“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The same can be said of our courts, particularly those that deal with children in abuse or neglect cases.
Juvenile courts handling termination of parental rights (TPR) and Children in Need of Services (CHINS) cases are faced daily with the dilemma of how to improve court procedures and provide more stability for children going through the system. Judges want to ensure that these cases are moving toward permanency efficiently, without sacrificing due process protections and the welfare and safety of the children. Knowing whether these goals are being met requires review and analysis of empirical data and improved data collection of the critical events that take place in these cases.
Fortunately, both nationally and in Indiana, strategies exist that enable courts to review and assess objectively the effectiveness of the judicial process in achieving the protection and welfare of children. As judges try to create the best possible outcome for the children under their jurisdiction, they now have tools to help them assess their progress.
In 2008, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the National Center on State Courts, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and the ABA Center on Children and the Law developed a set of tools that measure safety, permanency, due process and timeliness in child dependency cases. These measures are collectively known as the Court Performance Measures in Child Abuse and Neglect Cases, and are often referred to as the Toolkit.
In 2009, Allen County courts undertook a pilot project, funded by a Court Improvement Project grant from the Indiana Supreme Court, to report on many of these measures. The results of the pilot project can be found in Allen Superior Court Family Relations Division’s publication, Report of Allen County’s Court Performance Measures, which is available on the state judiciary website.
When Allen Superior Court Judge Charles Pratt began the pilot project, he knew that the report generated would not be perfect. However, he believed that the children in his county would benefit from an honest and objective measure of the court’s performance in CHINS and TPR cases. The report from the pilot project allowed Allen County to examine both areas of success and areas for improvement. Additionally, the news media appreciated and lauded the increased transparency that the report provided. Allen County’s experience demonstrates how tracking and reporting performance measures can not only affect dependency cases positively, but can also raise public awareness of and confidence in a county’s juvenile court system.
Several of the measures that were used in Allen County’s pilot project involved timeliness. Tracking timeliness of various stages of CHINS and TPR proceedings allows courts to measure both compliance with statutory requirements and the rate at which children achieve stability.
Beginning with the 2013 federal fiscal year (October 1 to September 30), states receiving federal CIP funds are required to collect five timeliness measures for all TPR and CHINS cases:
- Time to permanent placement;
- Time to first permanency hearing;
- Time to the filing of the termination of parental rights petition;
- Time to termination of parental rights;
- Time to all subsequent permanency hearings.
The Judicial Conference Juvenile Justice Improvement Committee (Committee) considered ways to assure the reporting of data that would enable courts to measure timeliness and concluded that the reporting of these measures should be incorporated into the regular statistical reporting requirements for Indiana courts. The Committee drafted a proposed rule amendment to Administrative Rule 1, which would require counties to report on these timeliness measures. At their meeting on March 22, 2013, the Indiana Judicial Conference Board of Directors approved the Committee’s proposal and voted to forward it to the Indiana Supreme Court for its review and adoption.
From January to March 2013, Judge Pratt and Allen County probation officer Kathleen Rusher conducted nine trainings in different regions of the state on these timeliness measures. The trainings served to explain the reasons and importance of collecting and reporting these measures, and to teach juvenile court judges and their staffs the technical aspects of doing so. Approximately 80 judicial officers and court staff members attended these trainings. For those who missed the regional trainings, an additional training in Indianapolis will be scheduled.
Staff of the Division of State Court Administration, including its trial court technology staff, worked with representatives from the juvenile case management system, Quest, and other computer system vendors to assist with programming and input changes required for this data collection. The juvenile courts that use the Quest system are already collecting this information, and most or all of the other counties should be able to provide the needed information by the end of the federal fiscal year.