Children and Youth-Senate and Aging, Children and Youth-House
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- October 7, 2026
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
0:00
Ms. Angus, thank you for being here on this rainy, drizzly, unpleasant day. Appreciate your getting out and being with us. Senator Hester, do you have anything to say? I'm good. All right, we'll go ahead and get started. We have the minutes. That's Exhibit C from our December the 10th meeting. If you've had a chance to look over these, do I hear a motion that these be approved? Motion. Motion. Second? Second. Okay, so these stand approved.
The next item on our agenda is the quarterly report from the Crimes Against Children Division of the Arkansas State Police. Major Jeff Drew, the commander, is here with us to give us this report. Major Drew, thank you for being here. Members, this is
Speaker 5
0:44
Exhibit D. Good morning, Chairs and Committee. Major Jeff
Speaker 7
0:58
Drew, Division of Commanders of Crimes Against Children Division.
Speaker 9
1:03
Today I'll be going over the third quarter, which will be July through September. We'll start on page— Major, could you pull your
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
1:09
mic just a little bit closer to you? Well, all right.
Speaker 9
1:33
All right, we're going to start on page three.
You see what the calls received by the hotline was 16,954, 7,716 of those were accepted and 1,500 and one of those were assigned to CACD with 4,869 going to DCFS and 1,346 were handled differential response. Then if we'll go to page four, will be a monthly breakdown by allegations of those calls that came in. If I'm moving a little too fast, just slow me down.
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
2:11
No, you're fine. Members, if you need it a little bit slower, let
Speaker 9
2:21
me know, but we're going to save questions till the end. All right. If we'll move over to page Page 6 will be the monthly breakdown of the cases open and the cases closed. But in that three-month period, there are 1,515 cases that were open, 1,220 closed within that time period. And out of that 1,220, 451 were found true.
That gives us a substantiation rate of 37 percent. All right, present we have 2,290 that are still active, and 100 of those that are open are over 45 days. And if you look at pages seven and eight, will be the breakdown by county.
So you'll be able to see what in your area is being affected. Excuse me. And on page 9, we'll show the calls that came in from mandated reporters and a breakdown of those
Speaker 19
3:43
reporters. And if you go to pages 10 and 11, that will reflect
Speaker 9
3:49
the allegation type and the
the ages of the alleged victims. Also, I believe Senator Hammerhead had requested how many children were involved in those total investigations. That number for this quarter is located there at the bottom of page 11, which was going to be 1,863 actual kids that
Speaker 19
4:16
were involved. Then on pages 12 through 28, it's
Speaker 9
4:22
going to be the relationship between the offender
and the victim with age groups of those offenders. And it will, pages 30 through 36 will be a breakdown of the prosecuting attorneys, the judicial districts, and the cases that were submitted to the prosecutor. And they're broken down by the decline, filed, and pending, which is going to be listed within there.
Speaker 19
5:03
The totals will be there on page 26, where we
Speaker 9
5:07
had 245 cases submitted. 38 of those were declined, 153 were filed, and we've got 54 that were pending. And that will conclude what I have. If you have
Speaker 7
5:20
any questions, I'll be glad to try and answer them for you. Members, do
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
5:28
you have any questions? Senator Stubblefield.
Speaker 22
5:33
Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Drew, when you look at all these numbers on
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
5:45
page four, 362 of those incidents deal with sex, either pornography, contact, exploitation, almost twice what all the other incidents add up to. Are you doing anything in regard to all these numbers, these sexual crimes?
Right, they're being investigated. Are you having any recommendations for the legislature as to what we can do to slow
Speaker 7
6:15
this thing down? I'd have to look into it, but presently we don't have anything additional. What we're pretty much
Speaker 9
6:20
doing is going into it, working hand-in-hand with law enforcement, making sure that we get those situations prosecuted. But as far as legislative-wise, we're not looking at anything
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
6:31
been looking at these same numbers of this magnitude for years now, and nothing seems to be changing.
Speaker 7
6:40
Yes, sir, we're more reactive towards that. Once we get the calls that come in, we'll go in to look at it and see
Speaker 9
6:46
what's occurring. Yes, sir, but we can look at doing legislation to see what we can do to affect those numbers. Yes, sir,
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
6:57
we can do that. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, thank you. I would say that the state police are the ones that are investigating the crimes. It's really not given to them to be proactive. We'll have to look at some other groups for that, Senator.
I agree with you that we do need to, but this probably
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
7:16
isn't the group that would do that. Investigation is one thing, but enhancing the penalty for some of these crimes
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
7:24
against children certainly needs to be looked at. That's
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
7:28
something we could definitely look at. Representative Evans? Thank you, Madam Chair. Major Drew, page three, you show over the three-month total, 16,954 calls that were received. Do you have any data to show a way to track how many of those roughly 17,000 calls are repetitive in regards to the same child?
Speaker 9
7:52
There is a monthly report that we'll do that's not included within the quarterly report. I'll be glad to get with you and give you a breakdown of those. Because out of that 16,000, we've got, you know, some out of state, someone able to locate, and some people are just calling to get directions. I mean, we've got all kind of calls that come into the hotline. But we do have a breakdown of how those calls are going. So you
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
8:13
do have records to show if there are multiple calls being placed by multiple people regarding the same child? Yes, sir. Okay. And follow up, if I may?
Yes. On page six, could you give us, as you've highlighted there in bold, the definition of what true means? So the true rate averaged 37 percent. Can you define what true means? Well, it takes well. Guidelines of
Speaker 9
8:39
preponderance. Once we go in and look at the investigation, we find that most likely the allegation that we've investigated that it is true. It's kind of like a guilty, not guilty, but just finding the situation true that that
Speaker 7
8:56
allegation that came in was, in fact, valid. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Senator Mathew Pitsch
Unverified
9:01
Senator Pitch. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. My question is into the numbers. I
don't know if you can hear me. This isn't really there. I'm looking at page, specifically page 32 in the judicial districts, and then I flip to page 33 on my own county and I think I'm the second largest county in the state judicial 12 but we only had six cases submitted to the prosecuting
attorney so I start looking at other districts and I see district 9 with 24 I see district 10 with 18 I see almost everyone that's in a double digit submittal to the prosecuting attorney appear to be rural so then I went and check Pulaski County, the largest county, and they've only got six as well. Is this report somehow biased or turned to the point? I'm much like Senator Stubblefield. I want to get to the problem and let the numbers drive us to reaction. But this appears to be a rural versus an urban
type scenario. And I can't quite buy that that's actually what's happening out there, especially in child abuse cases. Comments to that? Why our rural judicial districts have four and five times as many submittals to their prosecuting attorney as our larger counties? I'd have to go
Speaker 9
10:22
into each individual one, but on some of them, some prosecutors are more likely to pursue than others, which would determine what gets submitted to them. So you may have a prosecutor that
Speaker 28
10:34
may be a little more aggressive, which more cases would
Senator Mathew Pitsch
Unverified
10:38
be submitted to them. Yes, sir. Well, I guess, I mean, nine, 10, 14, you look
at 20 was on there. All of those districts are some of our least populated districts and they're filing 10, 18, 24, where my large, I guess I should look at Jonesboro number two. Yeah. Judicial district number two has five total. Our largest community seemed to not be having cases filed to the prosecuting attorney. And maybe, Senator Stubblefield, not to try and take another thing that you referenced,
but that's got to be a course of action somehow, unless these numbers are biased to reflect that. I mean, we've got large populations that aren't evidently having the crime, or at least not having it reported, and we have very small populations that are four and five hundred percent higher, and the numbers are driving me to that, and I guess I'd
like an explanation to that. Like I
Speaker 9
11:37
said, I'd have to take a look into it. You'll find just my experience of law enforcement, period.
Things are at least acceptable in smaller areas. When they get into a larger populated area, may have something with case loads or whatever they may have going on as far as pursuing things. I can't tell you that for certain, but in
Speaker 28
11:59
my experience through law enforcement, I've noticed that things are prosecuted more heavily within
Senator Mathew Pitsch
Unverified
12:06
smaller areas. follow up yes well answer me this I guess and again I'm trying not to be confrontational on
this but this is a log of what's been reported surely our law enforcement aren't going I'm not
going to report this child abuse they're reporting I would hope every child abuse they encounter and the numbers to me if I've got 127,000 people in Sebastian County I would have more just relative child abuse than a county that's got 10,000, yet they're reporting 24, and I'm reporting 5 or 6. Does that number set right with you? No, it makes sense to me, sir. Yes, sir. Okay. Senator Cheatham.
Speaker 47
12:49
Thank you, Madam Chair. This is a minor thing, but on page 7, I just noticed the estimated population. I don't know who checked this, but I don't believe Chico County has 104,000 people in that county. One of the smallest counties in the state. So I don't know who's responsible for checking stuff put in this report, but I hope that's the only. Matter of fact, Lincoln County is the same way. Somebody might want to check those numbers.
And I would hope that's the only mistakes that we see on these numbers, Mr. Stubblefield,
Speaker 50
13:30
that reported today. Thank you, Madam Chair. Representative Slate. Thank you, Madam Chair. Major, on the statistics that you have, this is just the ones that the Crimes Against Children Division has worked. This is not what the municipalities or the county has worked in their offices. Is that correct? Yes, sir. Okay, so when we're looking at Judicial District 12, the municipal agency or the county sheriff may have been the one that investigated those cases and did not report it with CACD and filed it to the prosecuting attorney off of their department.
Speaker 7
14:08
Is that correct? That's possible. With us working hand in hand, we should have record of
Speaker 52
14:19
that. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Thank you. Senator Hester. Yeah,
Senator Bart Hester
Unverified
14:22
my question is going to go along two lines. We've talked, there's 17,000 calls over three months, which is about 188 calls a day. And then we've got a lot of disturbing numbers on these crimes against children. Both those, the question I'm coming to you is, we're about to go into a fiscal session. Do you feel like you're adequately staffed on where you're taking the phone calls?
Are you adequately staffed on your, um, uh, to do the investigations? Sir,
Speaker 9
14:50
it's kind of a double-edged sword there. We can always use more people. Right now, with the last legislation session, we actually got 20 of the positions, um, financed, and it's helped us greatly. You know, at the hotline, we were carrying a 45 to 60-minute, uh, call wait time. Right now, the largest wait time I had last week was about 20 minutes.
So that's decreased greatly. Of course, we can always use more people to handle it because looking at the time restrictions that we have and the amount of cases that we handle, that would be greatly beneficial to have more personnel
Senator Bart Hester
Unverified
15:29
at it. Yes, sir. Yeah. Even a 20-minute wait call gives somebody a lot of time to second-guess themselves, you know. But anyway, thank you for that. Seeing no
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
15:41
other questions, thank you for this report. And we may have members who wish to get with you after or contact you later and talk about some of these issues.
Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Next, we have a discussion on the intake process and recent policy changes by the Division of Youth Services, known to us as DYS, the Department of Human Services. This is Exhibit E1 and E2 members, and we're going to recognize Michael Crump, the Director of DYS, and Cheryl Grappe, Assistant Director for Treatment with DYS. And Cheryl, did I get your name right?
Grappe. Yes? Okay. And Mark White? No, not Mark. And you are recognized. Hopefully you can hear me. Thank you. Good
Speaker 59
16:41
morning. My name is Michael Crump. I'm the director of the Division of Youth Services, and I really appreciate the opportunity to come here and tell you all about some of the changes we've made at DYS within the last year or so.
Last time I was here, oh, Cheryl Grape is with me here to my right. She is our Assistant Director for Treatment, who also joined the division about the same time I did a little bit over a year ago. I'd like to sort of explain some of the changes we made recently. Last time I was here, we talked about the things that we had just begun implementing on the treatment side at DYS as part of our broader effort to make some juvenile justice reforms. The legislature, the judiciary, the governor's office have all worked in the last couple of years to make changes in how children are assessed to make sure that we're sending the right kids to DYS
that need to actually be confined and also to make sure that those children that can be treated in the community have the opportunity for that less restrictive environment and are able to receive the services they need in that environment out in the community. So at DYS, we started the process of restructuring things, bringing in different types of staff than we've had in the past and really taking a hard look at our process because when you pulled everything back, you could really see that there were problems at DYS with how children were being moved through DYS and how the treatment was being provided
that were really causing some backup issues, just a lot of things you'll see in these slides. But I wanted to come back today. Representative Fite was with us recently and asked for an update on how things were going, and then we explained some of the changes that we're starting to see, some of the actual results we're starting to see in the data. And I was invited to come back and sort of talk about that to the full committee. So I had this presentation I'd like to work through to show you all in a little more detail what those changes are that we've made to our treatment team, how we're providing treatment in a different way than we have in the past,
and some of the early results we're starting to see when you take a look at the data we have. Sorry, I can't see this. as i said we we really needed to do a more robust assessment of the children that were sent to our our custody to dys that were committed from the courts when we looked we have way too many kids were sitting too long in juvenile detention centers not receiving treatment we also took a
look and and we found nearly 30 kids we had in our custody who had been with us for two years or more who were not violent offenders. They were not sex offenders. These were not extended juvenile jurisdiction cases. These were just kids that were stuck. Um, for whatever reason, their, their stay just kept being extended and being extended and, and they had more or less completed their treatment. So we could see problems at the front end with the kids coming into our custody, being assessed and being placed in the appropriate place. We could see there were problems with disruption in treatment while they were at DYS. And then there were still some
problems on the back end of getting those kids out and placed back into the community to continue receiving their treatment in an aftercare setting. So the treatment team now includes clinicians. The treatment team that I'm describing is the group that actually comes together after meeting with each juvenile and determining what their treatment is going to look like and what their plan will be. That treatment team includes clinicians, the youth is involved, the youth parents and guardians. We also have community-based providers, probation officers, basically everyone that has a stake in making sure that these juveniles are able to rehabilitate themselves
and re-enter the community are all involved in that process now. I have a little bit of a list here just to kind of describe for you what the situation was like before we started making these changes and restructured the division, and then how things are going today in comparison. The first you'll see there, as I said, youth often waited for months in a county-run detention center. we call them juvenile detention centers or JDC shorthand, to be assessed to get a treatment plan and be placed. Once they arrive at our intake unit, sometimes assessment would last more than a month.
So we have a separate assessment unit with 20 beds. The kids first come into our custody so we can sit down and figure out exactly where they need to go and what type of treatment they need. Now youth are going straight from the court to an assessment bed at our DYS facility in Alexander. Typically it's taking about 20 days to assess each juvenile, and they all get a robust series of assessments that you'll see later in this presentation where they meet with all these different specialists and they participate in the process from coming up with their own treatment plan while they're in our custody.
I actually had complaints from some defense attorneys when I first arrived at DYS because their kids were being bounced back and forth, and it's frustrating. As you can imagine, a child would wait in this juvenile detention center before they could even come to be assessed. We would assess, and then we needed that assessment bed for someone else, So they would send them back to a juvenile detention center where they would sit before they could actually go to one of our treatment centers and begin the process of actually receiving their treatment. Assessments before, they were cookie cutter. They were not individualized.
It was basically based on their charges. We didn't really have a team of clinicians. We didn't have clinicians on staff at DYS before this past year. So more or less, they looked at the charges and said, here are some of the goals you're going to work on, and everything was left more or less up to the private company that runs the detention facilities. Now each youth has a treatment plan, and it's an individualized treatment plan. As I said before, you have all these different individuals that participate in the planning, and they set goals. Each one is able to meet.
Each of these specialists meets with the juvenile one-on-one during that first, was it 16 days or so? And on the 16th day, the treatment team comes together and has a staffing where everyone's in the room with the juvenile. If people cannot attend in person, we have parents and others on the phone that are able to participate, and they sit down and talk about what problems each juvenile has so they can come up with this plan. Previously, after assessment, some youth continued to wait for these open beds. Most detention centers offered no treatment. So if you sat in it, it was basically juvenile jail.
There were not a lot of services being provided there. It was more or less for holding, and we still use those occasionally for what we call timeouts or for disruptive behavior. If someone is, they're aggressive and they're really, they just need a couple of days away before being moved to another placement or coming back with a new plan, we want to utilize those as infrequently as possible, but before those were used quite frequently. Now the youth are moving directly from assessment to placement in a residential setting, either at one of our facilities or a, it says community-based program, those would be group homes, and we are able to utilize group homes for some kids now.
they're able to go straight from assessment into that less restrictive environment and get their treatment there. If county detention center placement is needed, we contract for eight beds now. Six of those beds, White River Juvenile Detention Center in Independence County, actually have full-time therapy, life skills, education services. So we actually have a few kids on our JDC population list that we see every day, a small handful that are actually receiving their treatment in Independence County because that that more secure structured setting they
seem to function well sometimes they go to one of our larger facilities and they don't do as well maybe they have problems that they can be treated better and we've had some real success with sending some some kids who might want to go AWOL some situations like that we're able to actually provide treatment at the juvenile detention center so really we're trying to keep just a couple there and only use maybe one or two at a time if we if we can to actually put there for a traditional what we call timeouts before the changes we really had no formal monitoring of the youth's progress
it was more or less less left up to the the treatment centers themselves to let our case coordinators know that this is what's going on we think the juvenile is ready to be start their discharge planning and there wasn't really a formal process or any scheduled treatment review within dys and you didn't have those clinicians in place to do that if you wanted to do that Uh, now the treatment team, the same treatment team that has that initial staffing to develop the treatment plan meets a minimum of every 90 days on each juvenile to monitor their
progress, monitor progress, make any changes that might need to be made and look at how things are going prior to the changes. Um, the length of stay were arbitrarily extended often for minor behaviors. Sometimes we would see, uh, you know, their, their programs, behavior programs within the facilities that they use to sort of manage the behavior of all the kids there uh they're often incentive based that if you know if you behave you there are certain things you might be rewarded with they might have levels that you try to obtain uh you know that show the progress you've made as
far as from just your behavior they're outside of treatment sometimes kids would be extended their length of stay would be disrupted or extended because you know minor things maybe stealing a pencil or something. You know, I, I don't have the specific examples, but we would see that that's why we were seeing these kids that have been there much longer than they probably need to be there on for what seemed like minor offenses, staying there a year, two years plus in our custody. Um, now each youth has a planned end date for their stay, uh, in our residential
care with the exception of those extended juvenile jurisdiction cases, which are determined by the court. The court makes a determination on when those juveniles are ready to leave or if they're going to leave or actually be sent to serve an adult sentence. The length of stay, the discharge date can only be changed by the treatment team with approval by the director of the Division of Youth Services. We will welcome information from any of those stakeholders, the providers, or anyone we hear from if they think there are problems that the treatment team needs to take a look at, if they think there's a reason that maybe we need to extend a juvenile's release discharge
date by a little bit, or even if this juvenile's doing well enough that maybe we need to look at releasing them early, they can come back to that same treatment team and make that recommendation, and then the treatment team will come to me, and I have to sign off on anyone that's going to be extended beyond their discharge date. Before the changes, the companies overseeing the youth's treatment had a little contract oversight as it related to treatment expectations of quality. Now we have DYS case coordinators, inspection care auditors, payment integrity auditors. We also have monitors within our newly created contract management unit that are on site frequently,
and the case coordinators have to have at least monthly face-to-face contact with every juvenile on their caseload, which was something that didn't happen before. I think the requirement was once every three months they would have face-to-face, but as we found, that often wasn't really being enforced at all. So some kids might spend their entire time there and only see their case coordinator. They used to be called trackers, case coordinator at the beginning of their stay, And maybe at the end, and that was it. So as I said, it was just really a matter of DYS needing to do a better job of monitoring what was going on
and being more hands-on and proactive. I think what we have here, we have a list of some of the assessments that are done now when a juvenile comes into our custody. As you see here, it's a robust assessment to determine an individualized treatment plan. We do a physical assessment, psychological, psychiatric. For sex offenders, there's a psychosexual assessment. We do trauma, PTSD, adverse childhood experience assessments.
This one, UCLA, child adolescent PTSD reaction, that's a specific one that we require. We have education specialists on the team that take a look at each child's education needs to see where we need to place them based on that. There's individualized education planning. we have 504 special education planning there's dyslexia assessments substance abuse assessments dental vision last time I was here we had our substance abuse peer support specialist which was the first of those we had hired we're in the process of hiring a second substance abuse peer support specialist
that works with the kids and teaches them to sit down together and work through their problems with substance abuse the treatment team this this is going to give you an idea of that individualization that you get from the treatment team. This is a list of the individuals at DYS who are now assigned to that treatment team. So instead of it basically being one individual, a DYS staff member determining what your treatment plan was going to be, these are the individuals now involved in looking at every aspect of the kids' needs. You have team
coordinator who's a nurse. We have a behavioral health manager who's a licensed counselor. Beneath her we have four behavioral health clinicians now they're involved we have a behavior health modification specialist we have an education specialist independent living transition coordinator the aforementioned substance abuse peer support coordinator and then you have a list of basically we have one person who supervises those case coordinators and then we have 11 case coordinators so those are the individuals that go out into the facility monthly and meet with
the kids and come back and report and let let us know how things are going the really big change is this is the treatment team coming back together now and these these routinely scheduled treatment team review staffings at least every 90 days they come back together with the juvenile the parents are invited probation the aftercare worker so we want we want the aftercare workers and those community based providers involved as early as possible so when they get a kid who's released to the community they saw at the beginning what the problems were
what the plan was going to be and they know how things are going while the child's there our treatment staff case coordinator are all involved in these uh these review meetings that take place starting to get into some numbers and some of the results we're seeing here prior to may of 2019 in may of 2019 is when the treatment team may one is when we started this process we started with uh the first juvenile that was committed to our custody on may 1st and then we just kind of tried to work through all the other kids that were there already because we couldn't really put 300 kids uh we didn't have enough staff to do those
individualized treatment plans for 300 kids at one time so we take that we started with the first child committed may 1st and and we deal with every kid as they're committed to our custody before may before we started this treatment team within the last you know two and a half years that we looked at data we had as many as 73 kids at a time um in these county-run juvenile detention centers um it it it peaked around 46 again back in june or so of 2019 i believe it was as we were winding down the state running these facilities and we were having staffing issues so
a lot of kids were being placed there just because we simply didn't have room or because any time a kid was disruptive at all they would be sent to a juvenile detention center to sit and cool off for an undetermined period. As many as 352 kids within the last two and a half years were in our residential programs at one time. Our residential programs include the facilities that DYS runs, the juvenile detention centers, and what we call specialty placements, which would be the group homes. We have group homes, regular group homes, and we have sex offender group homes as well,
sex offender residential treatment, I should say. Currently, we had, and this was as of February 3rd, We had six children in the juvenile detention centers. Probably four of those were actually there receiving their treatment, so we only had two kids that were there because they needed a short disruption timeout of some type. It's stayed in single digits now for two or three months. Yeah, two or three months it's been in the single digits, and we really feel comfortable that we can keep it there. Currently we have 235 kids in our residential facilities.
I believe it's about 187 in the five facilities that DYS runs, which is, I can't go back any further than the data I have, but I feel pretty confident that that's probably the lowest number we've had at DYS in many, many years. This is a snapshot of the residential population. You can see there those numbers, and if you notice, as I said, the team began in May with the individualized treatment planning. We saw a real change in, I'd say, in November.
We had a pretty good drop back down to where we have about 180 or so in the 180s, the number of kids in our five facilities that DYS runs, and we've stayed at that since November. It's stayed pretty flat. It hasn't gotten above 190 or below 180, so it's been pretty steady since then as now the kids are getting their treatment. They're not being moved frequently, so they're able to complete their treatment without all these multiple disruptions that, you know, are traumatic for the kids in the first place. So we're seeing things sort of start to stabilize. We know it's not ever going to drop, obviously, to zero, but we feel like at some point we'll get to where things will level off.
Crime has been going down, I think, for quite some time, and I think with the judges, with the savory risk assessment that's now being implemented statewide, we've seen, you know, the number of commitments has dropped a little bit every year for the past two or three years as that pilot program has been in place. We expect it to drop a little bit more in the number of commitments as the rest of the judicial districts come in line using that validated risk assessment tool. This is the slide showing monthly commitments. It's a little harder to kind of see, but I will say we're running around 24, 25 commitments a month now.
We had a peak in October, I think, of 39. For some reason, we had a really heavy October in 2019. but we're seeing it level out to where it's running in the mid-20s right now. So we do see a drop in commitments from year to year. And the last slide I have here represents the juvenile detention center population. I believe that's two and a half years of data. You can see where it was up over 70, and then it's now we've had a little bit of a spike at 46,
and then now you can see where it's dropped ever since that July of 2019 date to where we're not using those centers to hold kids. We're getting the kids in the treatment. We're keeping them in treatment. We've worked really closely with the providers, and they've been great for if a child is having problems, instead of just sending them away, sitting down and working with the kid to find out what the problem is and keeping them there so they can continue their treatment. If you need to pull them aside and work with them and sit down, that's fine, but go ahead and keep the treatment, keep their education,
don't disrupt their progress, you know, just because they're having problems. Because we know, I mean, the kids that we're going to be getting at DYS, they have those problems. And if the courts are only sending us the kids that need to be going there, I mean, we expect the facilities to be able to handle the juveniles and any aggression or anything they might have without sending everyone into a juvenile detention center where they're not receiving treatment. And that's the end of my presentation today. We are also, we're taking a real hard look now at moving into those community-based services, diversion.
We have a diversion unit now that did not exist before. Now that we sort of, we feel like we've gotten our house in order with the kids that are in our custody and are detained in a secure setting, we're starting to take a look at what we can do on that community-based services, the diversion side, to see what we can do to increase the services that are available. And so that we can do a better job when a child is released from our custody and they're re-entering the community, we can do a better job of making sure we have that continuum of services. So a child really needs to be able to have that continuum.
Those kids that have never even, you know, their first contact with the court long before they might be committed to DYS all the way through the kids that have been to DYS and been released in the community, they all need to have those, those same resources available to them. So now we're taking a look at that and seeing what we can do differently with our contracting and within the budget that we have to be able to make those changes. So if there are any questions for myself or Ms. Grape, we'd be happy to answer.
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
37:00
Thank you. I really appreciated when you went over this with me, and I wanted our entire committee to have an opportunity to hear this.
This is very encouraging news, and we appreciate it. We have some new members on this committee. Could you tell us exactly where
Speaker 69
37:16
the facilities are located? Yes, we have five facilities. We closed
Speaker 59
37:20
two in July of 2019, which had been planned for a little while. We now have one facility in Dermott that is our 18- to 21-year-old facility. It's one of our most secure facilities. We have a facility in Alexander is our largest. We have capacity for 100 juveniles at Alexander,
and also those 20 assessment beds are located in Alexander and centrally located within the state. Just to follow up, we were at full capacity at Alexander for probably the first, I don't know, 11, 12 months I was here, and finally we have enough capacity there where we have a little bit of room. And it's also one of our more secure facilities in Alexander, so a lot of your more high needs, your serious offenders go to Alexander. So we're really happy to report that we were able to keep, you know, 10, 12 beds open
so we can get kids straight into especially those high-risk, high-needs kids. So we have Dermott for 18 to 21, Alexander. We have Harrisburg, which is now, as of July, is an all-girls facility. It's not as secure as Alexander or Dermott. The more high-risk, high-needs girls are at Alexander. So we have girls at Harrisburg and Alexander. We have a facility in Mansfield, and then we also have a facility in Louisville as well. So we have those five facilities around the state.
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
38:41
Thank you. Are there any questions? Representative Crawford.
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
38:47
Thank you Madam Chair. You're doing a great job. Thank you. Thank you. I think my concern is before this job was done so well and those kids were just left for a couple of years are you guys following those kids making sure that their mental health is stable are they followed once you found out what was happening
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
39:18
or are you talking about in general ones that you recognize that have been left there for a couple of years yes absolutely
Speaker 74
39:25
they had their case coordinators will follow them through aftercare we're looking at making some changes to the
Speaker 59
39:31
aftercare that we provide a re-entry as it sometimes is called to make sure that not only do we have our case coordinators and we have those community-based providers who are assigned to see to it that they're getting the care they need in the community, but that our treatment team is also involved to be able to make any changes and meet with that community-based provider and the case coordinator now, which
is something we've not been able to do in the past. Now that we have our four behavioral health clinicians in place, we've been operating with one or two up until recently, we'll be able to provide even more oversight for those kids. Representative
Speaker 76
40:06
Fortner. Thank you, Madam Chairman. And to follow up on that line of thought, do you have any way of measuring your success rate with these?
Speaker 59
40:14
Recidivism is the next. One of the big projects that was already underway when I came to DYS was getting a hold of the data.
We had data available, but it wasn't being utilized. It wasn't really organized or maintained in a meaningful way. So a lot of the things that we've been able to do is because we were able to start getting our data in order as far as the kids that are in our custody, the kids on aftercare, you know, starting with those, just how many kids do we have? Where are they? How long are they staying in our treatment? What's really going on with the kids that are in DYS custody and once they're released? So our primary focus was that first, to make sure we had that daily up-to-date data that we can look at and see
what's going on so you don't end up with full detention centers and things and nobody's really taking a hard look at it. Recidivism is another area that we will now be looking at. We've started the process of getting the data together so we can start matching that data and taking a look at the recidivism rates for both our secure detention centers as well as our C-STEP civilian student training program, the boot camp that we operate out at Camp Robinson now that we took over as of July. We're looking at recidivism there as well as with DYS children.
We don't have those numbers yet. It's something that we've just started embarking on now that we have other things in order, but
Representative Carol Dalby
Unverified
41:33
we will be taking a look at recidivism as well. Representative Dalby. Thank you, Madam Chair. Do you also keep track of how the specialty courts with the juvenile drug specialty court, do you work in concert with that to kind of keep up with that? Because that's a diversion prior to them getting there, and I'm just wondering how is that
Speaker 69
41:53
working? Correct. In the past, we've pretty much paid for a lot of those services.
Speaker 59
41:58
We have funds that we distribute to the community-based providers. They work with the courts to determine what each individual judicial district needs from the community-based providers, and some of that involves diversion programs because, as I've heard from judges, the judges feel like they know what programs work best in their communities, and so they're able to utilize those funds to run diversion programs. And we do get some data that's entered into our system telling us about the kids that are in these diversion programs so we can see that they are being provided these services.
I wouldn't say it's consistent across the board, but we're working on that as well in our next round of contracts to be able to make sure that we are getting that, I guess, I've heard the term use other places in counter data, but we want to know precisely what kids are being served in diversion programs, all these pre-DYS commitment programs that are out there and have that information entered into our system so that we can really start taking a look at what's working. So first we get that recidivism that we can see, From us, we can also start making those correlations between what programs work out in the community
and diversion programs and things like that. So we do get some of the data. We do work to fund those, and we have some grants also, a small amount of federal grants that we oversee that we distribute for those types of programs, but we are not the ones actually running those programs. It's the community-based providers working together
Speaker 36
43:27
with the judiciary. Representative Stubblefield. Excuse me, Senator Stelbeckfield. Thank
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
43:33
you, Madam Chair. Mr. Crump, did Southwest Arkansas Counseling,
did they receive all the payments for the services they rendered?
Speaker 59
43:39
As far as I've been told and my contracts unit has been told, and we're looking at that right now, they are up to date. I think they wait about a month before they pay, so they don't pay them right away. I was told by the youth opportunities that they were up to date as of two weeks ago.
Speaker 83
43:57
you mentioned in a you alluded to in an article back in february
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
44:01
that i read about a hostile work environment how long was that allowed to go on before someone took action that i that wasn't
Speaker 74
44:11
i didn't allude to that but i don't i do know the therapist from southwest arkansas had written that letter um the letter came to us i think on the 13th of february and so by the 14th or 15th
Speaker 86
44:22
of February. I think both your microphones are on. Oh, there you go.
Speaker 59
44:28
That's all. By the next day or two, our contract management unit had sent a letter of concern to YOY asking for some detail because it's a subcontractor relationship that they had with Southwest Arkansas to provide those therapy services. And our main concern was that the children are getting the therapy. And we did
confirm that there had been no interruption in the kids getting the services on there, but there There seemed to be a relationship issue between Youth Opportunities and Southwest Arkansas, and Youth Opportunities had already been making plans to bring those services in-house, which they've done at the other facilities they run, and Rides for Passage and Alexander, the other provider, they do that as well. They provide those therapy services they hire and bring that in-house. So we did what we could to make sure the children were receiving their services and make sure that the contractor is paying the subcontractor.
But I think at the end of this month, that contract is going to, their subcontractor contract is terminating, and they have already hired a lead clinician and another therapist to provide those services in-house. So all those services that were provided back
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
45:31
in the summer of last year, they've been paid? Yes, I think they were up
Speaker 59
45:40
back with you on the specific dates. I don't have, again, those invoices don't come to us when any provider chooses to use a subcontractor, so unless we ask for them, we don't have the actual invoices, but we
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
45:51
can get those. Thank you so much. Thank you. We appreciate the work that you're doing. Next, we have a report by the Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education, and we'll be hearing from Tanya Williams, Director of the Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education with DHS, and Ashlyn Abney, Assistant Director of Operations and Program Support with the Division of Child Care and Early
Michael Crump
Unverified
46:20
Childhood Education, DHS. So you're both recognized.
Speaker 89
46:24
Good morning. Tanya Williams, Director of the Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education. Let me point out, Ashlyn Abney is not sitting next to me. It's my colleague, Mark Quiet. Ashlyn's actually conducting training with all of our licensing staff across the state and really regrets not being able to be here, but that was scheduled ahead of time. So thank you, committee, for allowing me to be here to present this report. And when you're ready, I'll start. Okay. And
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
46:51
Mr. White, we do recognize that you're here, and thank you for being with us.
Speaker 90
46:55
Thank you, Madam Chair, and I apologize for the last-minute change, but we just want to make sure
Speaker 89
47:02
we can answer all your questions. So I'm reporting on Act 131 of the legislative session in 2019. There were really two parts for the Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education to that act. One was that we create an infographic or form that we put on our website that really simplifies the application process for programs in the state. I'm happy to say that we thought that was an excellent idea,
and we actually had that on our website before the legislation was signed last year. And I have a copy of it if anybody's interested. That wasn't in the packet, but it is on our website. Secondly, we were required to report out about any items, taking a look at our standards or regulations compared to federal regulations. So that is a report that you should have in front of you. And I just want to walk you through, and I think for purposes of illustration, this might be a really simple way to show you.
This book right here are the National Program Standards for Child Care Licensing. in the country. This book is Arkansas's child care licensing standards. So I just want to show you this book does have some guidelines. So about half of the book and I've kind of scanned it is is just guidelines or rationale for why we do this this way. So that makes up about half of it. But even if you split it, there's there are a lot of things in this document. We try to be practical
and we try to really be comprehensive in a very succinct way. So I did want to point that out. As I walked through the report, I put a little cover sheet so that you would know, up until 2013, Arkansas and the rest of the states in the nation were ranked based on their child care licensing standards. And Arkansas was ranked really first for its program oversight and monitoring. And the reason we're ranked really high is because in Arkansas, we visit programs three times a year.
One of those visits is to review the records in that program, so staffing, training, those things that are required. The other two visits are just to make sure that minimum health and safety standards are being met. There are also fire and health inspections that are required outside of my division, and programs have to have those as well. And sometimes people aren't aware that there are other entities that may be monitoring programs or have standards in place beyond what we do. But we do check for that when we're at a facility.
Do they have a current fire inspection? That's part of the licensing application, as well as making sure that they're current on that and that they're actually doing fire drills with children and safety drills with children. We were ranked in 2013 41st for our program standards. I will tell you, as someone who until recently ran the Arkansas Better Chance program, that's one of the best pre-K programs in the country, 41st is really not a good place to be, in my opinion. And so in 2014, I put my staff in a room for two years,
periodically when they had time to meet, and told them to work through this book as well as other national standards and revise what we were doing. And so we have not had a ranking since 2013. I look forward to the day when they rank our state. We will not be 41st any longer, I can assure you. We will probably be somewhere closer to the middle of the country. I don't think we're going to get in the top ten there because as you'll see in the report, we meet standards and regulation requirements, federal requirements in many places, but there are a few places that we do not.
So I'm going to go ahead and start. On oversight standards, we meet that we inspect programs four times a year, and that's really because we have health and fire inspections as well as the three visits that we do in early childhood and child care programs. The licensing staff ratio, 50 to 1. Our ratio is 60 to 1 in Arkansas, so we do not meet that. We do not have, you know, if we're trying to meet that standard, we're not adequately staffed. I'm not asking you to add staff. I think we're fine there. We just have a slightly higher ratio than the rest of the country.
Our licensing staff are required to have a bachelor's degree. It can be in early childhood, child development, or a related field. We have staff that have social work degrees and other degrees, but they do have to have a degree, so we do meet that standard. Our online inspection and complaint reports are on our website. They've been there. We were one of the first states in the country that did that. If you go to the agency's website, I encourage you, on the Division of Child Care, there is a search for child care. You can go and look on that search engine by city, zip code, county, a whole multitude of things if you're interested in what's available in your area.
You can also look at the hours of care, if they're quality. It will show three stars for the highest quality, and then all the programs listed going down to two stars, one star, and then just meeting minimum licensing standards. So I want to make sure you're available of that capability as well. It also has any complaint visits, investigations, and the results of that on the website when you're looking at that facility. Moving to the Child Care Center Program Standards. These are federal requirements, and they're federal requirements not because licensing is a federal requirement,
but because we get child care development block grant funds, and to the tune of almost $80 million in the state that helps pay and offset the cost for low-income families' child care assistance if they're working or in school. So there are specific requirements for programs, and it applies to all licensed programs, not just programs that take those funds. Some of these are new, and I'm sure you've heard about some of them from your programs, having to do with criminal background checks specifically. All programs now are required to get FBI fingerprint checks,
and we're also required to do state fingerprint checks. Those are new requirements, and we are working on automation and hope to be automated within the next few months. And it's very exciting for both my team in the office as well as for programs out in the field. And that's a whole other conversation that we can have, and I'm sure you'll be briefed on it as we continue to move into the automation phase. We meet, as you see on this page, the comprehensive background check. We are meeting that. We do have requirements for orientation and training.
These are all federal requirements that our state meets. I won't read through all of them, but as you can see, we do meet. We do not exceed. We meet these. On the back page or on the next page, these are program standards. These are not federally required standards. We do not meet these. We partially meet the first one, and that was a result of the change in 2014 that requires center directors to have a bachelor's degree. We did grandfather in programs, so we have some providers that have both experience
and maybe some education, but we do not require that everyone have a bachelor's degree at this point, so that one we partially meet. We do not require lead teachers to have a child development associate degree in early childhood or other college education in Arkansas, you can have a high school diploma or GED to work in an early childhood classroom. For child care center providers, we require 15 hours of training. That has been increased over the time that I've been in the division, up from 10 hours. It's now 15. The national recommendation is 24.
I will say that I think a lot of programs probably get more than 15 hours, but I'm aware there probably are some who only meet the minimum requirement. um the staff child ratios we do not meet and i just just to give you a sense of that in arkansas for an infant the requirement is one to five nationally it's one to four so we're slightly above probably on all the ratios just a little bit above what the national recommendation is and those were changed some of those changes we made in 14-15 so we improved hours but we didn't
get to what the national recommendations are. And then our group size is double the size. So, for example, in an infant classroom, our ratio is one to five, and the group size is ten. Nationally, it's one to four with a group size of eight. So you can kind of do the math there and figure we're just slightly above on both group size and ratio and everything. I'm going to stop there. That's really the report, and then let you all ask questions, if you have any.
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
55:32
Members, do you have questions? Okay, seeing none, thank you for this report. Thank you. Next, we have the report on the Arkansas Infant and Child Death Review. That's Exhibit G, and we have with us Don Porter from the Infant and Child Death Review Coordinator of Arkansas Children's Hospital.
And will you introduce yourselves to the committee, please?
Speaker 96
56:09
Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm Dawn Porter. I'm the Infant and Child
Speaker 98
56:15
Death Review Program Coordinator. Abdallah Dalby. I'm a pediatric physician here in Arkansas Children's, and I'm the director of the
Speaker 96
56:29
ahead, Madam Chair? Yes, please. Thank you. When looking at the 2017 deaths that were reviewed by the Infant and Child Death Review Program, there were a total of 457 child deaths under the age of 18 in Arkansas.
Of those deaths, 188 were eligible for review. There were 149 that were actually reviewed. Of those deaths that were reviewed, accidental deaths increased while undetermined deaths decreased. This is due to the improved quality of death investigations and reporting systems across the state. Between 2015 and 2017, there was a decreased trend in deaths among children five to nine years old, and an increased trend in deaths among children 10 to 14.
When looking at the manner of death for those cases reviewed, there were 81 accidental deaths that were reviewed. 28 of those were motor vehicle accidents, there was an 18% increase in motor vehicle crashes among males and children 10 to 14 years old, and 11% increase in motor vehicle crashes where there was no restraint used. There were 28 asphyxia-related deaths that were reviewed, which indicated a 40% increase in asphyxia deaths among children under the age of one.
And again, this is due to improved quality death investigations and reporting systems across the state. Adult beds were the primary leading location of these infant deaths that occurred and was also the usual sleep location for these
Speaker 103
58:01
infants. There were 13 drowning deaths that were reviewed. And between 2016 and 2017, our drowning deaths among one
Speaker 96
58:09
to four-year-olds showed a 24% decrease. Undetermined deaths. two undetermined death cases that were reviewed, 100 percent of these undetermined deaths were
sleep-related, again with adult beds being the primary location of those deaths. There were 21
Speaker 103
58:25
suicide cases that were reviewed for 2017. Suicide rate is still the highest among children aged 15 to 17-year-olds, and family and school issues were the highest contributing factors in suicide deaths. There were ten homicide cases that were reviewed for 2017. And our case report showed that children under the age of one had a 40% increase in homicide deaths.
Speaker 96
58:54
And children 15 to 17 year olds had a 48% decrease in homicide deaths. Thank
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
59:04
you. Members, do you have questions concerning this report? Representative
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
59:12
Mayberry. Thank you. You didn't get all the way down into more specifics of car accidents and things like that. Can I go that far into the report? Okay. A question that I've had, and I'm just trying to find facts that would support or not support a current law that we have in place.
I want to make sure that if we've got a law that adds restrictions, that they're actually making a difference, and they're not just there because we think this is a good idea. And one of the things I have to tell you, I've got four teenage daughters, and so we have drivers that are out there. My oldest is 20, and there's an issue that comes up every single time, practically every day in our world. If you are age 16 to 18, you cannot bring more than one passenger in that vehicle that is not related to you.
So that creates some conflict in our house because my daughter has after-school practices at school. And so we have to take off our time to drive there to pick her up, whereas there's another member of the dance team that could bring her home, but she can't because she's already bringing someone else home. We have situations where you could carpool with another teenager to get somewhere So we're not, you know, have extra gas expense on this, extra gas expense over here.
Sometimes there's safety in numbers when they're driving in certain areas. It's actually, I believe in some areas, it's probably better when there's more, you know, more in a vehicle. We have a lot of situations like that. And so I wonder if we are punishing the students who know how to drive, take driving seriously, and would be responsible on the road. Because what I'm also seeing is that I see a lot of teenage drivers who pay no attention to this.
My kids are rule followers, and they know not to get into that car if there's another teenager in there. But I see over and over again four or five kids getting into a car. And so I'm just trying to figure out. I'm certainly not trying to make things more dangerous. But I have not been able to find, because I've been looking into this for probably two or three years, and I've asked BLR to look into it for me, and I haven't really been able to find any statistics that truly show that we have seen a decrease in the number of deaths
or accidents of our teen drivers when, uh, because of this law? Can you, and you may not have the answer, but can we find that answer? So, uh, I
Speaker 98
1:02:01
work in the ICU. So those kids who does not make it to this list, they come to me. And some of the kids who make it to this list also had passed through my ICU. Unfortunately, most of the teenagers are actually not rule followers,
and most of them will have been texting or been driving in really high speeds in hours that they are not allowed to be driving, and in some cases have other people with them in the car that they should not have. I'm not really sure when this law was passed, but looking at our data, we can go and look at what's the effect of it, if any. The problem with that is like any problem with statistics, there's a lot of confounders with that, and it's really hard to go back and say,
well, this part of the law is actually what made this difference. But we will be happy to go back and look at when that law was implemented and what happened to the number since then. But I can tell you, we just reviewed a kid, what, last week, and the kid was in a car with a bunch of other kids, and she was on the back of the pickup truck.
So there is no way to tell you that, yes, if we pass a law, it's not going to be the reason for those patients or those kids not to die because there's a lot of other kids who will not follow those rules, and we see that frequently in our reviews. Does that
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
1:03:50
answer it? Yes. Representative Mayberry, we need to move on. If you could get with them perhaps offline and discuss this more. Okay.
Any other questions? Okay, seeing none, thank you for being with us. Thank you, committee. Okay, seeing no other business before us, or does anyone have anything that you need to bring before the committee? Well, thank you for being here today, and we are dismissed.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Comments by the Chairs
1. Senator Bart Hester
2. Representative Charlene Fite
C. Consideration to Approve Minutes of the December 10, 2019, Meeting [EXHIBIT C]
D. Review of the July-September 2019 Quarterly Report - Crimes Against Children Division, Arkansas State Police (ASP) [EXHIBIT D]
– Major Jeff Drew, Commander, ASP
E. Discussion on the Intake Process and Recent Policy Changes by the Division of Youth Services (DYS), Department of Human Services (DHS) [EXHIBIT E1-E2]
1. Michael Crump, Director, DYS, DHS
2. Cheryl Grappe, Assistant Director for Treatment, DYS, DHS
3. Mark White, Chief of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs, DHS
F. Report by the Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education as Required by Act 131 of 2019
[EXHIBIT F]
1. Tonya Williams, Director, Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education, DHS
2. Ashelyn Abney, Assistant Director of Operations and Program Support, Division of Child Care and Early
Childhood Education, DHS
– Dawn Porter, Infant and Child Death Review Coordinator, Arkansas Children’s Hospital
H. Other Business
I. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — CHILDREN & YOUTH COMMITTEE - SENATE & AGING, CHILDREN & YOUTH, AND LEGISLATIVE AFFAIRS- HOUSE, Feb 12, 2020 | Agenda | 2 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit C - Minutes | Exhibit | 4 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit D - ASP - CACD - Quarterly Report - July-Sept 2019 | Exhibit | 35 needs OCR | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit E1 - DYS Treatment Presentation | Exhibit | 11 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit E2 - Treatment Infographic | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit F - Act 131 Report 2019 | Exhibit | 4 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit G - ICDR Annual Report 2019 | Exhibit | 44 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Representative Charlene Fite
Unverified
Speaker 5
Speaker 7
Speaker 9
Speaker 19
Speaker 22
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
Representative Brian S. Evans
Unverified
Senator Mathew Pitsch
Unverified
Speaker 28
Speaker 47
Speaker 50
Speaker 52
Senator Bart Hester
Unverified
Speaker 59
Speaker 69
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
Speaker 74
Speaker 76
Representative Carol Dalby
Unverified
Speaker 36
Speaker 83
Speaker 86
Michael Crump
Unverified
Speaker 89
Speaker 90
Speaker 96
Speaker 98
Speaker 100
Speaker 103
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified