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- October 7, 2026
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
2:00
Okay, we're two minutes late, so we're
eight minutes early on legislative time, so let's get this meeting started, and Senator Kim Hammer got me in a habit when we chaired JPR
together of starting meetings off with prayer and a pledge, and I have asked Representative Scott to lead us in prayer first, and then Representative Tosh to lead us in the pledge immediately after, so if you will stand, and Representative Scott will lead us in prayer. Amen.
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
3:53
So we are to agenda item B. I want to thank all of you for being here, and I'm going And to go to Representative Dalby, my co-chair first, for any comments that she might have.
And she doesn't have any. I want to thank our presenters, Judge Peggy Walker and Judge Diana Johnson, for coming all the way from Georgia, flying all the way from Georgia, which is even more of an ordeal these days, to be here with us. I met them in April of 2019, the day after we ended the legislative session, I believe. We presented together, although we had never met each other, on child welfare reform.
Together separately, I should say, on child welfare reform in our separate states and was very impressed with what Georgia was doing and very interested in what Georgia is doing. and Georgia is a leading state right at the top on child welfare reform and interestingly to me and I think to everyone the judiciary is the spark behind that that reform and so we're very glad to
have them here today I think you will find their presentation very interesting hope you have lots of questions and the and again I just thank them for being here so moving on to C consideration to adopt meeting minutes from move got a motion
to move to adopt the minutes do we have a second got a second couple of seconds any discussion
seeing none all for the motion signify by saying aye All opposed? Motion carried. Moving to right on to D. I've asked my co-chair, Representative Dalby, to read an intro. Thank you, Senator Clark. It is our
Representative Carol Dalby
Unverified
6:25
privilege and honor today to have these guests with us, and it's my honor to introduce them to you.
First, we have Peggy Walker, who has a master's degree in education from Georgia State University and a Juris Doctorate degree in law from GSU College of Law. She served as a Judge Pro Tem, Associate Judge and Judge of the Juvenile Court of Douglas County, Georgia, for 29 years, retiring in December 2019. She has served as President of the Council for Juvenile Court Judges for the State of Georgia and as President of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, where she worked with Brookings Institute, the Pew Charitable Foundation, and Casey Family Programs
on Child Welfare Finance Reform. She is a Harris Zero to Three Fellow and a Senior Fellow at Emory University's College of Law. She is the Interim Chair of Georgia's Child Fatality Review, having served on that panel since 2012. She consults on best practices and policies for resilient children, families, and communities She's working with NCJFCJ 0-3 Emory Neurodevelopment Clinic, Resilient Georgia, Get Georgia Reading
Cabinet, and The Gears, a nonprofit focused on early childhood learning and development. And we welcome you, Judge Walker, to the Arkansas Capitol. We also have with us Diana Johnson, who holds a master's degree in biochemistry from Clemson University and a law degree from Georgia State University College of Law. She serves as Judge Pro Tem in the Juvenile Court of DeKalb County, Georgia, and was one of the first attorneys in the state to be certified as a child welfare law specialist.
She is on the Steering Committee of the American Bar Association's National Alliance for Parent Representation and the Board of Directors of the Georgia Association of Counsel for Children. In her private practice, she focuses on guardian ad litem work, adoptions, SSI, and disability. Diana trains with other child welfare attorneys in Georgia and across the United States on a variety of topics, including trial skills, effective case planning, understanding drug tests, and due diligence in medically complicated cases.
Ladies, we welcome you to our Capitol, and we look forward to hearing from you.
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
8:47
Senator Clark. I'm so glad I asked you to do that, Representative. You did that so much better than I would have. That was great. Judge Walker and Judge Johnson, if y'all could come on up to the presenting table, and we'll get started.
And when you get there, the chair is going to request, you don't have to, But the chair is going to request so that I can read your lips, since you're distant from everyone, that you remove your masks so that we can better hear your communications. I think so. So, we are to item E, discussion of child welfare court reform, and we're ready for y'all to start wherever you would like to start.
Oops, we need you to turn your
Speaker 17
10:02
mics on. I figured that out. Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to visit your beautiful state and to
Speaker 19
10:10
talk to you about something that we are extraordinarily passionate about, and that's children. I think that we can have a very fruitful discussion, and certainly we're not limited to just the discussions today. This is something that's near and dear to my heart, and yes, I may be retired, but
Speaker 20
10:27
it doesn't mean that I'm not working. I will work to make sure that children have better lives regardless of my employment status.
So thank you for this gracious opportunity to serve. And I second what Judge
Speaker 21
10:42
Walker said. We've done so much good work in the state of Georgia, and we are excited to share our experiences with you. Okay,
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
10:51
the floor is yours. So, in the spirit
Speaker 26
11:00
of the hard work that we've been doing in Georgia over the last 10 years in child welfare, we will be speaking to you about the revision of our entire juvenile
code, about the change that we made in 2014 that you all also recently made in 2019 to the presumption of unsupervised visitation between parents and children who are in foster care. We will talk with you about our juvenile courts being open to the public, our work with our own court improvement project, and our commitment to judicial and legal education and child welfare. The
Speaker 27
11:38
road to code revision was a long one for Georgia. We began the idea with
Speaker 19
11:44
discussions among the judges. Our code was written in the 1970s, and each time federal legislation was enacted and we had to make changes to Georgia's statutes, we developed a number of inconsistencies within the statutory framework. And it became evident that there was a need for code revision. So the first part of our job was to build public will. And that's the type of work that you're doing here today, is talking openly and honestly about your system and the things that you want to be looking at and that you want to focus on to
bring that change. So the discussion began among the judges. It was shared with legislators and then it was shared with a number of our community partners. And it was actually within the context of our nonprofit community where they got out and actually found funding to begin to pull together a complete revision of the code. And by complete revision, I mean that every single statute was rewritten start to finish, and it helped tremendously with clarity, it helped with definitions, and it
helped with organization. What was unique about this process is that it was very, very deliberate. Every segment that deals with children was brought into
Speaker 29
13:01
the room to talk about the good, the bad, the ugly, what they wanted to see, and what they didn't want to see, and that was actually the beginning
Speaker 19
13:14
of the work. The second piece that was critical to being successful was what you call your brain
Speaker 20
13:20
trust. You have to have people that everyone trusts. And by bringing in academic
specialists, by bringing in a judge who was the judge in our state that does all the model orders, everyone knew that she was academically superior in terms of her abilities and in terms of her analysis. So bringing in a brain trust to actually
Speaker 29
13:41
do the drafting of the code and then making certain that that goes back to stakeholders, more stakeholder meetings,
Speaker 20
13:49
more feedback, more revisions, and then having your champions. You have to have champions in your community,
Speaker 19
13:56
you have to have them in your legislature, but you also have to have them in the judiciary. The judiciary stays in that position for a very long time. You have turnover in your executive branch. You have turnover in your child welfare leadership. You have turnover in your legislature. But your judges tend to stay, and that's why it's very important that you
Speaker 30
14:18
have that judicial support and that you have those judicial champions there. What we
Speaker 19
14:28
provide a guideline to our brain trust.
And that was the Enhanced Resource Guidelines for Dependency Cases and the Enhanced Juvenile Justice Guidelines because they were based upon the science of child development, upon the
Speaker 20
14:43
research around what is effective. If you don't study the science and the research, it takes 18 years to lead to implementation of what we know now. That's an entire generation of children that is lost.
So it's our job to know what the research is. It's our job to translate research into practice, and it's our job to use the data to test if what we're doing is
Speaker 19
15:18
actually effective. So our code was based upon a lot of responsibility on judges in
Speaker 20
15:24
providing judicial oversight, making people play well together, and making sure that it was family-centered and family-focused.
Of course, once we passed our legislation, we found problems with some of the parts of it, and we continued to do cleanup language annually until we got all of the
Speaker 19
15:47
issues addressed. The legislative process was certainly very effective because everyone had the opportunity to be heard. Compromises were made to make certain that we got
Speaker 20
15:57
the code in place. And more importantly, once the code was enacted, the legislature allowed us a year of preparation time
to do the training for the implementation of the new code. It is well worth your time and your effort. I think that the way that we serve families now is much better, and I think that the work we do now is much better. We are all going to see big changes with the Family First Prevention Services Act, and I'm excited about that. It's going to shift our work. It's going to shift us to doing more work up front in every effort to keep families together.
And that in and of itself is going to
Speaker 36
16:39
lead to the need for some additional changes to the Georgia Code and certainly to
Speaker 26
16:52
the codes throughout the nation. So the presumption of unsupervised visitation between parents and children was one of the biggest changes in our new juvenile code. And I was a practitioner back then, mostly representing parents accused of abuse and neglect, and sometimes representing children. And it was a big surprise, reading the first drafts of the new code, that the presumption would be for unsupervised visitation.
And the next biggest surprise was that it was the judges who actually advocated for the presumption of unsupervised visitation. And, of course, I asked Judge Walker and some other judges who were really behind this what the logic was, because I really couldn't follow their reasoning right off the bat. And what Judge Walker explained was that frequent and meaningful visits between parents and children maintains and enhances the parental bond, that the more contact we have between parents and children, the faster reunification happens,
and that the default to supervised visitation in all child welfare cases supports the harmful us-versus-them mentality of the child welfare system. And just simply economically, why waste so many precious resources on transportation and supervision when it isn't necessary? So we are six years in to the presumption of unsupervised visitation. So we'd like to share some of our experiences and talk about the differences between Georgia's statute and Arkansas's statute and how we address visitation.
And you can see here that our statutes are quite similar. The biggest difference between Georgia's statute and Arkansas's is that the Georgia statute mandates that an order for visitation be made when the child is removed, which translates to that 72-hour hearing, the first time that parents and children appear in court. And that was already the practice in a lot of Georgia's courts, but in other courts, we have 159 counties in Georgia,
so practices vary very widely, but there were other courts where parents and children were going weeks and sometimes months without any formalized visitation. There were, in some counties, the agency was treating visitation between parents and children as a privilege, and even when visitation was being granted by the agency, there was often confusions about what the parameters for visitation were, and so we would end up with parents unknowingly violating rules that they didn't know were in place.
So it's been very successful having the court mandated to make a visitation order at that very first 72-hour hearing. In Georgia, we're very serious about what
Speaker 19
19:44
we now call family time because we think that visitation is really not the right terminology because what we want to do is build stronger families and not give the impression that this is something that's very casual. When I began my career as a guardian ad litem for children 30 years ago, it was not uncommon for children to see their parents one
hour a month. And I was livid because I have a master's degree in education, a background in child development, and that was the most unrealistic expectation that our system had. And I fought vehemently to get weekly visitation. And they thought that I was a real radical and And I was successful because I brought in the child development experts. But then when I became judge, I said, you know, once a week's not enough, especially when you're dealing with infants. Ideally, children should see their parents when they're very young,
daily, for short periods of time. Given our system, given our resources, that wasn't realistic. But I ordered it three times a week, and they're like, we can't do this. I said, yes, you
Speaker 20
20:51
can. You have to. It's the order, and it's got to be done. And then we began to develop resources within families. We began to develop resources in the community. Even our foster parents stepped up and stepped in, and yes, we do those frequent visitations,
Speaker 19
21:07
and it works. Because what I shared is absolutely correct.
The more involvement parents have, the more likely they are to work their case plan and do reunification. The more we separate them from their children, the more frustrated they become, and the easier it is to walk away. And that's not what we want for our families. I have had the pleasure of serving 11 years on the board of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. I've worked very closely with Judge Warren over the course of years as a 0-3 fellow, in addition to National Council work with Judge Naramore in the implementation sites at National Council.
And the quality and nature of the education that we get from the National Council, particularly on research and implementation of research, makes a huge difference in judicial education. Additionally, National Council offers scholarships to be able to train judges in specialty areas, particularly around areas of domestic violence. And I don't know what your statistics look like, but when I began my work, Georgia was fifth in the nation for men killing women, and that was not a top ten list that we wanted to be on.
And we've worked very diligently with National Council on the training of judges to make sure we were sensitive to domestic violence issues. And I want to encourage you as you're looking at your reform to make certain that you are giving those cases the weight they need, the resources they need, and also the safety precautions that are necessary to
Speaker 41
22:40
protect those who have been victims of domestic violence. If I could interrupt just a moment.
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
22:50
I don't want to take you off your thoughts, but on the subject of unsupervised visitation is an extremely important one. And I wake up in a new world every day, and when Judge Johnson spoke to me about this this past week, I couldn't remember if we had it or not, and you said we passed it in 19? Yes, that was your 2019 amendment. Good chance that was my bill.
But they're not on the agenda, but I would like to take a brief, just a brief period for the director of DCFS and I don't see Mr. Welch here, but anyone from parent council to talk about us doing that, why we did it, and some of the discussions that went on. If y'all don't mind, I think
it'd be very pertinent at this time.
Uh, Director Martin. Yes. We can get chairs, or we can also, you wouldn't be facing us, but we can. here you go ahead mission and uh we'll staff will help make arrangements down there
you may introduce myself yes please introduce yourself good
Speaker 50
24:29
afternoon i'm mission martin director of children and family services i recruited glenn and excuse me for
Speaker 55
24:39
calling you Okay. My name is Glenn Hoggard. I possess, I guess, a contract, a personal services contract for the state of Arkansas. I represent parents who've been accused of neglect and child abuse in four counties and two judicial districts. You want me to start? Yes, please. Okay. So,
Speaker 50
24:58
and I apologize that I'm not prepared for this. I'm going to have to think back two years because I did just come to listen and learn as well as you all but in 2019 we threw a partnership with parent council as well as many other stakeholders that were involved and Glenn you'll probably have to remind me because again I'm going off my head but there was definitely agreement that as a value of the state that we wanted and we thought the default should be unsupervised visitation and I'll just say that the majority of our cases as you know I presented
children use pretty regularly over 50% of our children in foster care are in foster care related to substance abuse and neglect only a small number of our children are in foster care because of some severe maltreatment so in many cases it's very appropriate for mom and or dad or whoever to be having unsupervised contact as long as they're not currently higher under the influence that it really was their lack of ability to parent under the influence that led their children to be in foster care and unsupervised visitation is appropriate
and I absolutely agree with what Judge Walker had said earlier and I hope I don't mischaracterize it but the more quality and I love that she called it family time the more quality family time that juveniles have with their parents it's not only it's not about the parents and in particular I mean it is good for the parents and their recovery to be having that contact and bonding with their children but we forget that it's really good for the kids they they love their parents they love their parents whether I mean you might see one or two here and there but overall children love their parents no matter what situation
they came from and they want to know that mom's getting better they want to know that mom's okay they want to know whether they're two six seven they need that connection there be sometimes we hear from foster parents where their behaviors are worse after they leave family time because that there is a period sometimes with kids and the evidence shows that they you know they act out because they're having to separate from their parents but overall we at the department are really pushing for our foster families to connect with
the bio families to work through that transition to be parent partners you guys may have seen that we did the foster parent of the year award just last week or two weeks ago I think and we recognize foster parents who are doing that dual parenting and increasing and I'm talking about this because it it's foster parents who are now helping us with that unsupervised time and making those visitations or family time I'm really going to start calling it that I love it making those family times happen so that these kids can safely reunify with our kids and just like more than 50 percent are in foster care
because of substance abuse and neglect more than 50 percent of our kids are going to be reunified with their parents so we want that to be
Speaker 59
27:50
a successful transition with the support system in place. I may, I'm
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
27:56
not sure I answered your question but. That was, that was very good, Glenn if you could share with us, first acquaint the members a little bit with what parent council does because not everyone is as familiar and then this issue from parent council's viewpoint.
Speaker 55
28:16
Pursuant to Supreme Court policy, parents who are indigent and who are the legal custodians from whom the state removes custody of children, they're entitled to appointment by the juvenile court of representation. There's no question there is a fundamental constitutional right to raise your children as you see fit without interference from the government, and yet the government is taking kids from the custody of the parents. And so a court case gets created to protect those parents' rights,
and one of the steps in that process is to appoint an attorney for the parents who cannot afford to hire their own attorney. The state has provided for a number of years now an appropriation. I think all but the director and maybe the assistant director, we all operate under personal services contracts. We don't have full-time employees. and we all take appointments from the various juvenile court judges to represent parents and I view that I'm a practitioner I'm in the dirt with somebody that's been accused of
physically harming their child neglecting their child or sexually or physically abusing their child that's my client and so I let director Welch who's the director of the parent council program and director martin and then director uh well okay so what station's mayor your name now help me that's a 65 year old moment right there director mcdonald who's in charge of the alighton program take care of those overarching scope things i look at stuff on a daily basis our paradigm in visitation in arkansas prior to 2019 was one hour supervised visitation per week
My position, as Director Martin just said, my position is visitation is really not to benefit the parents. It's to benefit the kids. And we were coming at it exactly backwards. We were restricting how the contact of the parents was limited. We were restricting the amount of time the parents could have with the kids, and it was perfunctory is what it was. I first saw what would happen if we didn't go with that normal paradigm in Lono County.
Judge Elmore was appointed to the bench, and she had been a former parent counsel, and she immediately, upon taking the bench, gave an edict that parents were going to get three hours of visit per week. Well, three hours still didn't sound like a whole lot of time to you and me, but that was triple what we had been doing. And the local DCFS office, it presented real problems for them because they didn't have the man hours. to cover three hours of visitation for all their cases. Now, they got some help from the area director, and they got Judge Elmore to agree to two one-and-a-half-hour segments
as opposed to one three-hour block, and that seemed to solve the problems. And we discovered some things that we hadn't really anticipated under the law of unintended consequences. Parents who were desperate to see their kids and who were interested in the outcomes and who were going to succeed succeeded faster because the department came to see that they were in love with their children and that they were willing to do and correct whatever the problem was in the first place and that they were involved and that they could be trusted.
And so they gained the department's confidence much quicker, and the department would make a recommendation much sooner to Judge Elmore, we need to get a trial home placement started and get these kids reunified with their parents. The parents that weren't going to succeed, the drug users who were just kind of showing up sporadically for their one-hour visits but the drugs were really more important to them than their children we found that they failed faster the pressure of three hours a week was so much greater than the one hour a week pressure that
they fell off the case plan and the progressive track that they were supposed to be performing on in order to get reunification in such a manner that they separated themselves from the successful reunification that's the goal of the case in a rapid fashion. And so I had that experience and knew that if we were to increase our visitation, that it would have positive and, in some cases, negative outcomes, but it would help us to know quicker we weren't going to drag these cases out further, which is one of the absolute
goals is we need to make certain that these cases don't drag out as long. in 2019 I was part of the legislative committee of parent council program the stakeholders group that was chaired by Senator Clark and we came together with two things unsupervised visitation in the state of Arkansas is now at a default of four hours per week I said it wrong supervised visitation is by default now four hours per week and we enacted that into the code so that jumps even from judge elmore's three hours to four hours per week and that's supervised and nobody really cares if
it's supervised in the dhs office which sometimes are hideous conditions or if it's done at a call house which is a whole nother program or if it's in a park or at the burger king playground it doesn't much matter but there's going to be a department employee or whomever the department designates to supervise the visit that's in attendance and we also enacted the statute that Judge Johnson shows here in her slide under 927-325 for a presumption of unsupervised visits. Now here's the so that's the good news here's the bad news there is a set of actors that go beyond
what parents council attorneys and kids attorneys and department attorneys are willing to do and that's the judges because they actually make the rulings on these things. We have had resistance is not the right word reluctance might be the right word judges are reluctant to change and we've had some reluctance to make unsupervised visitation rulings right off the bat generally it's still got to be earned unsupervised still going to be earned even though our statute clearly says that that's going to be the default position and so we're working on that I have to pick my
Speaker 67
34:32
cases carefully I don't know I don't know Glenn I'm going to interrupt you I think that
Speaker 50
34:38
we've some real champion judicial some judges i mean there's always some outliers but you know i think that the relationship with the judiciary in the last four years they have really they they championed this legislation with us they were at the table they were they were at the table they championed this legislation with us they agreed to it there have been many judges that have shared with us in the value of unsupervised visits but i think i'm sure you're aware there's always outliers there's
Speaker 53
35:05
There's some that are not going to grant unsupervised until it's absolutely earned
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
35:10
and checklists are hidden. I would say to the Judiciary Committee, you don't see the governor's representative in the
back nodding her head, but you're welcome to the meeting of the stakeholders. But both are true. We have some wonderful judiciary champions. We have some that are reluctant. but the judiciary was very much on board with this and helping get this done
as were the other stakeholders and I appreciate y'all presenting it because Judge Johnson brought this to me as a very important point and did today and I thought it was important
that we share how it got done here in Arkansas and the importance that y'all see in it because one of
the things that we talked about, I remember as we talked about this week after week, was the fact that one of the key things
to reunifying families is visitation, is parents spending time with their kids. And we can't expect to get them reunified if they're not spending time. And we know all the problems, staffing and all that, but we talked about we had to find a way to get it done. and I appreciate what Judge Walker had to say about how things, we begin to bring things together once you say it has to be done. Thank you all for coming to the table and you may get recalled. And thank you, judges, for allowing me to interrupt you.
Speaker 29
36:43
One of the things that's really important about this is the
Speaker 19
36:48
judicial education component because not every judge has a background in education. Not every judge has a background in child development, and so it's very important to bring that expertise to the judiciary. So I want to emphasize how important it is to focus on judicial education. We've got some slides in here.
Speaker 21
37:13
I put this one in here just to show that all the way back to 1995,
Speaker 26
37:19
the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges
Speaker 36
37:23
was advocating for a presumption of unsupervised visitation. Would you go back to that slide before,
Speaker 19
37:29
because I want to make sure I talk about that. One of the things that we did with the people that were charged with doing the code revision, our brain trust, is we brought to them the enhanced juvenile justice guidelines and the enhanced resource guidelines for dependency cases. This is what people throughout the nation believe are the best practices in abuse and neglect cases and in delinquency and status type cases.
And that served as a foundation for our code revision. The other piece that's important about it is we made a strategic decision to house code revision in the state bar in the Younger Lawyers Division. And again, that enhanced credibility. So your code revision has to bring a great deal of credibility, so all of your players have to have those very deep roots and have that respected reputation to get you where you're going.
And it has been an evolution in terms of, if you'll advance it to the next slide. It has been an evolution because you see the language of 1995 using the terms visitation and then going forward, if you'll move it forward to 2016, where you talk about family time and presuming how important that is. One of the things that has truly been beneficial when you order frequent visitation and when you have foster parents who believe that their role is to mentor parents
is that you actually have situations where foster parents will invite the parents into their home to do the parenting, to do the meals, to do the bath time, to do the reading, to do the homework. And in that partnership and that mentorship, they learn and they grow. And then when we do have a return of custody, the children don't lose those foster parents. Those foster parents stay as additional appropriate adults in the life of that child. And the next time that the parent has a crisis, they have someone to turn to for advice.
They have someone to turn to for support. They have someone to turn to for help. In one of my situations, I had a mom who had used meth, and I had removed the children, and she worked very, very hard for reunification. The children had a wonderful relationship with the foster mother, and the foster mother and the mother's relationship was difficult, but they loved those girls so much that they set aside their differences, and they became friends. Later, the mother had an issue with relapse.
She got off track, and when she had the call from Child Welfare, the first person she called was the foster mother, and when they came from Child Welfare, the foster mother was sitting there saying, I'm ready, I've maintained a relationship with these children, and I'll do what I need to do. And the mother at that point, son surrenders. She did not want to go through the process again. She admitted her addiction was severe, and it impacted all of her children negatively. And this foster mom took the two girls to whom she was very, very bonded,
but she took the new baby because she didn't want them separated. And that's the kind of work that can occur when you encourage mentorship, you encourage partnership, you treat your families with respect, and you honor the bond between the
Speaker 21
40:58
parent and the child. So over the six years that we've had our presumption of unsupervised visitation in Georgia, we've seen tremendous benefits
Speaker 26
41:05
from its implementation. I was a practitioner when the statute was enacted, and my favorite part as a parent defender
was that not that every case or even a majority of cases begin with unsupervised visitation. It's that the question is presented. And the answer to that question, if it is no, also has to be accompanied by the agency articulating specifically what the safety issue is that makes unsupervised visitation not in the best interest of the child. And as Director Martin said, a lot of times that is active drug use.
Well, we all know that in the course of a dependency case, when a parent who suffers from addiction is working toward reunification, that can take a long time. But somewhere in the intermediate, there is a point where the parent is not actively using drugs. Drugs were the problem, not necessarily the parent or the parent-child relationship. So once that parent is not actively using drugs, allowing unsupervised visitation between the parent and the child just moves that reunification and moves that parent's recovery even quicker toward the agency being out of that parent's life.
The other thing that having that question of unsupervised visitation presented at the very first hearing and at every hearing is that it encourages a lot more creativity and thought around how to make visitation happen. Because it isn't, we talk about supervised versus unsupervised visitation, but in reality it's not an all or nothing. A lot of times we end up with the foster parent dropping the 13-year-old off in pre-COVID times at the mall, where they can walk around with the parent, have a meal, and get picked
up a few hours later. So it's those sort of intermediate, you're out in public, there's a little bit of mitigation of some concerns, and it just allows so much more, not just parenting time, but quality family time between a parent and the child. And the best part has been that the agency isn't burdened with facilitating every visit, transporting the child for every visit, and paying for supervision, either in dollars to contractors or, more preciously, in the case manager's time, providing supervision
that may or may not be necessary. The handful of cases I've had where we go to unsupervised visitation right at the probable cause hearing, sometimes when you have the case of an unexplained injury to an infant, if there are multiple children in the family, some of them are 10 years old or older, they're uninjured, they have protective capacity, they can call out if something were to go wrong. We've often authorized unsupervised visitation for those older children while still, because of the
unexplained injury, mandating supervised visitation for the younger child. So the open courts is something that we actually did in Georgia before the revision of our juvenile code, and it was something that sort of snuck up on us because we had a county northwest of Atlanta, I think it was Cobb County,
where our juvenile courts were all closed across the state. We had court-appointed special advocates appointed to almost every single case in this particular county, and there was a case, I was not involved in it, where the court-appointed special advocates got crosswise of both the agency attorney and the judge. I believe the issue was that the agency and the judge were moving toward reunification for this family much quicker than the court appointed special advocates felt should happen.
And things got a little rowdy. The judge ended up vacating the appointment order, so taking CASA off of the case. And because our courtrooms were closed, then CASA had no further access to the hearings. And that sort of put in stark relief one of the disadvantages of closed courtrooms, because Here we had volunteer guardians ad litem who were very involved in the case and very concerned about the children are now on the other side of the door.
So they smartly went to one of their legislators and started to talk about an open court bill. It didn't pass right away. It was in discussion for three or four years before it actually passed. But it finally became, it passed in 2009 and became law in 2010. And at that time, we were not the first court, we were not the first state to have open courts. I think there were about 17 other states who had them at that time. So we had a little bit of guidance. And then we also had the guidance of our judiciary, of our judicial leadership taking
Speaker 75
46:21
cues from the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. In
Speaker 29
46:27
2005, the National Council actually passed a resolution advocating throughout the nation that we
Speaker 19
46:32
open up the courts. And certainly with precautions. so there are situations where open courts are not appropriate. But nonetheless, it was National Council's policy that courts should be open. For us at Georgia, there was a great deal of reluctance to do that, but I can tell you that it was one of the best decisions that we've made.
I suspect that you in Arkansas experienced some of the things that we do in Georgia. In Georgia, we have rural Georgia, and what you have depends on where you live. We have suburban Georgia, and then we have urban Georgia. And, of course, there are much more resources in our urban and suburban areas than in our rural areas. The disparity of treatment and even disparity of what dependency and delinquency means varies by your jurisdiction. Open courts helps to level the playing field so that everybody knows
Speaker 29
47:22
what's going on in your community.
And it's very difficult when you're the judge and everything
Speaker 19
47:29
is closed and you're getting calls from the district attorney. You're getting calls from the sheriff. You're getting calls from the governor. and judicial ethics absolutely prohibit you from discussing that case. Well, open courts make it a whole lot easier
Speaker 29
47:46
for everybody to come in and understand precisely what is going on. There are situations where judges have gone rogue, agencies have gone rogue,
and there's no way to check on
Speaker 19
48:02
it when it's a closed system, And that's why the open courts piece is a very important part that you consider in your state when you want to make a co-revision. We want to emphasize that not only in the dependency cases do we have the openness, but also in the delinquency cases. Now, certainly there's discretion to close, and certainly if a child has never been adjudicated delinquent in our state, then, of course, those courtrooms remain closed.
But again, the model around the delinquency is restorative justice. You need to have the victims present. You need to have the schools present because we want to provide our children with the oversight they need to be able to make the changes that are necessary so that they don't get what we call the pipeline to prison. The last thing that we want is for our children to be out of the educational system and into the juvenile justice system. Our 2016 Enhanced Resource Guidelines for Abuse and Neglect
also have a finding that the public has a legitimate compelling
Speaker 36
49:13
interest in the work of the juvenile and the family courts and should
Speaker 26
49:27
be presumptively open. So the way that our open courts law in Georgia reads, there are hearings to which the public shall be admitted, and those are on the delinquency side, adjudicatory hearings for designated felonies, adjudicatory hearings involving allegations of delinquency if the child has
previously been adjudicated delinquent, so not a child's first time before the court. However, the public cannot be admitted to hearings involving a child's first offense, any delinquency hearing on an allegation of sexual assault, and any delinquency hearing where any party expects to introduce a substantial amount of evidence regarding a corresponding dependency matter. And, of course, the court has jurisdiction for dispositional hearings,
so that would be the sentencing hearing with regard to delinquency. For dependency matters, we handle, we have concurrent jurisdiction in the juvenile court to handle both child support and legitimation, and those matters are also handled in superior court, which is open. So those hearings will automatically be open, and the public shall also be admitted to any dependency hearing that's not accepted by subsection C. So subsection C of our law
has to do with hearings that involve an allegation of a criminal sexual offense. The court has the discretion to close the hearing. If the court, for any real reason, feels that opening, the court remaining open is not in the best interest of the child, and the court has the discretion to close dispositional hearings, so that's the hearings where we decide placement and a reunification case plan in
Speaker 19
51:17
Georgia where you actually have to file a motion or the court can make
its own motion to close proceedings we of course consider the age of the child the nature of the allegations it's very common if a child has been the victim of sexual abuse if a child has been a victim of sex trafficking these are the types of cases where it's very common for us to close those cases we We also think about the effect that it will have on the family and its ability to reunite because we have members of families come in where they're so hostile to one another and they're trying to make it into a Jerry Springer show and I remind them that this is not Jerry
Springer and that we do have security in the courtroom and that they can be removed from the courtroom. When we have repeated situations like that where there are not changes, those are also also circumstances in which we will allow the courtroom to be closed. Also there are times when there are privacy issues that need, particularly around the residence of a victim of domestic violence. We may need to close the hearing, particularly if we're talking about an interstate compact,
a move to another state, because again we want to be protective and not disclose where that family is going to be going. The court can refuse to admit someone if it's detrimental to the best interest of the child, if it impairs the fact-finding process where you have the inappropriate behaviors, or if it's contrary to the interest of justice, because we have had situations where I would call family members stalking victims of domestic violence, and we've needed to exclude those.
It does require a written order with the findings, and that's to protect the integrity of the statute as to a valid reason as to why the court is closed. We also have statutes allowing access for the media. There are times when the media takes a great interest, and there is a public interest in what happens in the court, but it's very important when the media is admitted to make certain that protections are in place with regard to the identity of the child, the identity of the family, the family's safety, and the family's privacy.
So there have to be real serious discussions with the media about what the parameters are in covering the case. One of the things that I will certainly attribute to both National Council and to Zero to Three is training me as a judge on dealing with the media. The media is an important educational tool. And if we refuse to talk to the media, then they do not necessarily get the information accurately out there. And part of our job in administration of justice is to get the message of how the court systems
work out there. So there does have to be a working relationship between the courts and the media.
Speaker 26
54:14
So the effects of having open juvenile courts in Georgia has been very positive. Even though we talk so casually about it now, but most of us who were in child welfare at at the time of the change were a little horrified and a little scared of what would or could happen.
A lot of us envisioned media intensive criminal trials the way the courtrooms are filled and that simply wasn't the case in Georgia. And I'll share some stories with you. Judge Velma Tilly from Bartow County who is now retired said about open courts, I was horrified when the legislature decided to open deprivation hearings to the public. However, once the decision was made, I almost immediately began allowing extended family members into deprivation hearings. To my surprise, this was immediately
beneficial. In one case, a grandfather who'd been hearing his daughter say how the agency wasn't giving her a chance to get her child back, and he was believing it, saw and heard what had really been happening in the case. That case has moved to permanency now by permanent guardianship with the grandparents through the consent of the mother. The other story that Judge Tilly shared was in another CPS case, I allowed many members of the extended family in. I saw that the agency had safety planned. In Georgia, that means to let a parent voluntarily place a child with a relative
or friend without bringing that child under the jurisdiction of the juvenile court. That the agency had safety planned a toddler with a grandmother on oxygen who smoked and could barely walk by herself into the courtroom. I saw this as an immediate safety concern to that toddler. I required a clearance from her physician, which ultimately could not be obtained, and the child is now safely placed with another family member. Although I will be very careful about the re-victimization of older children by exposure to public ridicule, I am convinced that this is not the catastrophe that I once feared.
I can share that in my own practice, as an adoption attorney, I handled an adoption in Fulton County, Georgia, for a client who was adopting an infant who she had fostered since birth. And when I asked her who would be attending the final adoption hearing, she gave me a list of names, and many of the names on that list were the same last name as the child she was adopting, and my client explained to me that these were the child's aunts and
the child's maternal grandmother who were already caring for the child's other siblings, and that over the course of the dependency case, as they all attended the same hearings as to this child, the foster mother and that extended family had built a relationship, had already during the course of the dependency case began facilitating visits between the child and his siblings and were committed to moving forward with what was essentially an open adoption, even though open adoptions were not yet the law in Georgia.
And to this day, that child has a relationship with his siblings, with his extended family, and with his biological mother. As a judge, the most significant thing about open courtrooms is that when a parent appears before me for the first time within 72 hours after a child is removed from the home, the best thing to see is a whole bunch of extended family in the gallery who will express to me whether it is their willingness and their ability to serve as a placement for the child,
but if not, their ability to serve as a visitation resource for the child, to provide clothing and other necessities for the child before the Child Welfare Agency can catch up and fill in those gaps. And one of the most, one of those interesting cases I had, there was a grandmother who appeared at that probable cause hearing. She lived in a retirement community. She could not serve as a placement for that child, but what she did was volunteer to pick that child up at the foster home every morning and drive him to school because where the
foster home was related to where his home was he would have had to switch schools and had that grandmother not been there at that hearing we would have never known that that resource existed and that child would have had to go through the additional trauma of changing schools as well as
Speaker 19
58:50
being taken into foster care one of the things that i teach about resiliency is we want for our children same places and same faces and the best way for us to do that is to have the family involvement. When we have the open courtroom and family members can come in in support of the
family, we have the opportunity to see firsthand who they are and what they're willing to do. I learned this lesson the hard way in the early part of my career. I had five siblings. I got all the way to termination of parental rights. And at the post-termination hearing, all these people walk into the courtroom and identify themselves as relatives and that they are ready and willing and able to take these children, and that was never disclosed.
When people have serious issues with substance use, honesty is not a trait, and they often do not want their family to know their children have been removed, and they often fail to disclose where the children are. And this was a tragic, tragic lesson for me because of the length of time These children had been separated from these very appropriate families. So here we've had the bond, the relationship with the foster parents, getting ready to do adoption, and they should have never been there.
They should have been with these parents, the siblings of the parents. It was a very tough decision, but I made the decision to allow the children to transition to the aunts and uncles. They all lived in the same community. They lived in what we would call a family compound of different houses on same properties. They went to the same church on Sundays. The children went to the same schools. They saw each other for every holiday. And, yes, they lived in separate households. But considering the trauma these children had experienced and the complex needs,
this was the very best outcome for them, and they were able to have successful childhoods, and now they have successful adulthoods. But had we had the open courtroom and they could have come to see what was happening with those children, there would not have been that long delay. They would have been with family all along. Another thing that I've learned about the ability of the openness is that there are providers that want to come to you and explain to you what the needs are of the child.
I had a child born with fetal alcohol syndrome. She had 24 of 26 markers. Her medical provider made the effort to come to court and list the appointments that that child needed on a weekly basis. And when the parent listened to all of the hours and all of the appointments and realized that keeping a job and providing for that child was not going to be something that she was going to be able to do, she was able to enter into an agreement with the foster parents
for surrender of rights and for open adoption. And if you've not considered that in your state, in your code revision, that has gotten us permanency for children a whole lot faster by having the ability to have a contract that will allow post-adoption contact. It may just be letters telling what's happened with the child. It may just be photographs. It may be visitation of some sort. But nonetheless, it has moved us forward in a way that I would have not thought possible.
I had a similar situation with a mother who was acutely mentally ill. We have in Georgia what's called a foster parent's bill of rights. They have a notice of hearing. They have the right to be heard. And these parents came in, and they talked about this child. And if you could have seen this child when this child entered foster care, this child was so frazzled. This child was seven months old. this child was so malnourished and was in a situation where had the division not intervened, this child would have died.
These parents did a remarkable job of rehabilitating this child, and they gained the trust of the mother to the point that she too surrendered her rights to those foster parents. We've also had situations where that extraordinary tragedies. A family of seven ends up homeless. They're living in a motel. They've gotten a great deal of assistance from the homeless liaison from the school, but the mother gets into serious difficulties with relapse, and she leaves
the home. The stepfather, who's the father of half of the children, wants these seven children to stay together, and he does everything in his power to keep them together, but he goes to a party in December and he's murdered. And now we have seven children with an absent mother and a deceased father. And because we had open courts and because there were so many people in the community concerned from the school, from the church, and from both families, we were able to find placements
for these seven children because they had a lot of grief and loss in having the loss of the beloved father so I understand the reluctance to have open courts but the benefits have far outweighed the problems particularly since we have so much discretion and being able to close the courts when we need to one of the great things that
Speaker 20
1:04:20
I'm very proud of in the state of Georgia is how we use our federal money for court
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:04:26
Judge Walker, if I could stop you there. Yes. Stay on this subject for a moment. Sure. One of the things that you mentioned, in fact, a story that you, the anecdotal story you told was what I think we might call a TPR hearing or close to it that a lot of
families showed up and I think I get as many calls along that line as anything else is this child's fixing the parents about to lose the child their rights are about to be terminated and the rest of the family didn't know what was going on, didn't know they could seek custody, etc. and we've done a lot of things to move forward in that area but still happens so that seemed to be a positive that courts are open that family can
know and a judge can know whether there's interested family there or not but you know as judges you've mentioned even being horrified and the negatives can you think in your minds of some of the negatives that you thought there would be and that other judges thought there would be? And even I think that there might be.
And are they there? And if they're not, why are they not? First of all, I thought we'd be
Speaker 19
1:06:07
overwhelmed with people we weren't. And that was kind of disappointing because I thought people would take more interest and have more concern and want to know what was going on. So honestly, that was a disappointment. Secondly, I thought that the conduct would be like a Jerry Springer show, but that turned out to be the exception and not the rule. Most people act very appropriately.
I thought there would be a lot more pushback, a lot more reluctance, a lot more resentment of the state, but the family was actually grateful. A lot of times they were just worn out with it. They'd done everything they knew how to do. The person that they were dealing with in their family had gotten to the point where they would steal from them, lie to them, and they were just frustrated. And a lot of times we found that there were family members that would actually take placement because there was a court order that would prohibit the parent from coming to their home. That's why they wouldn't get involved because they didn't want to deal with the parent.
So a lot of things that I thought would happen simply didn't happen. The things that are bad that have happened are definitely the domestic violence cases. In your waiting areas, it's not always safe, and you have to be aware and tell people in advance that you've got a family coming in with domestic violence and make sure that they're separated and that they're safe. A lot of times you're going to have to escort people out of the courthouse for them to get out safely because we do have very serious people that are seriously mentally ill. We have people that are seriously violent. We have family members that will harass anyone that's a witness,
anyone that speaks ill of their family. And so those are the kinds of things that we've had to deal with. but again we've been very creative in how we've handled that so that we have the opportunity to have those family members in the court but I excuse the victim so that they do not have to be present to listen to any of that I'll listen to them all day long let them tell me whatever they want to tell me but I'm not going to make the victim be subject to that and listen to that anymore I make the victim's lawyer be there to make sure they know everything that happens in there
but we're going to make certain that they are not subjected to being re-victimized by the
Speaker 21
1:08:17
legal system. Senator, one thing I, as a former agency attorney,
Speaker 26
1:08:21
was concerned about was, with opening the courts, was with the demonization of the agency. And what I found happened was the exact opposite, that there were a lot of very negative feelings about the agency in Georgia, but the origin of a lot of that
was the stories coming from the parents who were, in Judge Tilley's example, telling their own parents and their extended family how they're being victimized, how they didn't do anything wrong, that the agency has stolen their children. And that when the courts are open and when that extended family can come in and see what's really going on, the agency, it, you know, is not, becomes not just a boogeyman.
It becomes a functional agency that is trying to reunify a family, but also we have the benefit of the extended family now helping to hold the parent accountable and to encourage the parent to finish their case plan and achieve reunification, which has been a tremendous benefit Because when I only have the parent in front of me, that parent is going it alone. But when the grandmother and the aunts and the uncles are hearing not only what the parent hasn't done,
but what the parent has accomplished so far, it changes the whole tone of the case. And it really gets a lot of buy-in from the parent and a lot of encouragement from their family.
Representative Douglas House
Unverified
1:10:03
Representative House. thank you mr chairman thank you so much for your presentation i'm certain in georgia as it is in arkansas children develop relationships that are beyond the family go to church every sunday because the church bus picks them up baseball school
scouting anything else are those family i'll use that word are those family members welcome in those situations along with grandma and grandpa and aunt susie yes we've created something called fictive kin and what you have to do is
Speaker 29
1:10:35
you have to ask kids who do you love one of the great stories is that
Speaker 32
1:10:41
i had both parents incarcerated and there was no one to visit this child who was in foster care and i just asked her who do
Speaker 19
1:10:50
you love and she loved her
special education teacher so we contacted her special education teacher and she was an art teacher that had been displaced because of budget cuts. She didn't feel like she was doing anything in special education. She wasn't trained in it, but when she understood how important she was to that child and she was willing to be a visitation resource for that child, it made all the difference to her knowing that she made the difference in the life of a child. So yes, we look for fictive kin and it's very important to ask children, who do you love? But I've also
learned that judges need to be trained on engagement. One of the things that I learned to get around deception was saying look I make decisions for your children if something happens to you and if you get killed I'm going to decide who raises your children and that's happened I've had people die from cancer I've had people die from stroke I've had people die from drug overdoses and murder suicide and so I asked them at the very first hearing help me make
Speaker 20
1:11:56
the best decision for your children, tell me the three people you would trust completely to raise your children,
Speaker 19
1:12:02
because I need a lot of options to make the best choice. And I make every parent in that courtroom give me at least three names. And that breaks down the barrier of them not wanting to tell people, because it's like
Speaker 20
1:12:14
I'm talking about like you would make out your will. I need to know what you think is best for your children. I don't want to be the one making that decision. If something happens to you, I want to honor what you think is important for your child.
And that has helped us break down barriers
Speaker 19
1:12:33
to get them to talk. The other thing that I would tell you is consider diligent search up front. In Georgia, we used to have diligent search after termination of parental rights. It's a little late. We require diligent search in the first 30 days. And it has to be ongoing until we have two plans for a child. Concurrent planning is real. If you want to get kids home faster, reunification is great, but you've got to have plan B, and you've got to be working plan B at the same time you're working plan A.
It's just like we all do. We all plan for what's going to happen to our children if we can't care for them. We have to think about it that way when we're doing our work in the juvenile court. And I would also tell you that it's very important for our division, our child welfare, to include all parents. We had this idea in Georgia that if a father wasn't a legal father, he wasn't a father. A father is a father is a father. Whether they've acted as a father, they're not biologically related,
Speaker 20
1:13:35
I think this is a really, really important concept that we include every aspect to make certain that children stay connected to the people
Speaker 19
1:13:46
that love them. And we have had great success with involving paternal relatives, involving fathers, and having fathers step up and step in. So I think that's a very important part of the legislation is to not exclude people because they have not exercised legal rights.
Speaker 26
1:14:07
And Representative House, with regard to what you said about the child's community, whether it be scouts or church or any other community involvement, that's one of the benefits of the open courts because the case managers who are taking these children into foster care, getting their medical checkup, finding a placement for them, making sure they've got all their medicine, their hands are full in those early days of the case. So I'm not expecting a case manager to do all of those things in those first 72 hours and go find out if this kid is in Boy Scouts and go
find out where he goes to church. And with open courts, a lot of times we have those people show up before us, whether it's at that first hearing or that second hearing, expressing to us, expressing to the judge what their place is in that child's life. And if you think about the trauma of a child being removed from the home and how much normalcy you can bring back to that child that we're going to, yeah, we can send the church bus that extra mile to go pick you up at the foster home so that you can go to Sunday school just like you always do.
Yeah, we can send someone to pick you up for your scout meeting. And those are things that it would take an agency worker weeks or months to figure out and discover and navigate, but if those people are before us in an open court, we can figure that out earlier.
Speaker 19
1:15:30
I've had a lot of coaches step up and step in and raise children. One of them is, one of our children is actually now an adult and playing in the SEC, and we have two that are probably going to be great NBA candidates in the future, but again, coaches
stepped up, stepped in, and they voluntarily raised these children. I want to talk to you about the court improvement project and how you spend your court improvement money because in Georgia we've done something that I think is... Judge,
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:16:01
I'm sorry, I still have some more questions in the queue.
No, we'll go. We'll come back to you. That's fine. Speaker Shepard, I know you're on the committee, but it's
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
1:16:10
an honor to have you with us today. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the judges for being here today and traveling to Arkansas. On the question of open courts, I appreciate you addressing some of the concerns, and many
of those concerns seem to be issues that you might have in any criminal or domestic situation. The thing that I guess I would have some concern over, I'd like to hear whether it's been an issue or not, is with regard to the possibility of children or juveniles being stigmatized by those proceedings and the fact that in an open court uh particularly in in more rural areas smaller towns there's a higher likelihood that just what's what's going on and what's going on
in their life and that maybe the issues that they're facing are maybe apt to be shared a bit and so could you address whether that's been an issue at all or how uh how you address that I guess with discretion, the courts could always close the courtroom. But in particular, is that something that's been a concern at all? Thank
Speaker 32
1:17:18
you. We have had children that are very successful, academically superior, that are
Speaker 19
1:17:23
mortified that they are in this situation.
And those have been situations where the child's attorney has moved to close the court and no one has opposed it, and we have done that certainly to maintain their privacy. We've also allowed them to change schools to, again, protect their privacy, because a lot of times people already know. But there's also a flip side to that. I don't know if you're familiar with a program in West Virginia, but I'm really impressed with it. And it's called Handle with Care. If law enforcement is called out to a home, they go ahead and notify the school of the child's name and handle with care.
They tell the school nothing. They just say, handle with care. And it may be a parent was arrested. It may be that there was a drug bust. It may be there was domestic violence. It doesn't matter. They just say handle with care. Because if that child has a behavior problem the next day at school, they don't want that child disciplined. They want that child to be handled thoughtfully and understand what has happened. That child may have been up all night, but they want that child handled with care. And it's an indirect way, without communicating what's happened in that household, that the child would have a valid reason for having problems at school and that the child needs extra help and extra support.
It's interesting because we've actually found that by the schools knowing who our foster children are, as opposed to not knowing, they've received more educational support and opportunities and encouragement than if we were to keep it a secret. So we've actually found that it's actually been more beneficial for the schools to know. Representative Shepard, I do
Speaker 21
1:19:00
have an example from the delinquency side of things. I was not a judge
Speaker 26
1:19:05
at this time. I was still a practitioner.
But we had a juvenile come in. He'd been arrested. One of those notorious kids who'd probably broken into every car in the neighborhood. and thanks to
Speaker 21
1:19:17
the wonders of the internet, the entire neighborhood knew that this kid was coming before the court and the entire neighborhood
Speaker 26
1:19:24
showed up. And our judge did an amazing job because he used it as an opportunity to educate the public. So before the case was ever called and was established that these were the people who were in the gallery, letting them know that there would be no outbursts, there would be no secret picture taking,
There would be no sneering or jeering, but the other, the main benefit was that the neighborhood had of course in their minds demonized this child who had caused them a tremendous amount of trouble and money in the previous months. And as you all know, when someone gets arrested, everyone's very surprised when they're back out on the street in a few days. And it was an opportunity for the court to educate the public about the circumstances
under which the court is going to hold a child in detention, and the circumstances under which the court is going to release a child, and what conditions the child would be released under. And it was also, it appeared to be very effective for the child to have his conditions announced, one of them was that you are not to be in this six block radius and with that many homeowners from that six block radius attending court that day, he knew he couldn't set a toe back
in that neighborhood because it would be a violation of conditions and he'd be right back
Speaker 25
1:20:54
in the RYDC. So that was a, it could have been an ugly situation but it was actually
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
1:21:02
very positive because of the opportunity for public education. Just a follow-up, with regard to maybe cases of neglect, have you, and that would be primarily where I might have stronger concerns about how a juvenile may be stigmatized by just the fact that there are situations out there.
Has that been something that has been a widespread issue, or have you seen, generally, has it been addressed simply by counsel moving for a closed case or a closed hearing on that issue? I have
Speaker 26
1:21:33
not experienced that directly, but I know that that is something that children, like parents, children also have court-appointed attorneys, and that's one of the discussions that the attorney has with the child before the case comes into court, and the child's attorney can always move to close the courtroom.
Speaker 17
1:21:52
The harsh reality is the court is sometimes and very often the last to know about the chronic neglect. Chronic neglect is generally well known among the family, in the community, and
Speaker 72
1:22:04
at the school. And it's usually repeated reports that have been made before it ever gets to us. So I would not say that the knowledge comes from the court to the public.
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:22:20
It's the public that brings the information to the court. Thank you for those questions. At this point, I want to bring up that we know that our judges are very busy
and have busy calendars and cases, but just for this body's knowledge, since Representative Dalby, my co-chair, and I represent you in chairing this committee, We invited the judges actually from the time we set a tentative date before you knew about the meeting so that if any of them wanted to attend, and I'm sure there's some, probably many
watching, but we invited them to be here.
We also checked with the rules and made the unusual step. I don't see any judges here, and if I'm missing any, please let me know. made the unusual step to let others other than committee members ask questions, and that would have been the
judiciary if they were here. Speaker Shepard, I appreciate the questions you asked, because those are some of the questions that would have been asked had they been here. And so I would ask again, any negatives, let me, as somebody who really likes the idea
and who is very active on social media, and some of the other members laugh, how about people spreading other people's business there? You know, because we talked about the media and the press, but now sometimes individuals feel like they're the press. It was more of a problem
Speaker 19
1:24:04
initially, but now that you can report these types of things, They're more likely to be taken down, and we also make it a point that we want to preserve and support these family members, not shame.
Shame and blame is very detrimental to families, and we make it clear that that's not our role, and that can't be the role. The juvenile court's not designed for purposes of punishment, but for rehabilitation. So that's the type of things that we want to discourage anyone under any circumstances to do. And certainly we have the ability to bring people in under what's called a protective order, make them parties to a case, and deal with issues like that.
But we are no different from any other court because social media is going to be used, and it's going to be used to prove various parts of the case. I will tell you that I did not know what Facebook was until an exhibit was entered saying that this person was alleged to be a boyfriend of the mother. I could not finish the hearing and had to reconvene it on another day. In the interim, I was called over to the commissioner's office to discuss some budget issues.
I walk past security and as I walk past security a man takes his belt off and inadvertently flings his arm over catching me in the chest I go down and hit the floor stand up look in the face of the man and it's the man in the exhibit from Facebook so I had
Laura Abbott
Unverified
1:25:45
to recuse myself so that was my introduction to Facebook, and it is key to evidence in cases, but again, we see much less of that than we did when Facebook was initially introduced, but we caution people
Speaker 19
1:26:00
that your social media is under scrutiny by everybody, and it will be used, and it
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:26:10
will be used against you since you have uh served with closed uh closed hearings and with open uh
i specifically and i'm probably as big a critic of the media as there is but i think in our nation they're extremely important uh that they they watch everything
that we do, and you may not have an opinion, but their role since the courts have been open, because I know they have been, you know, one of the places they're very friendly to me is child welfare reform, because sometimes, again, where we think 95 percent of things are done well. It's those cases that aren't necessarily done well that nobody can know
anything about that are very bothersome. Can you shed any light on that? Media is a tool. Particularly
Speaker 29
1:27:15
with reporting of domestic violence, they talk about people snapping. That's not what domestic violence is. Domestic violence is about control. And our job is to educate the media, get out the message, and make sure that we're getting out the information to victims about how to be safe. But my media story where media is a tool is the House of Prayer case. A number of years ago,
Speaker 19
1:27:40
60 children were removed because they were
being beaten as part of a church service
Speaker 29
1:27:46
in Georgia. And the judge who was hearing the case was interviewed on Nightline and said some things beyond the scope of what he should have said and was recused. They called every judge in the state of Georgia, and apparently I'm the only judge that didn't laugh and say no. I accepted the appointment for that case, and the media was really after the state and supporting this pastor and his practices. So having my background in
education and having the benefit of
Speaker 20
1:28:22
the psychological of these children and having the benefit of unlimited resources because the state really wanted this to go away, I was given the opportunity to use media as a tool in that case. And
Speaker 29
1:28:34
these parents had refused to visit their children for a year on the principle that they were allowed to physically discipline their children. So I brought every single parent in and I begged them to visit their children in front of the media and I did not
adjourn the case till they agreed to see their child. And the
Laura Abbott
Unverified
1:28:57
case resolved because I agreed that as parents they had the right to physically discipline their children.
Speaker 29
1:29:04
But what I made clear is they didn't have the right to assign that to someone else. They did not have
Speaker 20
1:29:11
the right to publicly humiliate their children. They did not have the right to injure their children and the vast majority of these were young men and they had ADD and ADHD and physical discipline just
makes them worse. They had to be educated on what their child's needs were and why they acted the way they did and when I explained that with physical activity and sports and structure they wouldn't have these behaviors and that they should expect a child who's having to sit through hours and hours and hours of services to be restless
Laura Abbott
Unverified
1:29:44
and need breaks but that is my best example of using media as a tool
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:29:54
thank you i had to keep from smiling as somebody who's
very uh involved in education also um about a not understanding sometimes young men in education who also sit for long periods of time So, but let's medicate them. All right. Judge, I don't see any other
questions, so if you, we've interrupted you twice if you want to move on to. There's just a couple of points I want to make, because
Speaker 29
1:30:22
how you spend your money that you get from the
Speaker 19
1:30:25
federal government on court improvement is really important.
Speaker 20
1:30:29
And legislators sit on the committee that helps decide how that money gets spent. So I want to talk to you about that, because I think the way we use the money in Georgia is really smart to drive change. We have a core group of courts that have agreed that they want to work on court improvement. These are our leaders throughout our state. We actually represent about 80% of the children that come before the juvenile courts throughout our state. We meet twice a year. Child welfare reports its data at the federal level twice a year. We get that broken out by our state, but we get it broken out by our jurisdiction.
We can sit down and look at that, and that tells us who are outliers in terms of their practices, whether they're removing too many children, whether they're taking too long to get to permanency. And we talk about, well, why is this so in your jurisdiction? Why is it different in your jurisdiction? And that helps us all improve our practices
Speaker 19
1:31:21
by learning from each other. We also have the opportunity, like I said, to apply the science to the practice and to test it. And we can see how our numbers change. We're able to identify trends.
We sit down as stakeholders. We pick goals for our court, and we work on a couple of things a year to make those improvements and see if we have accomplished it. We also get a lot of great ideas from each other, and that helps us improve. And it's
Speaker 20
1:31:47
helped bring things in our state to the point where practices are more similar instead of being so very incredibly different, depending on which courts you are in. Did you want to add anything about court improvement?
Speaker 19
1:32:03
And the last thing that we really want to talk about is judicial and legal education.
Georgia is a state council. When judges pay their dues to the state council, the state takes three-fourths of that money and buys a national council membership. That national council membership brings those enhanced resource guidelines, those best practices, those domestic violence trainings, the Child Abuse and Neglect Institute trainings, to the judges. It allows them to have those materials by being a member of the National Council.
It also allows them the opportunity to get scholarships to go to trainings. Those scholarships, some come from National Council because the funding is specifically to train judges. But a lot of the scholarships in Georgia come from our court improvement money to make sure that judges are getting the best training possible. And our Court Improvement Project has deemed the National Council's training to be some of the best training in the nation. And typically, 20 scholarships are awarded to the Juvenile Justice Conference in March.
And 20 scholarships are awarded for the annual conference in July of each year. So I think that your judicial education piece, we have two mandatory trainings that we do at the state level. Then there's two national trainings offered annually. And that's a lot of training. If you really want people to do the best job, you want them to have the state-of-the-art training. So look at what you're doing with your state training, but look at what national trainings are available.
Speaker 21
1:33:41
And I'll add that Georgia also invests a great deal into
Speaker 26
1:33:46
training for child welfare attorneys. There's a specialization called the Child Welfare Law Specialist. It's recognized by the American Bar Association and it's administered by the National Association of Counsel for Children. It requires an attorney to be in good standing, to have spent more than three or more years practicing almost exclusively in child welfare law. There's a rigorous application process, and there's a one-day examination that's like another bar examination.
And Georgia's really invested in our child welfare attorneys becoming specialized and recognized as child welfare law specialists. We actively recruit attorneys, and our court improvement dollars fund that application process. And having child welfare law specialists in the juvenile court makes a huge difference in the level of practice and the level of legal
Speaker 78
1:34:35
representation that parents, children, and the agency receive. I would have
Speaker 19
1:34:42
to say that child welfare specialists really help us in terms of accountability
because they hold everybody accountable because they have that in-depth training. And it certainly is a certification that is a symbol of excellence. And that's all we have for you today.
Representative Douglas House
Unverified
1:35:08
Okay. Representative House. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Speaking of money, how does your – I don't understand or know your appropriation process. How does the money get to the judges, get to the people with boots on the ground?
Speaker 20
1:35:21
Georgia is a really strange setup because the money for the judges,
Speaker 19
1:35:26
there's a base salary for the judges that is paid by the state, and the retirement system is from the state. But we are actually county employees with a county budget, county insurance, and county payment of legal representation. However, the Family First Prevention Services Act does have a component for paying for legal services, so I don't know how that's going to play out as there is a shift in practice.
But I would say the vast majority, other than the judge's salary and the judge's retirement, is funded at the county government level. And that's why your judicial leadership and your engagement with your commissioners in building a case for what you need becomes vital. That's also why open courtrooms are important, because I invite them to come to things. I invite their staff to come to things. I want them to see our drug court in action. I want them to see us staffing our infant and toddler cases to make sure that those
babies' needs are met, and then they understand why I'm asking for
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:36:36
the money. Thank you. Any other questions?
The, I have a couple, and it may, before we end, it may jog some others. The National
Association, whose name I can't remember, recommends open courts.
Yes. Correct? Now, you are just two judges. overall does the judiciary in Georgia and the other what we call DCFS and it has other names in other states do the judges overall and the other organizations working with child welfare in Georgia also see it as a
good thing after working with it for six years? I have not
Speaker 19
1:37:31
heard anyone other than a handful of people that were around when it was instituted who objected to it ever have a problem with it. There's still a core group in South Georgia that, to me, could be removed from office because they're not following the statute. They've been trying deliberately to exclude foster parents even though there was a Foster Parents Bill of Rights and open court. And I think that they are
Speaker 20
1:37:59
subject to discipline if someone brought a disciplinary action.
There's a very small, resistant group that has
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:38:09
glad to hear that's not just Arkansas because, again, I think sometimes
the judges feel like I'm always on their case. And we have the most wonderful judges anywhere. But you always have that handful that seem like it's not even a handful that don't seem like they want to
follow the law, which is a problem if you're a judge.
Representative Andrew Collins
Unverified
1:38:37
I would thank Representative Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I was curious about that handle with CARE
law in West Virginia that you mentioned. Is that something, is it a state law, and also is
Speaker 19
1:38:52
it widespread in other states, including Georgia? I don't know that they've enacted it as legislation. It's more of a policy. Some places in Georgia are doing it. It has to do with our training about being trauma-informed and trauma-responsive. In Georgia, we're doing a great deal of effort to train everyone who is a stakeholder
on the impact of trauma on children and adults, and then how to go from being trauma-informed to being trauma-responsive. To me, the West Virginia program is being trauma-responsive. They know the child has experienced trauma. they're giving an indirect alert to the school this child is going to need extra support and extra help I think it's a wonderful program with technology is as simple as a phone call simple as a text as simple as an email and there's not any reason that
Speaker 34
1:39:38
we can't support our children that way thank you
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:39:48
the this legislation that you have that calls for open courts in Georgia though does allow you talked about some an area where you saw a problem but it does allow judges a great deal of discretion it does they still are able to control their courts the okay and i want to just go back i really don't have a question just a note to the director of dcfs and to parent
counsel and to jennifer lewo i know she's probably not listening but she's since there's other staff here they'll tell her post contact adoption very interested in that subject going into the session anyone else thank y'all so much for being here it was very informative very helpful always love love anybody who loves kids and that's one of the great things about working in this we have a lot of disagreements
about how we should do it but it's always great to work with people who who care so thank you so much for going to the trouble to
Speaker 19
1:41:00
come all the way from Georgia to Arkansas today thank you for having us thank you Senator Clark and please feel free to share our contact information because people may have
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:41:11
questions later and it's really dull with COVID-19 and I'd love to talk to y'all
Speaker 58
1:41:16
yeah and and we'd feel even better about it if the football game
Speaker 20
1:41:21
had ended at halftime yeah that was and you know our greeting was with the razorback head so we really
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
1:41:28
enjoyed that thank you I'm going to move
to H I'm going to go to I and come back to H is there any other business yes that's what i was gonna h had more to do with them but since it says miscellaneous information i'm gonna throw it under both h and i uh we have a tentative meeting set up for october 23rd second october 22nd uh what we're trying to pull together uh and it's
pulled together yet we think have been trying to pull together for some time is a law enforcement brutality racism etc I think it's both important to dig into from those who have experienced it and then also in support of law enforcement who if they haven't done it but you know us we will we will dig into to it uh straight on and so if you have any interest if you have anybody uh that you would
like to to testify or or any direction you think we should go on the subject uh as a member of this committee or even if you're not but especially if you're a member of this committee i'd love to hear from you as we're uh trying to get this together and i know some of you are in law enforcement and other parts of this so uh so you know that again we'll be watching because we've got to be able to get all the moving parts together to get everybody here. But October 22nd is when we're planning on doing that. Anything else? Thank you so much for
coming. We appreciate you always. Stay healthy and safe. Thank you.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Comments by Committee Chairs
C. Consideration to Adopt Meeting Minutes from March 9, 2020
D. Introduction of Presenters
E. Discussion of Child Welfare Court Reform
F. Discussion of Child Welfare Court Transparency
G. Discussion of Continuing Education Practices
H. Miscellaneous Information
I. Other Business
J. .Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — JUDICIARY COMMITTEE - SENATE AND HOUSE, Oct 1, 2020 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| D1 OCGA 15-1-10.1 | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
| D2 NCJFCJ Resolution in Support of Presumptively Open Hearings | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| D3 NCJFCJ Resolution re Trauma-Informed Courts | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
| D4 GA Bar Jounal article - Dec 2013 | Exhibit | 7 | Official source ↗ |
| D5 NCJFCJ 2020 Arkansas | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| D6 OCGA 15-11-700 | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
| D7 OCGA 15-11-704 | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| D8 Juvenile Court Transparency PowerPoint | Exhibit | 21 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit C1 3-9-2020 Draft Minutes | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit C2 3-9-2020 Draft Minutes | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Senator Alan Clark
Unverified
Representative Carol Dalby
Unverified
Speaker 17
Speaker 19
Speaker 20
Speaker 21
Speaker 26
Speaker 27
Speaker 29
Speaker 30
Speaker 31
Speaker 36
Speaker 41
Speaker 50
Speaker 55
Speaker 59
Speaker 67
Speaker 53
Speaker 75
Representative Douglas House
Unverified
Speaker 32
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
Speaker 25
Speaker 72
Laura Abbott
Unverified
Speaker 78
Representative Andrew Collins
Unverified
Speaker 34
Speaker 58