Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, February 22, 2011,
Item 4
Item number 4 is to receive annual report regarding the office of child representation and the office of parental representation.
good morning.
>> good morning.
I'm rob jeffries, executive manager of justice and public safety here with lessly hill, attorney and laurie kennedy managing attorney for office of parental representation.
every year those are partially grant funded by the Texas supreme court on youth and families, I think I got that right, and every year they must give a report to the supreme court and did so recently in January and we thought we would share that with you.
actually this is a report to you all in two parts.
this first part will be a programmatic overview and we'll come back in a month or so and update you with a cost benefit analysis and some data about how these officers are doing in that regard.
so I'm just going to turn it over to them and let them report out on their programs.
>> I go first.
>> who is first?
>> leslie is first.
>> all right.
well, I can --
>> hang on a second.
>> there you go.
>> [inaudible].
>> we'll have a musical interlude.
>> can we go with parental first?
>> the judge will entertain us with her rendition of --
>> [laughter]
>> okay.
I'll turn it over to you all.
>> thank you so much.
first of all I wanted to say thank you to the Commissioners court and obviously to the taxpayers of Travis County who have given us the opportunity to start these offices and to provide services.
as mr. Jeffries let you know leslie hill, managing attorney of the office of child representation and I'm fortunate to get to work with a wonderful group of lawyers and support staff and social worker and interns and together that group provides services to children for Travis County who are in c.p.s.
care.
and we have clients who are one day old, we have clients who are 18, sometimes we even have clients above the age of 18.
and we get to provide a range of services to them, but as mr. Jeffries mentioned, we did get the opportunity to give a presentation to the Texas supreme court, our grantor, and so I'm going to go through some of that with you today.
as most of you know, we opened in February of 2009 and our second anniversary is actually tomorrow.
so it's a timely -- thank you, yes, we're very excited.
it's been just such a great opportunity to start something from truly what we had in the beginning was an office and desks and chairs.
and from that we have now got a fabulous team.
we have strong collaborations with county offices, with the hospitals here in town who provide services to our clients, to the schools.
it's been a really amazing thing to see happen in 24 short months.
our offices were opened with the hope that we would be able to provide consistent quality legal representation and I believe we've really gotten an opportunity to do that.
and our clients, our goal is to listen to our clients, find out what their needs are and represent them as zealously as we can in Travis County.
we started taking cases in June of 2009 and we handle three types of cases.
court ordered cases, temporary managing conservative ship cases and permanent managing conservatorship cases.
basically we have clients who live at home with their parents, we have some clients who live in foster care, we have clients who live with relatives, and we are providing legal services to children in all of those different circumstances.
some of those children will go on to stay in the care of the state through c.p.s.
for the rest of their teenaged lives.
and so one of the jobs that we have and one of the great interests is helping those teens get the skills they need in order to become productive members of society.
our hope is that by having early intervention in the schools and with our role as their attorneys, we can help them contribute to society and our team -- teen parents and teen clients, we try to help them get the skills they are going to need.
we have a team of four lawyers on our staff.
we're very fortunate to have people from a real varied background.
we have one lawyer with a mba, two of our lawyers including myself have child welfare legal specialization, and then we also have a social worker on our staff along with support staff, and it's a really great mix.
one of the things that we wanted to do in opening the offices was to develop really strong working relationships with the schools.
we've got interns through the school of social work at u.t., and that provides us a really great collaboration.
they are able to help us with research on a russian of a -- af topics that affect our clients such as the medications they are taking, the kind of therapy that might help them and so that's been really fantastic.
as far as collaborations go, we obviously collaborate and work closely with the Travis County office of parental representation as well as the d.a.'s office.
other county offices, the juvenile public defender's office, the mental health public defenders office.
we are working closely all the time with justice and public safety and we also get a chance to work with u.t.
through the school of law, the children's rights clinic.
and private attorneys.
the court appointed family advocates are very strong colleagues of ours.
and obviously casa as the guardians and c.p.s.
I mentioned just briefly that we are a multi-disciplinary team.
that's a model that we have found to be really helpful.
we're able to not only address legal issues but our social workers are able to help us make better determinations about safety and risk for our clients.
is able to go out and meet relatives, find out who might be available to help in a variety of capacities for our clients.
sometimes relatives can have the kids come live with them, but sometimes they are not able to do that but they may be able to bring presents for a birthday or they may be able to come to parent-teacher conferences.
and so our social workers are really able to talk more about those sorts of things and what's going to be a safe, appropriate environment for our clients.
and again, we have interns.
we are very interested in helping the next generation of child welfare advocates have a place to learn.
so it's very exciting to us to have that.
we do have an oversight committee.
some of you serve on that.
we have as part of that an evaluation and a finance subcommittee, and that helps us just make sure that we are handling things appropriately and staying within policies and procedures of the county and that we've really got the best machine that we can have to provide services.
part of that evaluation is an independent program evaluation.
our evaluation is being done through george mason university, and we are -- their recommendations have been helpful and we expect will continue to be helpful to us.
we're working right now on strengthening and developing best practice standards using things that other organizations like ours all over the country have found to be helpful.
and so that's one of the things that we've got coming up.
as far as just ensuring that we've got quality of legal services, we spend a lot of time in our office working as a team and having team case reviews and I supervise our staff and meet with them as appropriate on individual cases, but it's really important to all of us that we can learn from the entire team.
training is one of the most important parts of opening an office like this, obviously we want to make sure that we have a trained staff.
we want to make sure that we've got opportunities for our staff to go out and present to the community, and we're doing both of those things.
we present regularly through judge burns court, we present through casa trainings and we're getting a chance to allow our lawyers to share what we've learned as far as best practices.
we also invite distinguished speakers from a variety of areas to come speak to our staff about different topics whether it be immigration or trial techniques, different legal issues.
so that's been very helpful to our staff.
I wanted you to know that in -- last year, fiscal year 2010, we were able to help 539 clients.
>> 539?
>> 539 clients last year in 2010.
so -- and each of those -- you know, sometimes we get our cases involves one child, sometimes it's six or seven children, and we go out and we meet individually with each of those children.
we meet with their caretakers.
wherever they live, we go there to see what their home environment is like and get an idea of what they need from their teachers and other caretakers.
but 539 children were served through this program and I'm just so thrilled that we were able to do that.
some of the projects that we've got that are going to be coming up in the future include continuing our outreach to schools and hospitals, different groups that we work with.
we are continue to go develop a library of child welfare resources so we can help others practicing in that field, that we're not reinventing the wheel.
we're continuing to track data and we have a database that we've worked with with public safety to develop and we look forward to giving you more information through the budget process about that data.
we'll continue our internship program and, of course, we're very interested in knowing the most we can about research on trauma based therapy and medications that affect our clients.
it's been an amazing experience to get the office up and running and to just meet the clients and to work with all the different systems. I will leave you just with one thought.
I had a client who said something I will never forget.
I was working on his case and he asked me about when he was going to get to be with a relative.
he wanted to be with a relative and he was in an out of care placement and it was a really tough situation for him.
and I said I'm work on it, I'm working on it, I will get you there as soon as we possibly consideration and he looked at me and said what have you done on this today.
and I -- that's what I keep in my mind.
fortunately I had been able to work on it that day but that drives me every day what have you done today because our client's sense of time is very different than adults.
>> how old was this client?
>> this client was about nine.
they all participate in the ways they can but time for them is very different than it is for adults and we try the very best we can to give them great legal services with the hope of getting them to the best place they can be.
thank you so much.
turn it over to miss kennedy.
>> thank you.
>> thank you.
I'd like to echo miss hill by thanking all of you for being so involved in our experiences and the great experiences.
I didn't come in until may of this year so I got a little bit of a late start but I think we're I'm going to show you significant changes.
I'm going to go off into my own little thing.
who we are, again, we also have four attorneys, two of them that are child welfare law specialists in the states, and not to brag on leslie and these other attorneys, but there's only 12 in our entire state and four of them come from our office.
so I think that's a really impressive number.
we have one attorney who used to be a social worker so she has the social worker background.
and we have one attorney who used to work with the district attorney's office so it gives us a great ability to have the other side come into our office.
we also have our social worker who is a great resource to our office.
she used to be the disproportion at specialist for region 7 so she has great contacts and she is able to provide services that our county isn't even aware of through her -- just through the people that she knows.
and then we also have some office staff.
what we are doing, what the goal of our office is to preserve, excellent even and std support our families and provide early, consistent representation.
we handle two types of cases.
we only represent one parent per case and we represent the primary parent and sometimes that's the mother and sometimes it's the father.
we handle the temporary managing conservator cases which is basically where the court has legal custody of your children and that has the one-year statutory deadline.
we also represent the court ordered service cases and that's where the parents still have legal custody of their children, but the court has still intervened.
so we hope both kind of parents.
we also through our office with all the service providers that we are able to maintain and continue relationships with, we do have an excellent relationship with not only the offices that miss hill described but a lot of the private attorneys call us to assist them in getting into some of these services.
and our social worker mia, she spends so much time not only with clients but attorneys and service providers and helping get -- whether they are our clients or somebody else's, their needs and services completed.
what we have accomplished, I just wanted to share not very specific numbers, but taking our first case in may 29th with -- this is as of 2-18, which was Friday.
we've had 12 cases -- let me rephrase that.
we have close to 146 cases to date.
and out of those 146 cases, 48% of those cases were returned to their family, parents, period.
12 cases were I did missed in the first 30 days which means we got rid of them and there was no court intervention.
36 cases the parents had legal custody and completed court ordered services and the children stayed home with them.
out of the temporary management conservator cases, 13 of those cases were completed the services and were returned with their parents.
ten of those cases were final orders where those children did not go home with their actual parents, but were given custody to other family members.
with regard to termination, we had 42 cases where the parents' rights were terminated.
however, out of those 42 cases, only eight cases where the parents did not have any input as to where their children went.
so that basically means all the other cases, the parents' rights were terminated, but those children were placed with family or victim kin.
and out of those 42 cases, only one case went to a jury trial where the parent refused to give up their parental rights and we went to trial on it.
28 cases were conflicts or withdraws, and those were not in the first 30 days.
those were cases after significant work was done on the case a conflict arose due to other reasons.
five cases were transferred outside of the county.
what we do for these clients is we conduct discovery, we respond, we meet regularly with our clients.
we kind of have a three-tier basis for our clients.
they come in at a level 1, 2 or 3 depending on the urgency and the type of services they need.
our social worker does a four-hour assessment on every client to determine what services we can start providing prior to them even going to court or getting them started in those services prior to them being ordered.
we attend all c.p.s.
meetings which include family group conferences, family meetings and those are great places where we resolve cases without even any court intervention including mediation.
being that our social worker is the disproportion at specialist, you can see on this slide that 39% of our cases are hispanic, 32% are african-american, 26% are white and 2% native american.
we're learning a lot more about native americans recently.
we have 89% cases today where we are representing the mother and 11% where we represent fathers.
we will be by the next meeting, we'll be able to tell you by zip codes which of your precincts are most affected, but off the top of my head that Commissioner Davis and Commissioner Gomez is where the majority of all of our cases come from.
and Commissioner Eckhardt's is where a lot of our clients are placed.
that's just interesting information.
one of the things I have worked on since I have been here has been defining what success means.
because you look at those numbers and maybe you think, wow, there's a lot of kids -- parents' rights that have been terminated.
how we define success is that a child is safe and with a family member if at all possible.
we want to get permanency for these children and be with family.
so we have redefined success in our office because if we just define those kids that went home with parents, we have redefined that.
I just quickly want to give you a couple of examples what that means.
one of our attorneys, tracy, took the very first client we ever had in our office, ended in great success.
we had a mom, a drug convicted prostitute with only a iw of 55 and against all odds that mother one year later is cleaned, has completed all her services, because reunified with her son and awarded joint managing conservetorship.
if we have a parent that is a teen that is our client rather than leslie's, and we have a young mother who aged out of foster care.
she has two young children of other own and became involved as a parent.
she did not know the basic parenting skills to take care of her kids since she didn't have a mom growing up.
this mom and through cindy and miss hill's office and the d.a., we were able to place this teenager in the same foster home with her children.
and this foster parent took in the mother to enable her to foster the mother as well as her children.
that was a really great success.
and then eventually that led to the mother getting her children back, but she was able to learn not only how to be a mother but was able to receive a mother in the progress so that's a really exciting success for us.
another quick example was an early intervention case, two years went on and we got that case and melissa was able to -- within the first 30 days, excuse me, within the first 14 days meet with all the partnerships, get that case in order and dismiss that case.
so it just took court intervention with some attorneys putting their heads together and getting those mothers the right services and we were able to dismiss that case with that mother continue to go have custody with her children.
and finally a termination that was a success in our eyes.
I had a mother released from prison after serving ten years.
her child -- she was imprisoned due to a vehicular manslaughter where they are two-year-old child was in the car with her.
she has not had a relationship with that child.
when she was released from prison her child was dropped off at she did not want -- she herself called c.p.s.
to find out what to do.
c.p.s.
came in, between the mother, myself, leslie's office and some other people, we were able to find a family member.
the mother relinquished rights to that child and she knew that child was living in a safe environment and she still would have access to a child and we consider that termination a success that that mother had the where about to know she was not capable of caring for that child but found the proper people to care for that child.
our vision is to be a community where families of all cultures and all socioeconomic groups are respected and encouraged.
we are a big push on identifying family and that's a pushy think for everybody in the county to find family members out there so children could be placed with family.
we think that is very important for our children and our parents as well.
how we're getting there, in addition to a lot of the things that leslie talked about, we're very involved in the trauma informed care.
we see a lot of repeats, people that started in leslie's office are now becoming our clients, and if we can address the trauma that these people suffered or why these parents are acting the way we are, if we can get to the root of that, we think we can solve some of this.
we're developing the standard practices.
we're identifying different services for our clients and that can help our clients rather than the standard ones that are already ordered.
we're getting very specific in identifying them through our social worker and connections in the community.
and, of course, disproportion at is a big focus in our office as well as all the training.
that's how we're doing and going and we just look forward to helping this community and being a part of it.
thank you.
>> thank you.
>> do you all have any questions?
>> yes, I've got a couple.
number one, I want to thank you -- your staff in doing a remarkable job.
it goes without saying.
I'm concerned some of the comments that were made especially those that reflect a significant amount of activity for the services that are being rendered.
you mentioned in precinct 1 and also precinct 4.
of course, precinct 2 being a recipient of some of the fallout from precinct 1 and 4.
the question I need to pose at this time is of the cases that are in precinct 1 and 4, can you basically tell me the factor or the most driving significant factor that cause the action of dealing with the particular child or parent of where the environment was not really safe for the child.
can you give me the most significant cause of that, per se.
if you were to break it down and say it was a, b.
c, d, e as far as cause and if you could tell me.
>> I could give you my personal opinion.
I can tell you from my own personal opinion, I think a lot of cultural issues come with it.
that are things that we can't address.
such as young -- young women having children, which is acceptable.
a lot of drug issues.
and mental health.
>> drugs, cultural --
>> mental health and domestic violence.
>> okay.
so those four categories per se?
>> yes.
>> from your own personal experience.
>> yes, I think the mental health is just that we don't have the ability -- the parents don't have the ability to get the medications that they need and we're able to assist with that right now.
the most difficult one would be domestic violence because you can help people, but when they believe that type behavior is accessible, that's the hardest to assist people with.
>> secondly, I need to find out, especially on the foster care and, of course, the bottom line is to make sure that there is a safe environment for these children to have a chance at life successfully.
so can you possibly tell me the attributes as far as financial concerned especially when it comes to foster care, the finance --
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
>> are you looking at that?
>> absolutely.
it's very critical to the success not only of our offices but of the parent, the children involved.
mental health is a huge concern for us.
I mean, d.
p.
s.
cuts -- that's where we are creative and make additional relationships with the community and try to get more services and people involved.
it's definitely going to affect everybody -- the courts, everything.
>> -- the caseload, everything.
>> we were looking at other issues coming up before the court.
I'm just trying to make sure that what we're hearing this morning that you're bringing to us which is a great program.
I think we've made great strides.
I'm glad you identified those categories as far as the causation of a lot of problems that we have to address as far as providing services to those that need them.
so again, I'm just trying to lay it out and let you know that there's going to be some relationship between a funding and a whole bunch of other things that we need to know in advance how it's going to impact services.
that is really a big deal now.
how and what that's out there that's going to impact our services on great programs.
>> senior judge -- the think I wanted to address on that is that department of family and protective services are experiencing extremely serious budget cuts that are existing now for this fiscal year as well into the next biennium.
they have wiped out any and all funding for protective parenting.
they're wiping out daycare funding.
so we're talking about some serious cuts to the state department.
I want to remind you that these offices are created to do a two-fold job.
one was to provide quality representation to the specific group of cry ents that had already under statutory requirements have to have lawyers.
the parents as well as the children.
these are mandatory court-appointed lawyers under the law.
and so these offices were create today provide that in a very specify manner and to hopefully do so in a manner that would also be fiscally responsible to the county.
so you'd have quality services at either a fiscal impact or reduced fiscal impact.
I think over time you'll see that.
I do want to caution you.
because if in fact the continued cuts occur at the state level, the c.p.s., the cases that are being filed in court today that these offices are handling are increasing at a rate that I haven't seen in the last decade.
that means that they will at some point be saturated, their offices will be overwhelmed with the ability of the cases, and they will no longer be able to take on cases because they won't have the ability to serve those clients effectively and give quality representation.
which means you all have to make hard choices as to go out to the private sector and pay them, which we will be required to do by statute, or to in fact grow these offices.
but I don't want you to forget that impacts that you're talking about on the state budget cuts are going to impact the case involve.
these officers are doing great work and I appreciate and applaud you as well as them for everything that has come about.
but I'm concerned that we don't need to lose sight that increase is overwhelming right now.
>> okay.
I suspected that.
and judge, I really appreciate what everybody has brought forth to us.
and it's going to be some significant challenges all across the board.
we've just got to figure out a way to continue the real good services that are helping so many folks out there that have these kind of concerns, especially the protection and safe environment for our children, of course that need representation such as the child.
so I'm just laying it out as far as mixing it up together.
so thank you all.
thank you.
>> judge?
with regard to -- we are seeking a mental health drug addiction family violence and teen pregnancy being large drivers on this docket.
in addition to the cuts in funding for c.p.s.
we're also seeing rather large cuts in areas outside the court system on these issues as well as policy changes that are going to impact these issues.
so I echo judge muir's comments.
it's not just inside the state budget for support of these court services, but also the services out in the community before court intervention are disappearing at the state level.
so to the extent that we can track and prove up that relationship, I know your plates are absolutely full just providing services.
but to the extent that we can find ways to track and prove up the impact of those pre-court intervention cuts, we are cursed with living in interesting times.
this program, like many novel court programs, are provided start-up grant money by the state that then goes away.
and we know that and we're good with that.
we know that grant money for this program will have proved up or not the effectiveness of these offices.
but with regard to other ongoing state programs to help these very families that y'all see every day who are in massive crisis, I applaud you for taking a job that places you in family crisis all day long five days a week and sometimes longer.
and with regard to precinct 2, I don't want it to sound like precinct 2 is angelic.
I suspect and we will probably be able to prove this up through census data, but we're seeing a socioeconomic migration out of precincts 1 and 4 into the flyingerville area where there are people who have both the socioeconomic wherewithal and the cultural and family connections to take these children.
and I wanted to give a big shout out to flugerville and the northern section of precinct 2 because that's where it's happening.
>> how would you say the supreme court received your report?
>> I think they enjoyed it.
I think everybody is as frustrated as everybody else about the cuts and how it will affect everything and how we'll be able to do our job effectively with all the different cuts.
but it was a very interesting meeting.
we heard lots of information from all different people in this arena.
>> did those judges indicate whether they would attempt to inform the legislature?
>> I can tell you that they did not notify us that they would inform them about this.
but juvenile justice and these areas are going to be a hot topic during the supreme court chief justices state of the judiciary tomorrow.
I do know that juvenile justice is going to be on his list as well as I would suspect some of these points.
directly these offices know.
but in general they are supported.
and that particular commission, by the way, is still looking at granting opportunities for tracking and other areas for just these very cases.
and we will be looking at them as we might be able to get some more funds for that.
>> so you mean that their opinion may be more weighty with the legislature than Travis County officials.
>> I think we have a very good rapport with the supreme court commission and the chief justice, and I think they will be supportive of what we're doing.
I think they see us as innovative in the state of Texas.
>> when we approve both grants, we had two main goals behind.
one was improving the quality of representation.
second one was a hope, I guess, more than a goal.
and that was that we could reduce the line item for court-appointed lawyers over time.
and from the information that I received, we are convinced that quality of representation is much, much better.
mike?
>> yes, sir, I would say that.
and again we'll be coming back to you in just a few short weeks to talk about the impact that it has on the finance, on the budget.
>> it seems to me that if we're looking at a growing number of cases, then we may well focus on cost avoidance rather than a reduced line item.
the last report I heard I guess several months back, it looked like the cases really had increased a lot more than projected.
and what I'm hearing is that there's no reason for us to expect that to in the foreseeable future.
>> that's correct.
>> on the sheet label, how can we get there, the last bullet is disproportion at.
what does that mean?
>> we have a specialty analyst in our office, a social worker.
disproportionallity is a nationwide service that I think -- it's a nationwide issue that we have to continue to be aware of.
and it's very big obviously in our office.
so we're keeping great statistics on that.
and being aware of what's going on in our community.
>> so that's basically that number of cases from african-american and hispanic families exceed their percent of the population?
>> oh, yes, absolutely.
>> is that what I it means?
>> the disproportionallity specialist, judge, is a little bit different.
there's been a way, there's a new movement which is a wonderful movement.
we've always known that there's a disproportionate share of those in the juvenile justice system and child welfare system for minority groups.
so we've known that.
the disproportionallity specialist thing and programming is actually focusing on, as I'm learning about it, it's kind of like an inside out.
instead of us always recognizing that we do have the differences, is it because of the by ass from those who are -- biases from those within the system that creates the disproportionallity.
so trying to educate those of us who are within the system but at all levels to actually when you're dealing with the community to deal with them in a manner in which you understand the demographics, the cultures and everything else, and so that the expectations when you remove a child and different things like that in juvenile justice and the criminal justice world, so that you don't have an overrepresentation based on your own inherent ignorance, so the disproportionallity is coming from a reverse kind of consent.
it's a good movement trying to reduce the disproportionate number of kids in these systems.
>> a response?
>> yes, ma'am.
>> it's kind of a weird way.
because when you say it it's something we all know.
but it's actually a positive action towards trying to change that.
>> from my childhood days I recall that family members were always good about taking up young victims of various things that needed assistance.
and I guess the family I'm familiar with right now, it amazes me how my sister and other family members will take in distant cousins when the parents clearly are not doing their job.
and so I'm hearing that that good practice continues, and that we are trying to increase our efforts to notify family members when assistance is needed and at least give them an opportunity to intervene on behalf of the children so the custody can be placed with another family member rather than foster care.
I guess foster care can be with a family member too, right?
but what can we do to help with that?
just educate the community?
>> well, I think supporting the offices the way that you have is a fantastic way to help, and just letting people know in your own personal lives and professionally as well just how important it is to be involved, whether it's to give donations or time.
obviously within families, we've been amazed.
when people know there is a need they are very willing to respond.
and so just letting people know this is a really big issue that affects our society across every system that we've got.
>> and there's a whole continuum of ways you can help.
for instance, the c.p.s.
board is doing prom night.
so if you've got like fancy shoes and costume jewelry, at that level continuum all the way to fostering an adoption.
so at whatever level those of us who are watching want to participate, there are all kinds of ways.
>> there's also a great computer program called family find.
you might be seeing some requests come across for some -- as you were talking about "we" meaning travis couldn't, if in fact these offices are so intricately involved in all of this they may be needing more access and some sort of ability to find people because computers now seem to be the way to locate?
and you can do a lot.
so just to let you know that may be another way.
and Commissioners, anything that people do for the board and giving these kids hope and just normal lives whether it's through family members or foster care or anything, is incredibly appreciated.
>> but I think we need to not overlook some of the other programs that we also support.
the healthy families in h.h.s., as well as the other interlocals that we have with the schools that will offer mentoring and tutoring to young people so that they'll stay in school, especially the young girls, that they need to make sure that they get the education that they need so they can move out of poverty, and then also get out of that -- that cultural trap that girls don't need an education, girls are going to grow up and have babies, anyway, and they need to depend on a man to take care of them.
and then when they do find the man, that it's okay for him to abuse her.
because after all, she's property.
she's not an independent person.
and so we do support those programs as well.
but obviously we need to step that up as well to complement the work that you do.
and perhaps we need to -- there's a lot more that we can do.
very basic.
and so we need to work together on this.
but thank you all so much for your report.
>> from an intuitive and I guess subjective level, one would think that placement with a family member would be much better than just with a nonfamily member.
but is there data to substantiate that?
>> there's a lot of tracking going on.
and I believe there is.
and I think that we've learned -- and I'll try to work on getting that for you, judge and Commissioners, statewide and nationally I think there is a knowledge -- and we can look at some of the data -- that placing with a family member you're less likely to have that child return into care, and you're also more likely to have that child be successful.
that just makes sense.
the biggest issue is the stability, whether it's with a foster family or with an adoptive family or with a relative.
it's still stability.
and what you've got is an issue of if your child moves too many times they lose their educational opportunity, they lose many things.
even if you do it with a relative, if they bounce from relative to relative you start having the same issue.
so truthfully the one common theme is stability.
>> to the extent that there are studies that document that, I'd appreciate getting them.
I think it really drives the point home if it's backed up by some facts rather than just -- I've always felt that way, but it's just been my feeling.
>> I'd just like to add my thanks to both of these professionals for their work and their staff.
it's tough work.
I'd like to thank criminal justice planning and judge muir and judge burn's office and the civil courts administration for the work that they do to help support these offices.
they really work hard.
so thanks, folks.
>> keep up the good work.
>> thank you.
>> thank you.
>>
>> [inaudible] -- you mentioned, judge, a program that a person can actually get to if they have access to computers.
if for those that are listening that want to participate and help, though, in this regard and really want more information, is there a telephone number that may be made available publicly where someone could call?
>> our office phone number is 512-854-7305.
and just anything as simple as clothes is always just very helpful.
books.
anything.
anything that anybody's able to donate is greatly appreciated by all of our clients.
>> okay.
thank you.
repeat that number one more time.
>> 512-854-7305.
>> okay.
thank you.
>> and ours is 854-7312.
>> okay.
thank you all very much for doing an outstanding job.
>> thank you.
>> thanks.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, February, 2011 2:19 PM
