burlington each time as our metropolitan area. So since the fall of 2016 we conducted reviews every fall and spring in four district offices Burlington was always one of them, the other three rotated through all the remaining districts in the state. So I just want to understand the process a little bit. The PIP was created and you have identified these areas that need improvement. What if anything happens within the agency folks to educate the social workers or others that these are areas that need improvement. Do you then have workshops or educational experiences continuing ed of some type so that we're reinforcing I mean you're not just throwing it out there and then doing an evaluation you have to be doing something inside. What I would say is that the review process itself is its own greatest teacher. So workers are interviewed supervisors are interviewed. All members of the case and team are interviewed as part of the process. The reviewers are division staff, quality assurance staff and community stakeholders. And so the process itself requires that workers are preparing their cases to be reviewed. The instrument is applied to the case. The instrument itself has detailed feedback about areas of need and areas of strength that are then shared back with the worker. And then we have ongoing meetings with our supervisors, our directors and our division leadership team each quarter. Here's our outcomes, here's where we're strong here's where we need to continue to improve. So it's actually a pretty robust process in terms of continuous feedback loop really utilizing the interviews and the review results ongoing to inform practice. So with that in mind then where does the review end then if you're doing all of this and the process itself relates to improvement how do you know it's a permanent improvement or it's not just related to those specific cases. So the the bar is high so we have to actually demonstrate strength in a pretty high percentage which often takes repeated reviews of cases. So we didn't pass all six items after one quarter of reviews. It was four or five, six quarters of reviews and continuous feedback to get to passing. So it takes quite a lot to get there. So that's the eight, there's an eight year period that we know. So I see three years a year. That's right three years. I wonder what I heard in her question. Maybe it's because I wanted to hear that in her question. This is happening. Are there the department got feedback in any of your 150 pages of rules and guidelines and any changes are there new or different trainings that are offered to, I think that's part of what you were talking about. And that's a yes or no. Yes and so and I can go through the six areas to give you a sense of what was looked at. If you would like that's, I have six slides, one for each item and the end is a summary of some of the broader areas of change that we've implemented as part of the program improvement. And what's not on the slide we want to know about is what are the potential part of the process is that when you don't pass the three after the program plan there is a possibility, that's my understanding but there is a possibility of a federal fine. Yes and so we need to know what that is, what that possibility is and I realize that you may be in negotiation or things like that, or we're first to advocate but this is all new to us. New information to us as a legislative branch shown it. And it's new to the nation and so I think the bottom line there is the federal government has not yet provided us with any detail regarding what we find or how much. Well I imagine there's something in the process that says you could be fine up to a certain amount. There is something in the process that says you could be fine there is not specificity regarding the amount. So the first area is the timeliness of initiating investigations and reports of maltreatment and this is an area that we passed and this is really about that if we're conducting a child safety intervention that it occurred timely or if for whatever reason couldn't occur timely that we properly deduct it to 5. I understand what this means. 86.9 passed. Are the 65 cases that they looked at? Correct. And that means that 13.1 did not pass. Yes Yes and what it means is that right that we had to have documentation All of the 65, 13 13% didn't pass. If I'd gotten that in college I'd have done it a lot sooner. Can you add other appropriations? The second area is an area that we did not pass which is risk and safety assessment and management and so this one really looked at So this is an area that was looking at the initial risk and safety assessments. Were they completed and documented in the file? Was there documentation of ongoing assessment of safety and risk in the home? Was there safety and risk assessment documentation in case notes and then are there safety incidents and concerns that indicate they were addressed in a safety plan with the family as appropriate and being monitored throughout the case So that's a lot that's pretty broad. I will tell you what this one really boiled down to for us is that in our ongoing practice in our case notes were our case notes were specific in reflecting the ongoing assessment of safety and risk that that worker was doing during those ongoing home visits. So it's a quality assurance issue with regard to appropriate documentation. I'm just going to make an editorial comment. That many times that does not reflect that we didn't try to protect the child It's stupid. I understand why you're doing it This is documentation. It's become that way These people that are doing this ought to go out there and work with some of those kids and families and see how well they do in keeping track of what they just saw when they got out of there to write their case notes. I'm just frustrated that it's easy to stand here and criticize but it's very difficult to do that job and these kids are much tougher today than they ever were. The kids that I worked with were much easier than they are today. I don't think I can do it today. I appreciate that we're trying to do this but I think we need to recognize that the federal government needs to recognize I don't get me going. Thank you. I just want to recognize these are case notes. It doesn't necessarily mean we're not. I don't want anybody who sees this on whatever you're televising for and think that it means that we're not doing risk and safety assessments and management with kids. It means that somebody will write their notes down correctly. In most cases and the challenge is back to the things that Christine mentioned in terms of what were some of the challenges in the system overall which is a number of cases and things like that and at the same time without documentation of what I leave and someone else takes it up or when there is a record sharing but you're right. It's totally right. This doesn't necessarily reflect it is a proxy that the federal government has said. Right. So the next area is placement changes. We pass. This means the case notes were correct. The next one's better. Moving on. Permanency placement stability. We didn't pass this item which is a very important item and then next we looked at on your permanency goal this one looks at in terms of this one we did not pass 53%. So this is looking at initial case plans are completed within 60 days and then permanency and concurrent goals. This one we primarily did not pass because we did not have the initial case plans completed within 60 days. We know we have a quality assurance work to do in terms of more timely completion of the initial case plan which again relates to workload. Is it possible to do it within 60 days given what I feel is the case load? No. I would say that case load challenge is definitely playing to this. It's a 60 days of federal requirement. There's federal language there and then we also have state language and state statute language and policy language and some of it is wanting to make sure that the family knows as soon as possible what are the areas that have been identified to address. And what I might say is that this also then connects to somewhat what our first two in a different topic people were talking about in terms of delays when a good portion of family service workers need to spend time in court and when they're either waiting or things like that then if they're there they can't be somewhere else. It's also in our non-court involved cases so our family support cases which is an area again it's a valuable quality assurance area to shine a light. How can we ensure that we have more timely case plans for families and so we are certainly working actively on that. I think we say that 41.4% passed over here we say 53% did not pass. Because it did not pass of the three ones that well I know why is that well because on the did not pass only 43% passed and this one 47 passed. And it's a different benchmark each it gets confusing when I read it we're saying 41% passed that means 60% roughly didn't. Over here we're saying 53% didn't pass that means 40 something didn't. Right so it's a different benchmark the federal government sets a different benchmark for each item. Probably something Congress will set there. I can tell you're not going to learn from Congress. I think this is well stood. I probably should have explained more clearly from the beginning. When we did the 65 cases reviewed with the federal government. I got it but it just doesn't you know like what are they I didn't know. They set benchmarks that in theory were achievable so what would it take for us to have incremental improvement to the standard. The new standard. So this next item we passed. This is achieving reunification or permanency and this one looked at our concurrent planning efforts and basically that we're achieving permanency through reunification within 12 months or through adoption within 24 months. Which I'm sorry is it totally ridiculous time span for so much of what I mean talking about a family who is engaged in some serious hard work a year might not be enough time. That does not necessarily mean that the child could not be returned safely and thrive in the family thrive just because they haven't. Whatever address fixed all of their the issues that have gotten in the way right and I think the federal adoption say families act gives us the opportunity to say that you know reunification needs to occur timely children need to return home or the goal needs to change to adoption if that child has not returned in 15 of the past 22 months the child the goal needs to change to adoption unless there are compelling reasons why not and I would say I would offer good that some of those compelling reasons is that the community service providers who are doing some of the work to assist families have either waiting lists or aren't always able to meet the demand that they have. Yes and the goal is not 100% in this item for that reason so there is I think allowance for a range but then there's also a measure so that we are paying attention to timely permanence and what the barriers to that are and then the well-being item so this one we passed and this is looking at that we have the documentation of the initial and ongoing assessment to ensure that appropriate services are in place and so this one I think to some degree speaks to your point is really making sure that we're looking at are we providing appropriate services to families so that that timely permanency can occur and the next one we passed on the case planning that we have documentation that the child and family were involved in the case planning that the evidence supports that they understand the case plan and what's required and that the information through the interview process of the review was considered in terms of whether that child and family were involved in developing the plan and in that process so this is an item that we did pass. Congratulations. Thank you. Go a little longer and then case worker visits with the child that we passed and this is the visitation that monthly face-to-face contact with the child and that there was evidence of documentation that the family services worker had private audience with the child to discuss the goals and assess the services and supports that are needed. We did pass that item and case worker visits with parents. That's our third one that we didn't pass. Yes. There it goes. Did not pass and this is parent-child contact regarding regularly including engagement with non-custodial parent making ongoing and concerted efforts to identify, locate and engage the non-custodial parent and that is an area that we certainly are continuing to shine a light on for quality assurance purposes. This is just a question going back to the benchmarks. If we were to look at what the benchmarks were for each one of these, do we have an idea of how well we have passed? Right. Do we have that information? Yes. Yes, I can certainly provide more detail. What that would give you is after the original federal review here was the percentage for each area and then here's the benchmark that we set for improvement. We also have for all 18 areas. So is that something that's on your web page? The full report, I believe it is. There's full detail in terms of percentage in each area. Just a question on item 15, case worker visits with parents. Can you speak to just very briefly the underlying reason why we didn't pass that? Yes. So there's the household from which the child was removed to refer to as the custodial parent and then there's the household if there's a non-custodial parent that we also need to have monthly face-to-face contact with and we may not have identified that individual, that individual may not live in Vermont and so efforts to identify and engage the non-custodial parent is a challenging area and so really wanting to continue to grow our practice in that area. That speaks to I think what Christine said about she was father engagement. Absolutely. And the father engagement not only the non-custodial parent but the entire paternal extended family that could be a resource to the child is a vital area that we want to continue to grow to our family finding efforts. So this speaks to your earlier question. This is an area of kind of a summary of actions that we have completed as part of our program improvement plan that was submitted and accepted by our federal partners and so this looks at we have implemented a pre-case load training requirement for all new fathers so family services workers do not receive a case load now so they've completed foundations and that includes classroom online and shadowing. We've implemented our structure decision making tools. We did a substantial effort to train and retrain and revise all of our structure decision making tools which are all the validated tools that help to drive consistency and quality in decision making in the practice. We've implemented substance use screening capacity in all 12 districts now so we have lung substance use case managers that go out with our front-end workers. So these are lung substance use case managers that are screening parents where there is a known or suspected substance use issue. They actually go out with that worker that first knocked on the door. They are there to answer any questions about substance use and they have a bridge from the screen to the assessment. Yes we now have them in all 12 of our district offices so all front-end interventions if there's a concern that substance use could be an issue they're right there side by side with the worker and they've actually achieved 80% success in engaging that parent in treatment. Is the screen a chemical? Is it like your analysis or is it screening? No it's the uncope so it's five questions and if two out of the five questions is a yes then they get referred on to an assessment and then if the assessment indicates treatment then that lung substance use case manager is facilitating engagement in treatment which could be helping with transportation answering questions so it's been a very successful model. I'm just curious as well about the screening method. Yep substance use screening. Continued focus on our staff safety policy and the role of our staff safety manager. We've implemented a new policy for our conditional custody cases. We've had a substantial expansion of the Beckett support and stabilization program which is so that is wrap around supports a 90 day bridge so any youth that is in a high end placement so residential level treatment it's a bridge to help those youth to return to the community and it's a program that we I would say have incredible success there as well. That includes kids in residential care at Beckett? Yes it targets all of us. I think that's all so Beckett is helping you to get kids out of their program and all of our programs. As a conflict of interest I would flag that as a conflict. Beckett you contract with Beckett to place kids, right? We place kids in a Beckett facility but we control whether they go in or out. And then we hire Beckett to help get kids out of when we're stepping them down from residential care they provide a wrap back in the community and it's for all of the residential programs. I find that to be a conflict personally so I'm just calling that as I see it. I think that we in government need to be careful about who we're the same people that are providing the residential treatment are providing support in the community. Let me ask this question about that when the child is placed in the Beckett home there is a plan for that child and the plan includes moving back to the community is there a time frame for that included? It's not necessarily a conflict that they want to keep. I just want to understand it. In the two minutes Brenda has left and she's done a fabulous job of being given less time than she was originally given can we have our committee discussion and let her go through the presentation. We do have an offline conversation about that at any point. Just finishing the list we have our qualitative case review process we've implemented our structured decision making reunification assessment tool we revised our case plan we've put in place a consistent statewide process for assessing potential foster homes we've implemented our statewide foster home recruitment and retention plan that's our diligent recruitment plan That just began correct? For the past year and a half we've been developing our diligent recruitment plan and we have been piloting it in three districts and we are now rolling it out across the whole state and we could certainly provide that plan to the committee as well if you would like and then we've implemented a method for tracking our training records so that's in place now as well So the PIP ended September 30th as I mentioned before we were the first state in the nation to complete our program improvement plan and the Children's Bureau will issue a letter soon regarding their final determination on our achievement of goals. Did they negotiate and send back or is this My understanding is that they will determine a certain percentage and issue their determination I don't believe it's a negotiation. Okay so this is when we're going to find out if we're going to be fined If there's any financial repercussions for not meeting all of these Now are PIPs in general a new thing So in the past if a state after their program improvement plan and I'm not saying we're not but in terms of what we know in the past have states been fined My experience is that there has been discussion of being fined I'm not aware of states being fined but I know that currently when we have met with Children's Bureau they have stated to us in this most recent round that states would be penalized if they did not pass In those discussions when which were informal and not what is the range or did they just literally say you could be fined or did they say you could be fined from $10 to a quarter of a million dollars So they have said that it would be a percentage and they don't know what the percentage will be yet but I was a part of a meeting at one point there was an anecdotal for example kind of a statement $10,000 per item that we don't pass So it might be a percentage or one or two percent of the federal money that the feds give us for My understanding is it's just a fine per item and they have not yet told us what the amount would be they have speculated with us So when we can take that fine and invest it into it make improvements in our system I'm kidding I'm going to ask a question when you get that letter do you think you could share Do you have permission to share that letter with the legislature Can you share it with your families I'm very comfortable telling you that when we get the letter we will share it with you A meeting of both timing and place of the meeting for the next two meetings for the two November October 31st October 31st because the state house is shutting down and I'll send an email out to everybody about this but we're all being costumed the fourth floor okay so the my understanding is after this meeting we have two more meetings do we have three more meetings I have that we are meeting October 31st and November 21st so we only have we have two more meetings and the suggestion a suggestion slash request has been made that rather than me ten to two or three twelve to four this is on Halloween and November 21st and this is a request made from a couple of the individuals who either travel far or have other employment that perhaps makes it hard okay and Kelly has been told for the first one and that helps her as well and I live in a condo so kids don't come to the for Halloween okay so our final two meetings will be in the fourth floor of the tax bill then and it will be from twelve to four so please send an email out and I'm going to assume that we can bring our sandwiches to the tax building okay so that is that NCSL has sent me a cause I'm on some committee but sent me information they're having a webinar on the financial aspects of the NCSL family first stuff and so I was just going to send that out to our community if people are able to do that or not but just to let folks know I have it somewhere but send it out so when I find it I will send it or yesterday good afternoon yes it's November 13th at 1 p.m. eastern on fiscal issues related to family first prevention services and especially given the comment suggestion proposal from Larry that our use of some of this money is for this whether it is or isn't I can also send you information specific to that but so and Ken I don't know if your office needs it, wants it or whatever NCSL is having a webinar on fiscal issues related to family first prevention services yes November 13th I'll forward this can I forward this to staff and legislators but I just want folks to sort of know that Senator Sears isn't here but I want to get back to it our first meeting various people were interested in maybe to wait for congressional delegation around this federal legislation and how it really doesn't quite some of the requirements don't quite work for small rural states and I don't know if we feel like that's something that we have got enough information that we're okay that we want to do something or whatever but I don't know if you have any thoughts I think it might be a good idea if we did and I think can you help us so Ken would you work with Bryn who's not here right now in writing a letter from not from you this is the ghost writing in terms of some of some of their concerns and challenges and then and then Bryn can give it to us ahead of time and we can change it and change it we're glad to get that going I doubt it you want to maybe some of you went to Woodside as we did and I didn't know if there was anything around that that you needed to know or whatever there's a lot going on right now in looking at the facilities and the programming needed it might be useful to have an update from commissioner Schatz don't worry about today right now in depth but an update on Woodside where it is and what planning what's going on I think we did just that we had a really terrific time going through meeting the staff talking with the staff learning about their programs and then having lunch the kids actually took us through the facility and then shared with us what they're doing and their next steps and then some of the tensions that exist between decision making between parents and kids when next steps are being designed so that was all very useful to me but it also gave us kind of a sense of the things that we can do the things that we can't do what we should do so we got an update just to press your memory we have a report due January 15th and so I can give you a status update in terms of where we are on a range of issues and what's really helpful is to really give us some case studies what's going on with some of the kids where are the real problem areas and what are the areas that we can provide what services can we provide and what we can't provide what else first of all as Jim said we took the tour and Schuyler came with us and he was the absolute cat's meow the boys loved him he knew all the Chicago music and he played pickleball with them in the gym which for a good 45 minutes we heard from parents who have a child there I don't know the piece I was left with was this very difficult decision of DCF wanting to get the child into a program that we don't have in the state that is far away and the parents wanting because of attachment issues to be local so it really it was kind of a microcosm issue of all the voices and factors at play and how you weigh those I was of the understanding that when the clinical director left they were no longer continuing with this therapeutic environment but that is not the case they're fully still operating that and running it so that was good to see and I would say lastly the kids kind of leaned over and said to us our portions are twice as big for this lunch because you're here they got a double helping they were very excited about that so it was a lovely day we were there for almost four hours so it was a great great experience I think it was a little update on which side in terms of the planning and where we are on that and based on what we had talked about and heard and questions we had last meeting is to get some more some more information perhaps from outside the state or whatever in terms of what does different models of Ombudsman advocate kind of thing and that would be next so we're focused so much on intervention and treatment especially we can talk about families and disarray could we bring in some folks who are working on prevention programs like the after school program that has been demonstrated to be so effective maybe just talking a little bit about ISLAM as the model that has served a comprehensive model for prevention and changing culture they don't have to talk about what they're doing right now I think that's more appropriate for our committees but I think just globally what's going on with that model looks like I don't think everybody has heard about it have you heard about ISLAM I heard that there is some new information around funding and where they're trying this in a few communities in Vermont that after school got some significant funding so it would be interesting to know what Tia's up for what's coming up what I might suggest is putting a rehab button is perhaps start also talking about prevention maybe that doesn't fit in here but we did create a position to be administrative I'm not quite sure if anyone's been hired or where we are she the person who's in the health department using this secretary's office that's the one we're looking for yes she's the trauma person we thought that was the same sorry but if you talk about prevention at our last meeting you would express some interest in hearing more about the sustained home visiting proposal and I just want to ask if you want to have a presentation I'm certainly glad to help facilitate that if people wanted to get what we can do with this this will be challenging but whether it's Brena and the Iceland or other kinds of things people were here last week now escaping me doing something with I think through Dartmouth but in the white river with Easter Seals what I might say is that we could offer those three people about an hour I missed the Woodside discussion but that's fine is that on a future agenda if people went to Woodside not this time but I went in the spring and what grew out of that was a suggestion that we have an update on where things are in the future plan does that make sense and I wanted to know did anybody bring up hearing from Judge Greerson, Marshall Paul James Pepper about the response expressed by Larry and Bill Young we haven't done that but we can add that to the agenda so that I would like to know their response as well as obviously Kent or if somebody from DCF what is the response to their report and their recommendations so response from the other would be the state's attorneys might I suggest that Mr. Christ has had his opportunity to share his concerns I believe I was just pointing out that you were writing down who and I said that three of them are here and the other one is James Pepper I think that's it I wasn't trying to get them to talk I'm giving you a grade you've been doing it for 20 years and we're getting younger and younger we do have something that we have to do in the sense that we were the committee of jurisdiction there's some kind of reach up report we actually put it on the agenda for today and I was informed that the reports not due until the 31st would you be ready on the 31st we have two meetings left which of those two meetings will you be ready to come I'll adjust to your schedule to my staff in terms of if you want us to be ready for the 31st I expect we could do that that might be helpful because at the last meeting we lose Senator Shears and so if there is anything that reflects actions or comments that this committee wants to make even though I guess we don't make reports anymore we could talk about what we're losing today we should talk briefly about whether there are any legislative recommendations we as a committee want to make I want to say our next meeting is full I'm going to say that based on if we're going to do woodside planning, child advocate the reach up that would be five things woodside, child advocate, reach up, prevention, response, and then talk something probably you can do reach up the last the last meeting that would be great because that's I mean reach up is important but it is not as related to the things that we are doing right here in terms of legislation do you want an update at that time on SNAP as it affects children huge I have one other right Representative Kelly I can't pronounce she's not here but she and I are trying to meet with some people at the 31st meeting but we're unsure of what time we're meeting we're meeting 12-4 we're meeting from 11-1 we're meeting from 11-1 we were trying to set up a meeting regarding the opiate response so she and I decided that we weren't sure it would be meeting at 3 or 11 is that in the westman one out again no actually representative because she has to come a longer distance than Senator Westman who has good ideas and he has other people I never would do that so we're going to have Bryn do the 60 page report Bryn why are you out we have the Commissioner of DCF has offered he was volunteer if you recall in one of our first meetings and actually Senator Sears brought this up we were sort of concurring wanting more information around how the idea of the family's first prevention and love the goals some of the things that are out there for small rural states don't seem to fit like we don't have big institutions how many of our foster homes actually have six kids and so we decided that we did want to write a letter to our congressional delegation and e-volunteer to to help in writing that letter and providing to work with you in writing a letter from us that you could then buy actually buy the 31st so that because this is a minute Senator Sears spearheaded so that we could discuss and make as much of the final decision about it on that meeting that would be great that's in lieu of the 30 page report it'll just be a 30 page letter okay and then so letter and we actually have an agenda and I'll get it for the next week and we're going to be, we've changed the meeting times for the last two meetings from 12 to 4 and they're all going to be in 4th floor of the tax building because of Steakhouse things thank you moving right along because I know that we aren't going to lose Senator Westman at 2 so thank you for the record Brian Pearson Chief Superior Judge Peggy is writing you a handout that the committee may have received for the last time these are the fiscal year ending July June 30th this year numbers for all of the June 11 related dockets I've also attached a single page that was supposed to show all of the guidelines but as I looked at the exhibit that you have apparently when I printed this I left off two columns being the total columns so I will send a new document to you electronically that will tell you all of the categories that are missing yours ends at Delinquency there's then youthful offender audience and then there's a total for each committee certainly as it relates to actually a couple of them these do have the totals so I'm not knowing exactly what the committee is looking for let me just give you I guess a big picture of the guardian and lighting situation what you have in front of you represents all of the guardians the one we have is not complete I apologize so the chart in front of you that some of you have and all of you will have represented all of the guardians appointed in the various juvenile doctors those are the guardians two sessions I believe was included in budget for additional staff and training of guardians and we're involved in that process now to expand the training and development of guardians Rob can fill you in on the details of where that stands but we certainly have made some significant progress with the funds that the legislature allocated to increase our staffing in these dockets these dockets the individuals are recruited and trained specifically for these dockets they and we follow the CASA national standards and in our practice and that not to get too far into the weeds of the legislation but that's why one of our proposals last year was to change the name of the individuals working in these dockets in front of you to CASA as opposed to guardian and lighting and I'll explain the difference but you should be aware that these folks are trained according to those standards and always have been trained because nothing new it's just a basically a change in the names what we're proposing I'm distinguishing these dockets and these guardians from guardian ad litems that we use in the domestic docket and the probate court we have seen a significant increase in demand and probate court over the last four or five years that coincides with the increase in the impact of the opiate epidemic impacting clearly all of our dockets one way or another but probate court has seen it because a lot of individuals find themselves folks my age in circumstances with grandchildren that are going into probate court usually to begin with voluntary guardianships of their grandchildren because the parents are impacted by the opiate epidemic proceedings generally are uncontested where they become problematic is a few years later when the parent feels they've recovered to the point they want their children back and their grandparents resist and so that's where the contested here has come into play and that's where we've seen an increase in need for guardian ad litems in those proceedings we don't have any guardians specifically trained for that docket and because of the need for them in this docket because of the training we receive we restrict the other and the domestic docket divorce from using these guardians because they are not trained in those dockets number two these folks are trained specifically for guardians that are ending up primarily in the CHIMS docket but they're used in other juvenile dockets help me CASA and CASA standards or CASA they do is or the training they receive is significantly different than what perhaps in other states or whatever the GAL is in domestic and other things because you're saying you want a name change to reflect the different roles and responsibilities and maybe I've lost something here you then went on to talk about probate and you said probate cases were increasing and one of the exemplars that you were using was opiate more people rather than involving the state have involved their families and so would the CASA people then be assigned to those cases in probate even though the issues may be very much the same and where there may be concerns that the placement of my giving my child to my aunt, uncle, grandmother was let's say maybe I wasn't totally on board with that but the alternative I felt like I had no alternative and so the difference is when I say generally no it's because of the demand in these doctors for the guardian adelaide it's because of the demand in these doctors that is a priority in our system in juvenile matters they have a priority over all of the cases and because there is a specific structure the CASA train guardians are trained for this process so what you're saying is that the numbers of cases in probate court that really relate to a family who placed their child with a relative because of perhaps parenting challenges those numbers in the various counties are less than the chins the short answer, maybe perhaps I should say the longer answer is that we recognize when I say generally no there are some times when a CASA trained guardian will be used in the domestic or the priority court but we try to minimize that because of their need in this target and so when I have to say no I do it collectively but I sometimes have to say no you can't do so you are the one who assigns not you who runs the program somehow the problem cases end up coming to me into both of us who is making these decisions as to who is the and the GA has and the CASAs we are talking volunteers, trained volunteers, no question the CASA trained or not is a volunteer who is managing where these people go based on their skills except in some cases you are making sometimes the question will come from a guardian coordinator within a region to say the judge in the domestic dog has tried to assign a CASA trained guardian to a case and so what we what I have explained to the judges and the problem is that that judge should reach out to the coordinator and determine first of all if their individual case loads allow them to consider taking on for instance a domestic case and if so is the guardian comfortable in taking on a case that they haven't been trained for their role in some respects is similar in terms of trying to provide guidance but they don't have anywhere near the resources that individuals working in the juvenile dog can have in other words when you have a guardian in a juvenile proceeding there are attorneys for both parents and child, you have DCF, you have therapists, whatever the family needs in one form or another they are there and the guardian is working as part of a team when they are put in a domestic dog well over 50% of the domestic dog is self-represented individuals and so when we are asking someone to get involved in that dog they are pretty much on their own it's a totally different role the title may be the same but what they have to do and what they have to work with are totally different and so just recently for instance I had it of course there was a judge who was assigning chins if you will guardians to a domestic dog and I said you know we can't do that unless you go to the coordinator because what I heard from the coordinator this came through Rob to me was that the individual assigned one of them for instance had only been a guardian in this docket for a year and did not feel that they were prepared to take on a case of that nature and felt they didn't have a choice and another person said my docket is so full that I can't take on any more cases so there are situations where we will use them but we want them not just the judge to select someone or appoint someone we want them to work through the coordinator to see if we can identify someone thank you I realize I have a good variety of similar information I apologize, thank you when you get into the domestic docket and the probate court over the years you know have relied on individuals to perform that role of guardian but it's hard to tell what the demand is I would be the first one to say that any contested case be it domestic or probate without a guardian there for everyone so it's not that we're making light of the need what we're trying to do and what we have been doing over the last few months and we're going forward with it is to try to determine the demand in that probate court so we can determine how many guardians we need to be recruiting specifically for that docket my reaching out to the probate judges really at this point a lack of data that I could come to you today and say that we need money for more guardians in the probate court of the domestic docket and this is going we just don't have that data but we're embarking on a project now to try to determine what that demand is and part of the problem is the best example I can give you is the domestic docket for instance when I sat in Burlington it had become part of the culture up there that experienced attorneys in the domestic docket would be willing to take on the role of guardian in another case and that's who we rely on but that's because of their experience in that docket and so judges in that docket are used to knowing that there aren't guardians available so they don't ask, they don't expect people knowing what that demand is is difficult and that's what we've got to do to really explain to you and the legislature what the need is if I wanted to understand why Wyndham County has in that period of your report Wyndham County had 205 chins abused and neglected kids Bennington County and the other side of the mountain similar size county without an interstate highway had 97 how would I find out why those two counties would be so Wyndham County has 100% more going back to Larry Chris testimony earlier have we got a bigger problem than Wyndham County than Bennington or is Bennington sending them to probate court what is going on, why would that be and as a legislator I don't know how to dig into these questions but I would think that one of the groups who work with this on a regular basis would be asking why, how could that be how could you be dull did somebody, you know, I mean they're in the same state, they're divided by a mountain I know brother bro's rather tippy but they use a lot more drugs than they do on the other side, a lot of them talk to Senator White about that, but now seriously that stands out to me and I as a legislator have no idea how to get to the bottom of what is going on we deal with the same thing in the judiciary, you know in the adult system as well, you have cultural differences from county to county and you know that's one of the problems that I know you're trying to deal with but doesn't that stand out to you as something rather odd, there's no question I wish I had an answer, but how do we get the answer why, are they doing it better over there or are they doing it better over there this has been the topic of the entire, to me anyway this problem and we a little state with a very small legislature, I can just see somebody in Congress having 50 people looking into this problem but seriously I don't know who's responsible but obviously that's a question of anyone involved in this process we have a hand from the audience I just want to I appreciate the question, I wish I had the analytic capacity to look deeper into those issues that exist all around the state levels of differences in a variety of ways and some of the data the court provides is helpful I am hopeful that the UVM study that we discussed earlier that's looking at entry rates will also look rather than just broadly as a state, you'll look at the geographic differences and help us understand the answer to your question do contract lawyers yes both counties have a staff office and both counties have conflict contracts so that's not the problem well I mean it may be a problem but it's not our experience is that it typically has to do with practice in a district office versus practice in another district office and the only way that anyone can find that out is all respect due respect to Ken because he has a big system to manage is you have a group of people maybe it's the UVM study they go in and they have access to the case files they pull them and they look to see what really happened in this case that's the only way you can find this out but because of confidentiality no one in the system gets to look at it that's the problem it's sort of like asking Sherlock Holmes to solve a mystery but he has to be deaf dumb and blind again I think in order to make the system work we have to understand what we're doing I mean we don't have do we have 14 different in this case 12 different systems dealing with abuses and what so it would probably take a special analysis a requirement we could ask for a special analysis to be able to go into the files in the individual offices and then to have specific criteria that we're looking at so that you can come out and say these are the reasons so one of the questions that's really important is how many of the kids in Bennington County are shifted to the probate court regarding ship issues versus in Wyndham County maybe it's different there I don't know maybe that is part of the UVM study but it's UVM structure so we can do that but can they go into the files the answer to that is yes we have the capacity to then subject to confidentiality agreements to allow researchers to look at our files that's not a problem the issue I think we'll have to interview correctly identified if I heard it correctly I don't determine the scope of that particular project the amount of money exactly what they'll be able to do is certainly a different question I don't want to belabor I don't know if that wasn't why you were here I think it does point to something that we really need to find the answers for now maybe in the next 6 month report it might be somewhat different but we've been looking at Franklin County right now they're not but Franklin County was close to Chittenden County in terms of number of years before a few years ago not even not a few years ago less than only a year ago I think the only to get that more it was very recently on one of the terms I handed out it shows for each of the counties so you can see where they were the total is a lot it was somewhat behind Chittenden but it's always high what is the population of Franklin County I know our county is like 137 Franklin's so that's well in this window it's pretty high I was wondering if we could allow Brian the opportunity to complete their presentation as I said you may have specific questions for us I just wanted to make sure that the committee had the current figures for these loads of the various types the guardians that we use in this these juvenile dockets and to make sure that you understand if you have questions about the difference in the role they play in those other dockets where there's no question that said there's a demand for them we've got to do a better job of training and recruiting in those dockets but we need to have a better sense of what is the demand how difficult is it to find a guardian to get these volunteers and then to train so maybe you could talk a little bit about the turnover rate and how you identify people and how they come in I know I did it years ago but I remember how I was pulled into it by a friend who's an attorney for the record I'm Rob Post I'm the program manager for the and currently we have 336 active volunteers working from our own mission docket recruitment of these volunteers is challenging beginning with the fact that we have a small population state to begin with and then whittling that down to people who are have the time to do the job and have the capabilities and temperament and all those things that go along with being a good guard at Lido makes that even harder train new volunteers we recently embarked on a branding campaign through partnership with the national cost association we applied more grants and funds to do some advertising to bolster our social media presence and our website materials and that is bearing some fruit but we have currently 12 guardians that are ready to be trained who will be attending our next training which will be in December and our applications are also up we had 15 in just the last 2 weeks which is actually quite high and a good sign so hopefully bring those people on as soon as possible and we just completed training with 6 new guardians who are now back in their counties mentoring in their respective courts that's how we go about recruiting them in all sorts of different ways like I mentioned we do advertising and recruiting from the administrative level from our office in Montpelier mostly radio advertising and things of that nature the jail coordinators as part of their job duties is to recruit locally and that just like every other thing else in Vermont really varies by county as far as strategy really depends on the county sometimes it works to go to co-op and sit there with a table and get people to talk to you that other things might not work so we've proven it's a challenge and we try to meet the challenge in creative and various ways it's really how to characterize that part of the way what's the average age of the high low and the average yeah I don't know the average age but I would say the vast majority of our volunteers are retirees this helps with the time factor that I mentioned people with no job and maybe growing children have more time to volunteer so that's when that age bracket I couldn't put a number on it but retirement age I think is the safe way to put it we don't have a lot of young people well the question is that's what was in my head do you want to have young people because for experienced reasons yeah we don't necessarily gravitate towards younger folks for that reason one of them is that they don't have sometimes don't have a lot of life experience in order to give the recommendations they require to do as part of their job and also younger people are busier they're often full time employees or we get a lot of people inquiring about being a guardian that are in school but they're looking for an experiential opportunity and not a two year commitment of being a volunteer, right? they want experience and that doesn't work out either it's interesting Senator Sears referenced Wyndham County and for whatever reason that somebody varies from county to county they have a tremendous number of options available to them either through their local recruitment they just have probably I don't want to say more than Chittenden County or Franklin but for a county that size they have a tremendous number of varieties available which is interesting maybe the guardians are working too well I'll let you draw that conclusion on the 336 that's covering all of these plus cases that are on the chart some of the guardians will have one or two cases others will take 10, 15 in other words the individual caseload is very tremendously among those guardians either time or inclination and that's what makes it difficult to share them sometimes with the other dockets because of their commitment to this docket those that don't take many of the Chin's case generally aren't interested in being involved in the other dockets so there's a lot of factors that come into play it's interesting so the people that the guardians are working with are probably much younger and then you have an older population so what cultural differences do you see do you have to do any sort of discussion and meeting out about what you know what makes sense doesn't make sense because we're looking at some significant age differences I think and so you have some significant sort of life experiences and expectations but how does that how does that play out I'll clarify your question are you asking how the older population works with the younger population when they have different values and different expectations perhaps yeah well we try our best to train and inform the guardians of their sort of narrowly tailored scope of work and that is to represent the best interests of kids and child welfare proceedings and they this is not necessarily a mentorship program it's not like a big brother big sister type situation where the guardians are spending time with the youth for any purpose like bonding or creating a relationship they interact with the youth for the specific purpose to ascertain whether or not what is happening in the proceedings is in their best interests and that's it so I think that avoids some of those issues of age gap or different things and some of the children they represent are non-verbal and we're talking about babies and some of them are teenagers and it all depends and that's part of the geo-coordinate's job is to match a guardian with a case that makes sense some prefer to work with the older kids have different experiences working at that age demographic so they'll usually get assigned and other people will work with the undershoot better so that's some of the interplay with the coordinator and what they do in their role sorry you began by saying you want to name change is that something that we have to do or is that something that you can do no we asked to change the name because wherever it appears is that a step is that so again my question is that something that you can do without statutory authority or do you need a bill to be introduced no we saw statutory authority but what did happen last year was that Senator Sears knows because we discussed it in his committee but there was miscommunication I'll put your office in the guardians as to what was behind this change in name so in other words there is a process in place or representative grad is aware of and you're just alerting us that you're going to a bill passed to change the name I know I have it on record but when it got to the senate people realized that it had been passed who were guardians and they were upset that they hadn't been consulted so the court magnanimously said well let's just wait a little bit so we continue to talk so they're continuing to talk and they destroyed the roll call even if we change the name even if we change the name to cost what it helps us do also is to make sure that other courts are looking for folks it's a quick way to identify the training that someone has had and so it helps us on different levels other questions about what is happening what is going as strengths in areas to grow or things that are rough edges I think as I said earlier we are embarking on projects that determine the demand that's our next step I think we're in pretty good shape with this docket that's in front of you we continue to recruit but those efforts seem to be successful so now we're going to focus in on the other dockets and find out what they need in order to figure out what we need to do in terms of the narrow but broad focus of this committee you can proceed and go along and there's not something that you are looking at from the legislature in terms of other things not at this point with respect to guardians would you request that we say Casa instead of Guardian okay so that's learning experience it's not going to be easy I'll remind you whenever I get the chance thank you other questions this is part of a retirement planning and all the various judicial and human service kind of things this is what you can do with your time you can show up to all the retirement parties for every state employee there is and be there with pamphlet thank you for being appreciated and they identified was an update on truance and you know you haven't moved are you doing this by yourself I am, I'm going to try so again for the record on this part of the agenda Brian Rearson Chief Superior Judge and again not sure exactly what the committee is looking for let me just explain you know a few years ago there was a major effort to try to deal with truancy in a different way all the studies from other states indicate that a good indicator of somebody coming into custody is truancy and it was a way to prevent that so there's been an effort I know in DCF I know in some of the courts there's actually truancy courts to me it's one thing we can do that's very preventive to try to deal with truancy before it becomes a major problem and many of those problems are the result of miscommunication I know in Bennington there's a truancy court we don't advertise it as a specialized court but it seems to help I don't know if you're hearing more specifically but this sounds interesting if at the end there's anything you want to add or not please and I think anyone that works in the system that we do recognize the school to, unfortunately the school to court pipeline it they end up in delinquency for the time that I've been involved with the courts truancy is probably one of the most neglected dockets historically and it generally follow the pattern of schools reporting delinquencies they usually let the kids slide that first half of the year and then they begin notifying the state's attorneys towards the end of the year and then into the early winter by the time the petitions would get filed often times it was in the spring and it's too late for the courts to do anything except wag your finger and I'll see you in September there have been attempts over the years to try to come up with a model to do a better job there's no question we need to do a better job Bennington is one of them and it was not advertised to the point where I wasn't aware that it was going on so I'm glad that you called for this to be on the agenda but they had apparently a project I didn't realize you didn't know I hope he's not going to get in any trouble it's a success they had a good response from the community and in light of that because he's a Rutland judge that started that and all the judges in Bennington are Rutland the city in Rutland is trying to emulate that program in Rutland and they are essentially court driven projects with the state's attorneys that is one vehicle for doing this in my experience one of the most successful programs and for any of you who may sit on the Justice for Children Task Force this past spring the LaMoyle group has had a truancy project I think Marshall was on one of the school boards up there so he's probably more intimately familiar with the workings of the project they took a different approach and it was really community and school based we were literally the last resort and by that I mean they went out and went to each of the supervisor unions in that area and essentially we correct me if I get off track here but we recruited funding from those schools to hire an individual to oversee essentially the truancy issues in all of those communities and so they laid out a process where after a certain number of days, five days they will be alerted to the fact that somebody is missing they don't get involved until a later stage maybe ten days truancy and then at twenty days they will get really involved I'll just give you some quick numbers because you know time is tight but the numbers that they put together in this project are pretty amazing they started out this is 2018 2019 school year notification of the student being truancy that's five to ten days absent involved twenty students was the beginning number they take their first, there's a total of 4300 students in the three supervisor unions so 320 referrals to this program and the intervals are five days absent a documented attempt to make contact with the parent or guardian by the school at ten days absent there's again documented absence, support services offered by the school again, letter from the school, letter copied to this organization the Memorial Valley truancy program and the determination by that program at that stage and the school what needs to happen at that point if the truancy gets up to 15 days absent then the Memorial Valley project really gets involved in it the letter goes to the family notifying them of the Memorial Valley intervention they hold a meeting with the student, the parents, the guardian, the school they develop a plan to figure out what this family needs the superintendent seeks cooperation regarding the student's physical or mental fitness to attend school and then finally when it gets to 20 days absent the program works with the principal, the superintendent and DCF is involved at that point try to come up with a plan and if not it's referred to the state's attorney so our 4300 people, 320 started in that year by 15 days absent that number of 320 have been reduced to 85 children, the 20 days absent the number had been reduced to 29 students and by the time the court petition was filed 17 students from 11 families, 5% but much like any of these specialty projects or courts review it, it takes the community to support these, that's why we're struggling in some Senator Sears knows in some truth of court talk, they struggle not because somebody doesn't think it's a good idea the court is encouraging the community has to be behind these projects I think this is fabulous and I'm giving the fact that we seem to have someone I can just chime in with a little bit more sort of what I think, and in front of Marshall Paul deputy defender general and chief junior defender perhaps more relevant in this case former member of the Waterville school board and I would just add I think the real magic of this program and the reason that this program has been so successful and so incredibly successful really is the Loyal truancy project employs a dedicated social worker full-time who does nothing but truancy issues and really what was sort of missing from Judge Grierson's procedural explanation here is that when you start to approach 10 days absent you have a social worker knocking on your door and that's really what is making the difference the meetings are really important, the structure is really important the fact that it's consistent across the county but what it really is is that starting really early in the process rather than it being something like happens in other counties where letters go home, letters go home, letters go home petition gets filed and they wind up in court very early there's an intervention where a social worker is knocking on your door and a social worker is a not just sort of a consultative role but is actually a sort of boots on the ground if they show up at your house at 8 in the morning and you're not out of bed they're going to be standing there saying get out of bed, let's get in the car, we'll get you to the school we're going to move this along and if you are refusing that's going to change the course that the case takes and because it's so there's so much active involvement it's very easy to tell early on the case whether this is a case that needs to go in one direction or go in another direction and the project not just the social worker but the other people at the little restorative center who sort of supervise this project and I'd say mostly we're talking Heather and Becky Penbury are not just involved at the level of the family and knocking on the door but also finding out what the problems are and resolving them with the schools so they are prior to because it's a lot of the same work that gets done in court it's just being done long before the case goes to court when we have truancy cases that go to court it's a lot of work of essentially identifying why is this kid not going to school most of the time frankly in the really tricky sticky cases it's not simple it's not just a problem where the kid won't go to school there's problems at the school that need to be resolved in order to accommodate the kid it takes really the involvement and investment of everybody and so there will be meetings with the schools there will be negotiations people will try to identify what could we be doing at the school to make it so that this kid will go to the school while at the same time working at the home saying what can we change at the home to make this kid go to the school it's a really great program and it's been incredibly successful I was a attorney taking juvenile cases as a contract attorney as that program ramped up and as it really became effective and it was really just a sea change in how truancy was treated by the court system because it used to be the court system in a loyal county it was sort of like everybody was not really well equipped to deal with truancy issues because that's not what courts are designed for the tools that courts have are essentially take a kid into custody or don't take a kid into custody and a judge can sit on the bench and lie his finger in a kid that's about all the tools they have and this provided so much more to the point where we go for years where there would be truancy petitions were so incredibly rare because this project was essentially solving these problems before they came into the court system so it's a tremendous and it really was one of the things that was amazing about it I was at the same time as it was a contract attorney I was a school board member and it really was a grassroots thing they showed up at our school board meeting and they said we want you to budget X amount of money that was the question using the past tense who pays for it while the projects in lamoille county go out of the lamoille north district and there was a shared position between lairway and lamoille north and tom would not leave five days tom was there after two days to show up at the house but so it's no longer a thing it was taken over by the restorative justice it started as a school project it started as a school project it started as a school and it moved to the restorative justice as recently as four years ago which is when it was the last time the school board school boards were still kicking in money to it whether we were funding the whole thing or not and I'm not sure I think Martin is absolutely right that it is that the lamoille community restorative justice system deserves a great amount of credit because what they did is figure out how to blend money so the Orange program through DCF, the bannister restorative justice program is what we give money to lamoille to have a range of programs including addressing truancy and that happens actually throughout the state but what lamoille did very effectively and it sounds like there was some history works with the local schools so they also kicked in some money to enable lamoille to have this robust program it started before as a part time position funded through the school district and lamoille north and it was a shared position and then that moved as a shared position and Laraway had a presence in it and I can't remember exactly how much money they kicked in but Tom would go and it wasn't five days it was more like two days Tom was at their door going are you up I know you're in there and what I am struck by I guess I wanted to say is we even started there's trouble and we've gone to court and we have to fix the court process or we have to do that and what has been discussed or shared right now in terms of what is working on the truancy project is you know okay that's the court maybe but really what we're talking about is the community and then it's not just the school it's not just the family it's not just DCF it is in fact the community coming together and figuring out there's a proxy there's something's not right and the proxy in this example is the kids not going to school so the community in a sense is rallying around by where they're putting their money and owning meat the problem they're not waiting for the public defender or the judge or for that matter coming into custody to get help and just to be clear that really is so effective in the large part because truancy in particular like separate from the rest of child welfare issues it's really the judicial system public defender's judges prosecutors lack the tools it's not a very effective process if you give us a truancy case we're going to have a truancy case it's about the least effective way to handle truancy honestly one of the things that cracks me up in truancy cases is how often we have to go and pull kids out of school to take them to court we do that a lot I really like it when you're suspended because we didn't go to school and the way it's currently structured because they have to have the linkage as representative pew said you have to have a linkage with the school and then with the community in order to make it I would think to make it highly effective cost effective so how do we spread this I'm thinking we write bills we spread things by writing bills and we direct the appropriations process so DCF might take a little piece of their money that goes to the community it's tired of it but you know so seriously how do you give up some of your court money because I heard you scheduling your next meetings but you should talk to hennarovar they know more about this than we know they're the people who've done this program from the ground up and they know how to build it and they know how to get people invested in it and then we give it to the judicial system we give it to the defender's office and let you do it and I'm going to show my age but when I was a social worker in the field there was a truancy work whatever it takes and we would do whatever time of the day or night you went to the family's house to do stuff and whether it was to get the kid up whether it was to put the kid to bed I think what's significant throughout the state we have small programs and the idea was specific things and we don't have an inventory really of what would be right particularly with school issues whether it be truancy, suspension, expulsion fights in school whatever it is it's much better to delve within a restorative justice manner and many of the community justice centers are now more involved in function than they ever were before and that's keeping a lot of kids out of custody, a lot of kids out of trouble so it's actually money well spent after school drop by program kids are coming there, watch TV, eat popcorn I think in this case the reason it got started so well is because the school, the largest school district I think that you'll find that these community justice centers and school districts it was like pulling teeth, Senator Campion I introduced a bill on school expulsion and suspension and I'm telling you, you couldn't believe the education establishment, if you think DCF and others have problems when you try to do something in education you watch those folks they didn't want to do any human services work and yet I think you're at your full point which was we have a lot of programs that seem to be working addressing issues that get children and families children at risk and families that we can identify no, I don't think you are I am also saying, and I don't know if Chittenden County is an outlier or Howard Center is an outlier, Howard Center has school social workers in every single except one under Bill I.D. has a social worker in every single solitary school, I don't know that to mean they're not focused primarily on truancy I don't know how they get involved with that but this is not this is different from a person who is being a clinician and working, shall I say, individual therapy but more of what we are talking about so that's it may be that because of the size and breadth of that community mental health center that they're able to do some things which in your district and others it is the restorative justice. If you want, I can get the school district and I can get Heather or Becky come to talk about it. I am aware that we're going to begin to lose people and I didn't know if folks here got what they wanted and needed in terms of input and update around truancy and around GALs and CASA CASAS I just wanted to say it you said to do it before we can you add something I just want to be clear that truancy is a significant part of our bar to CASA so in effect DCF is putting a lot of resources into truancy and to insist with everything Judge Beerson and Marshall and you all have said clearly courts are and should be a very last resort I understand that we have children who have to be focused on reason is they didn't go to school so the answer I hope it is still no but it is a provision in the law that allows it which is how there can be changed proceeding because I think it's part deep subsection B that allows that but none of us including clearly the commission of DCF does not want a child coming into state custody because of truancy. All of these other approaches are a benefit to the youth. We want kids to be very successful I bet you are going to say oh but I have heard from parents and that is why they are there. Actually what I was going to say is the beauty of what was just described is that there is beauty for the parent too because you try being a parent who is under DOC supervision and you have a three o'clock mandatory meeting but DCS says you've got to be at the bus stop to pick up your child at three o'clock and corrections doesn't recognize DCF and DCF doesn't recognize corrections and if you've got that kind of a community meeting then the parents can bring those issues to the table and solutions can come up and all likelihood corrections needs to change the time of the meeting but you try to go to corrections and tell them to help. I want to say that the communication between departments within the agency of human services and outside has been something that is challenging, hell it's challenging to get us in the same room at the same time. It's been identified, it's been something that I think people are trying to work on. It's certainly not helped by a technology that is older than I am. This helps, this kind of approach really does because those issues that we're on today... Oh stop! Stop! So what I was going to say, I'm just talking to Judge Gerson that the Justice for Children Task Force recognized the issue of truancy and frankly that the numbers had started to go off in terms of court and though recently they went down a little bit which is certainly good news but there's a subcommittee of that Justice for Children Task Force that is going to be making recommendations. I do think they're going to focus on replicating the Lamoille program which again I think is a really good thing. And what I would ask if you are going to have continued discussions, and I think Senator Westman indicated, let's include the schools or AOE because they are a really critical part of this conversation. Again Lamoille is an outlier in a complementary way in stepping up and being involved. I'm not sure that that is consistently true around the state. Thank you very much. Is there a special name for the program? That's real. That's it. Thank you.