Children & Youth Committee- Senate & Aging, Children & Youth, and Legislative Affairs- House
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| Bill | Title | Sponsor | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
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HCR1010
· 2 mentions in chapter, agenda
Matched: “E. Discussion of HCR1010 by Representative Tara Shephard – Requesting the House Comm…”
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REQUESTING A STUDY OF WAYS TO IMPROVE THE STATE'S JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM FOR YOUTH. | T. Shephard | Approved by the Governor |
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Unknown speaker
0:00
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
3:30
all right members going to ask you to go ahead and find your seat and
we are going to get started right on the dot it is 1 30 so welcome and i'll call the senate and house joint committee on children youth to order with that I will entertain a motion to approve the
December 10th minutes I have a motion to have a second have a second on any discussion see none all in favor say aye any opposed eyes have it before we move on to item C I'll ask if my co-chair she has any comments great perfect all right we're going to move on to item C which is the appointment to the child maltreatment investigations oversight committee and I'm going to ask for a motion to confirm representative Mary Bentley to the
child maltreatment oversight committee she's one of two members of the general assembly who are members of the house committee on children and youth and the Senate Interim Committee on Children and Youth. So with that I'll entertain a motion. I have a motion to have a second. I have a second. Any discussion? It's to be in time now to tell all the things you think about Representative Bentley. Okay I'm going to keep it open for a little bit longer. All right seeing none. Will committee all in favor say aye? Any opposed? Ayes have it. Congratulations Representative Bentley. You don't have as many detractors as I thought.
all i'm joking of course all right moving on to item number uh item d arkansas infant children death review um if uh those presenting that would go ahead and make their way to the table that would be great and once you come to the table if you would introduce yourself for the record and then you may proceed at your will
Speaker 11
5:45
Hello, Laura Taylor. Good afternoon, Kevin Clighorn. Sherry Williamson. Okay, and you may proceed. Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. The mission of the Arkansas Infant and Child Death Review, the ICDR, as it's labeled, is to review all unexpected infant and child deaths in the state of Arkansas. The ICDR consists of 11 regional teams, volunteers that cover 75 counties in the state.
The team reviews unexpected deaths of Arkansas children ages 0 to 17 years, as required by Act 1818 of 2005. The annual report was completed in December 25 and includes deaths that occurred in 2023. There were 170 total non-natural deaths. However, 22 of those deaths were either under criminal investigation or being prosecuted at the time of the review or the team could not obtain sufficient records. Therefore, those 22 could not be reviewed.
So, of the 170 non-natural deaths, the ICDR teams statewide reviewed 148 as reflected in the annual report. Of the 148 deaths, 69 accidents that include motor vehicle-related injuries, accidental drownings, poisonings or overdoses, asphyxia, fires, or other injuries, which can be found on page 10 and 11 of your report. 14 suicides and 18 homicides, which is on page 12.
And 47 undetermined causes that included sudden unexpected infant death, which is pages 13 and 14 of your report. recommendations, the teams are required or suggested to make recommendations to the state panel from their jurisdictions and their regions. On page 33 and 34 of the report, you'll find a list of recommendations from the ICDR state panels and the regional teams. This report is meant to serve as a resource for organizations and agencies working to reduce the number of injury-related
deaths across the state, and it's the hopes of everyone involved in the infant and child death review process that this report will help guide that work uh thank you very much uh for you for your time and we can open for
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
8:11
questions at this time if you would like okay thank you for
that overview any questions from the committee at this time okay um anybody up there we go representative
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
8:26
Gonzales-Worthin you are recognized. Yes I really appreciate the recommendations from the report
and I was just curious as to how do you see
Speaker 22
8:37
these recommendations being moved forward and how can we
Speaker 24
8:45
help move this forward? Okay thank you. As Kevin mentioned it really is a tool for any you know organization agency non-profit anyone who's interested in trying to put in place some prevention activities or programs these are very broad recommendations so um it was really helpful
for the teams in the panel to kind of summarize the findings and be able to put um you know really in like a bulleted format of some some basic recommendations that would help inform any of the groups that are interested in this work so um it really could be a variety of of ways that this information could be used and what we don't want is for this report to sit on a shelf so we really um would love to see um all groups of people who are interested in in prevention activities using it as a
Speaker 28
9:36
guide thank you uh excuse me um the agency that i work for has a small amount of funds
available for child abuse prevention grants and we've actually used the recommendation from the report this year that came from the local teams to guide our request for proposal so we've given in the request for proposal five specific recommendations to for people to make applications for grants if they're willing to develop a program that would
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
10:10
help assist with one of these recommendations. So how, excuse me, so how might an organization find these
particular types of grants? Is this open to any organization in Arkansas? That's a great question. We
Speaker 28
10:25
are, the grants are open to state agencies, higher education, non-profits and we actually just sent out the rfp that this last week and we've sent it out to all of our contacts ask them to share it with their contacts we would be happy to share it with staff so that you all could pass it along to anybody who might be interested in it yes i would definitely
like to help sure that information absolutely thank you thank
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
10:56
you and if you would just send that to staff, and they'll distribute to
the committee. Thank you. Representative Richardson,
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
11:04
you're recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chair. On the suicide homicide information on page 12, do you have that broken down by ages of those children? So with
guidance from the Arkansas Department of Health, we're really careful about how we display
Speaker 24
11:26
the data because a lot of these numbers are very small. We wouldn't want to make any of the information identifiable by individual cases. So on page let's see starting on page 16 it's broken down by all of the ages. So you'll see you can find some of that information by age group. I can tell you that if you jump to the 15 to 17 year olds on page 20 that's where you're going to see majority of the suicides and homicides okay thank
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
12:00
you all right seeing no other questions
i'll give one last opportunity all right seeing none thank you all for your presentation uh look forward to getting the information um thank you
very much thank you mr chair thank you committee all right committee we will move on to item e and that's a discussion of hcr 1010 by representative shepherd um i'm going to go ahead and ask uh representative shepherd if she would um go to the go to the table unless she would prefer to do it from her chair
that's fine i'll let you do it from the chair um
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
12:41
at this point you're recognized thank you mr chair um
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
12:45
and thank you all for being here today my opening comments are are simple statements that will be made. Basically that I'm asking this committee to not look away at the
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
12:56
data that would be presented to us today and to actually confront what will be revealed. The individuals that was asked to be here today to present is not about
blame, but it's about responsibility. The responsibility to build a system that protects the public, as well as a responsibility to protect the future of Arkansas children. About six months before I filed the resolution, there was a delinquency plan submitted. What the key statement that stood out to me that really knew that I was going to move forward with filing it.
The statement reads, and Mr. Chair, I can give this to Blake or BLR to put on the state's website if need be. But the statement reads, Arkansas still locks up more children than most states when accounting for population, according to recent data. The trend is costly with expenses running around $127,750 per child, state records show roughly $350 a day.
And because the state's court system is not standardized, the way children are punished for similar types of crimes depend on where they live and which judge they appear before. So that information there led to me fouling the resolution, and I know what I'm attempting to do here today will not be resolved, but I simply wanted to give my colleagues an overview of what's happening with juvenile justice in Arkansas, Mr. Chair.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
14:48
Thank you. All right. Thank you, Representative. So with that, I think we're going to continue this discussion, And so I will, um, move on to item F and I would ask, um, those that are in attendance, if you would, um, a part of that discussion and Senator Irvin, you, you're, you're able to be there or go to the table. Perfect. All right. Um, with that, I will ask those to introduce themselves when they get to the table and go
from there. i didn't know we're going to have walk-up music all
right senator river we'll start with you and you're recognized to proceed and introduce yourself thank
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
15:50
you i can think of some other walkout songs some people might play for me
that might be a little bit different um i'm senator missy ervin uh represent uh senate district 24 um an issue this is an issue i've been working on since 2013 2012 something like that good afternoon
Speaker 56
16:13
thank you i'm troy braswell i have the honor of being a circuit judge in the
Speaker 58
16:19
20th judicial district that covers Faulkner, Van Buren, and Searcy County. I also have a message from
Justice Wood who informs that she regrets that she cannot join us today, that the court has some important issues that they are handling, but she sends her gratitude for you taking the time to focus on juvenile
Speaker 61
16:41
justice. Good afternoon. I'm Brooke Stain. I'm the juvenile division director at the Administrative
Speaker 62
16:49
Office of the Courts. Good afternoon. I'm Kathy Hess, circuit judge for the 1st Judicial District. That's
Speaker 63
16:54
Cross, Lee, Woodruff, St. Francis, Monroe, and Phillips.
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
17:00
Okay, thank y'all. Thank you, and it's really an honor to be able to address my colleagues sitting here and talking about an issue that we have been working on for a very, very, very long time. This is actually a very big success story that we came together and collaborated with each other on. And this was legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch all working together. And it was really generated through the need of what we saw at the time,
which was a high level of incarceration of our youth without really meaningful community engagement services that we knew they needed and the ability to try to get those services outside of an incarceration system and in their communities. In 2013, unfortunately, I was in the minority at that time of the legislature, but I ran a bill called the Close to Home Act, which we were not able to
get passed. And I invite you to look at the history of that piece of legislation and what happen with it. But that did not deter myself, Judge Rhonda Wood at the time, who was a juvenile judge before she made her way to the Supreme Court. That did not deter our work. We continued to meet together, work together, and develop a policy that we knew that the state of Arkansas needed to put in place in order to right the wrongs and correct and create real reforms as it relates to
juvenile justice. So in 2014, we have made the deliberate decision to adopt the core principles of reducing juvenile recidivism. There was a lot of work that was done with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, with the juvenile judges, and I credit Judge Hanna at the time. He was our Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Judge Hanna created the Commission on Children, Youth, and Families, And at that time, he appointed me to that commission, and I thankfully, and it's just honestly been one of the biggest honors of my life to serve on the Commission on Children, Youth, and Families now for more than a decade.
And that commission is not just a commission that just meets and talks. We put in a lot of hard work and time and effort, and it is a commission that is just a beautiful orchestration of the judicial branch, the executive branch, and the legislative branch, and stakeholders all coming together to really focus hard on juvenile crime, juvenile children, juvenile offenders, the entire system,
how the system is being efficient or non-efficient, how we can continue to develop what we've put in place. We've obtained multi-million dollar grants to study, assess, procure, and pilot the use of validated assessments. We passed legislation to require that juvenile judges utilize a validated risk assessment. Um, and so these validated risk assessments, um, is known as our savory tool. Um, and these
assessments not, they don't only apply for just the child. It applies to the entire family and the entire situation, uh, that has led that juvenile into the behaviors that are occurring. And it's really an amazing tool that our juvenile judges have to have and our courts have to have to be effective and you'll hear more about that from our judges um and so and and this is statewide and we have incredible engagement from juvenile judges um across the entire state working with us
to really fine-tune this policy these tools um and see what more we can do and how we need to move about uh creating that we the we began with the savory which is a structured assessment of violence risk and use and expanded to include assessments for different stages as well as identifying special needs such as mental health and substance abuse. The process has been in place now for over a decade and we've made considerable improvements and again change is difficult but if you'll hear
I think you'll hear from the juvenile judges that system-wide improvements have really been exceptional. And I want to say, too, if you paid attention to some of the things that were happening in other states in this country, it was unbelievable. And Pennsylvania and Florida are two states that come to mind as to what was happening with juveniles and why they were incarcerated. And that did not happen in the state of Arkansas. But what happened in some of these
cases, I think it was Pennsylvania, you had a juvenile judge that was being paid under the table to incarcerate youth. And these were first-time offender kids. And one of this kid, one kid ended up committing suicide because of what happened to him. And it is out there, and I invite you as legislators to look at that because it's so sad how quickly things could just go so wrong
and and the dramatic effects that juvenile justice will have on a kid's lives and so we have gone to extraordinary lengths with this commission and with all the stakeholders to put in this system and to make these changes because we want to make sure that these kids get what they need at home in their communities not incarcerated and we're working around the clock to really make that
happen um we went to a retreat uh this past past summer incredible work we are working with incredible people nationwide that are giving us excellent advice um but we dug in and put in the work and i couldn't be more proud to be a part of this commission and and the great work that these folks have have done so i'm going to turn it over to them thank you senator judge
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
23:26
thank you for being here thanks for all your work on this you're recognized
Speaker 58
23:32
thank you mr chair and thank you senator ervin for that overview of the hard work that we certainly put in over the years
what i also hope to do today is give
Speaker 56
23:42
you some additional background information on kind of how we got to where we are today i'm
Speaker 58
23:48
not very good at powerpoint so i'll that'll be awesome that'd be great great you think clicking would be easy but uh sometimes
Speaker 69
23:57
i struggle um in 2015 the juvenile justice reform board was
Speaker 56
24:03
created and implemented and the main goal was to how do we identify areas in the system where we need additional support um and modifications i had
the honor of eventually being named the chair of the juvenile justice reform board um justice wood chairing the Supreme Court Commission on Youth and Families. We decided, why are we meeting separately? Let's meet together. Let's pool our resources. And so we've been doing that
Speaker 69
24:31
as long as the Reform Board was in action and by statute
Speaker 56
24:36
has gone away. Through that, we selected pilot courts to learn, be trained on the use of validated risk assessment
tools. I volunteered for my court in Conway, Clinton, and Marshall to participate as a pilot court program. And I can remember very vividly being in a meeting room at the Supreme Court and the creator of the risk assessment was going through everything. And it's very detailed. It requires families to come in and sit in long interviews. And they're asked very specific questions aimed at violence
Speaker 71
25:13
in the home, substance abuse. They take a mental health assessment,
Speaker 56
25:19
a substance abuse assessment. What is going on in this kid or this family's life that increases the risk that they're going to continue to be in the court system or risk of violence? And so it's one thing
Speaker 69
25:34
to know what risk factors a kid may have in their life, but to me the bigger question is once you know those things what are you going to do about it what programs and services do you have that are specifically aimed at helping that individual kid or family and I remember the
question back to us was how many families do you think are really going to come and sit down with a judge's staff probation officers whatever that may be and just open up and tell you all the awful things that they have going on in their life? It's a good
Speaker 56
26:10
question. My answer was, what if it's only 10%? What if only 10% of the kids and families come into court and let it all hang out? Is that not worth it? Is that 10% not worth the hours of work that it takes to complete these
Speaker 69
26:27
assessments? Well, for me and my community, absolutely it's worth it. And what I can tell you is it's not 10 percent there are times that my staff has to tell families and kids like you know what I think we're good like we can move on to the next thing right this is a lot of information you're giving us but it's important that we meet each kid and family where they are in that moment we cannot have a cookie cutter approach to juvenile justice in the state of Arkansas
we have individualized education plans at schools because we understand that every kid learns differently that there may be certain modifications or help or support that that kid or family needs to be successful the same thing is true through the court system the same thing is true in life and we're doing a disservice if we just throw everybody into one basket and say do community service do your probation good luck we have to be intentional about identifying the
services and support that can help and so we've seen the impact of that not only in the 20th judicial district but across the state and you can see there on the slide different legislative legislation that was passed in 2019 mandatory use of a risk assessment that is specific to prior to a commitment to DYS. So I know part of the resolution is related to kids that are committed to the Department of Youth Services, right? And so before a judge can commit a juvenile to DYS,
they are required by state law to conduct the risk assessment. And basically what that does, just for some that may be unfamiliar, based on the assessment and the results of that, a child is determined to be low, moderate, or high risk of reoffending or violence in the future. there are no questions asked about what the current offense is so if you have a kid that's in court for breaking into cars and nobody's asking them questions about what were you thinking what'd you do what was going on we're looking at what does this kid have going on in their life
what have they been through and the judges get to review that prior to making a in juvenile court disposition sentencing decision and I'll tell you how valuable it is and some have heard this story But I had a young lady that was about 13 or 14 years old that came into court, and she was in court for a battery. She'd gotten into a fight at school. And I'll tell you, I take fights at school very serious. It interrupts the learning. It creates a security issue. It's an important deal. Why are we fighting at school?
And so she came in, and she was with her grandmother, and she ended up pleading true, which in juvenile court, true or not true versus guilty or not guilty. And I took that plea. I heard what happened, and I read through her risk assessment. And what I learned was that years prior to this fight, she had been in a car with her mother and two siblings, and there was a wreck. This young lady and her siblings were able to get out of the car
Speaker 56
29:37
but had to watch their mom burn to death. What was the fight about? There were girls in her class that knew what had happened. And they were making fun of her about that. And she had had enough. And they got into a fight. Why does that matter? Because it should change the way that
Speaker 69
30:01
I talked to that young lady. Without that information, it would be very easy for me to, right off the bat, come down heavy and let her know what the expectations of her behavior would be at school.
Speaker 56
30:12
and she would leave that courtroom without being seen or without being heard.
Speaker 69
30:21
And that would just be another step in the process of somebody that's ignoring such pain in her life. And I was able to tell her, listen, I wish that I could make it where 14-, 15-, and 16-year-old kids didn't say mean things to each other, right? That's a part of life. In fact, as adults, we even experience those things.
Speaker 56
30:43
So I'm not minimizing what happened. I understand how you got to that boiling point. What our job is to do with you, young lady, is to help you get through this because it might happen again. We want to give
Speaker 71
30:56
you the tools that you need, whether that be coping skills, counseling, whatever that looks like, so that the next time somebody wants to be mean to you or say something bad about your deceased mother, that you have a safety plan you have
Speaker 69
31:12
an idea of what you're going to be able to do to avoid being
back in court that matters for every kid that comes in court regardless of what they're accused of they have a story and if we ignore that we're missing the mark and I say this a lot and I want to be very clear and you can ask the people that come in front of me this is not about being soft on kids and ignoring what's going on in our communities. That's the wrong way. But it's a smart way to handle the kids and the adverse childhood experiences that they've had and
the trauma that they've experienced and try to get them on the right path. It's in all of our best interest, as Senator Irvin pointed out, that kids be at home in the community and they have the support that they need. Unfortunately, there are times that that's not possible because of safety risk or concerns but that's how we're using these risk assessments and it's important for for all courts across the state to partner with people in the community to be able to come in and provide that level of support for that youth. You'll see the statistical
impact that that's had across the state. Since 2015, you can see these are delinquency cases filed statewide, a 55% reduction in the number of kids that are coming through court on a delinquency case, right? So delinquency anytime that a juvenile commits an offense that would be a crime if they were an adult, right? That's a delinquency. DYS commitments since that time,
down 24%. The Ohio youth screening tool that we use for diversions, that we divert kids out of court, an increase of 836%. That's massive. That means that people are using these tools to work with kids. You can tell by 2015 all the way to 2025 the number of risk assessments that have been completed with data inputted that we know that there are this many kids and families
that sat through that process and were given an opportunity for that individualized court plan and plan for rehabilitation. Diversions, you know data is only good as the input. We're always working on our data. I serve on a data subcommittee, I think two different data subcommittees. And so you can see that diversions have increased greatly, and that
Speaker 56
33:44
was part of a legislative package a session or two ago that really opened the door for more diversion programs to keep kids out of court.
Speaker 69
33:54
And that's the Ohio Youth Assessment Tool. That's what we used early on for diversion, the savory. The MAZE is the mental health assessment I discussed earlier, as well as the substance abuse through the CRAFT. You'll see what needs each kid has. So based on these risk assessments, we're able to identify the specific areas in their life where they may be struggling. We also point out what positive factors do they have going on in their life. What's something they have going on in the community that gives us hope that we can make an impact?
And so these are all the things that we look at to come up with that, you know, probation plan that, you know, that's tailored specifically to that kid. Total delinquency cases, yeah, we've looked at that. 38% reduction there on felonies, 60% reduction on misdemeanors, 48% reduction in revocations. And this is statewide. And these mirror, my numbers are a little bit different, but you can see that it's drastically made a huge impact on the kids and families in our communities.
I just wanted to point out here on DYS commitment data, the breakdown between felonies and misdemeanors. In Arkansas, you can't commit a low-risk misdemeanor to DYS, okay? and there's there's two schools of thought that if you go out and do a bunch of research across the country there's a group of people that believe that you should be offense based so the first guiding principle is what is the offense for which they're in court for and that your sentencing
Speaker 56
35:38
options disposition options should be limited
Speaker 69
35:45
based on that to me the using the risk assessment and the results contained in that is a better guiding principle because it gives us a greater in-depth look of what areas of risk that a kid might have. And so the last one is just probation, revocation, or aftercare violations. So a kid is committed to DYS, gets outs on aftercare, let's say a period of six months,
they commit a violation that ends
Speaker 58
36:11
up sending them back to DYS. That's the third row there on the
Speaker 71
36:18
right. and I believe Ms. Steen is going to go through the remainder of this slide. Yes, I'll be
Speaker 59
36:25
brief on this slide. Representative Shepard did ask us to bring some school data, so we
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
36:30
do have a data point in our case management system on school-related incidents, but as you can see there, we only have 10 counties that are currently using that data point.
I'm hopeful that with our data projects that we're working on that we can improve that because I think that is one area that really needs a lot of attention, and I think that's very important to Representative Shepard. And so I did want to provide the data we have, even though it's only 10 out of our 75 counties that were recorded there. Now the FINS data is accurate. For those that are not familiar with FINS, it's family in need of services. The truancy would be the ones that are filed by the schools because they are not able to get these kids to come to school. So they actually file an action in the court to say,
hey judge help us we can get these kids back in school and FINS take up a lot of our juvenile judges times and I'm sure they could tell you all about it but the FINS they're able to provide services to these families without having a delinquency case so sometimes it is a child that's been involved with criminal activity they probably have committed some offenses but it's not gotten to that point yet they haven't been arrested because usually when a kid's skipping school something's going on in the home something's either going on with that child or something's going on in the with the family not to get that child to school so this is the FINS data you can
see it's not really changed that much um over the last five years um we of course had you know a little bit of a difference around COVID um but we we are not really seeing a slowdown in FINS that's still occurring statewide um and again do take up most of our juvenile judges time that is actually all of the slides that we have and so i'm happy to answer i know we are all happy to answer any questions that y'all may have if i
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
38:17
can add one last thing i think that's really
important as it relates to this slide we have talked about and discussed the idea of trying to really layer in the schools um there's some there's some barriers potentially there because of FERPA laws or federal laws but if you look at this these kids are in these they're at the school and they're also in the court system there's got to be a little bit more shared data
or collaboration or something happening um with our that's something that we as the commission talked a lot about and have talked a lot about because you know especially with truancy and fence and things like that it can cut both ways you know you've got um some schools that just they kind of just the juvenile courts kind of become a dumping ground and that's not good and it's not appropriate and those kids should not be there i've seen those we've seen those cases where
they should not be in a juvenile court system that they're not being dealt with at the school effectively and efficiently there's there's data that that's that is could be so helpful for the schools that the courts now have because of this validated risk assessment tool that they're utilizing here but could be so helpful for the school people for school officials teachers whatever to also have that information because they need to know why that child's acting up in
the classroom or skipping third period I go back to the to the to the dashboard system that the state of Arkansas paid for for the schools all to have a school safety dashboard at one time all schools had it because the state of Arkansas paid for it now it's only by choice if the schools want it or not it's a system that was created by a man in Mountain Home Arkansas that's brilliant who worked for walmart um and and i will tell you it it's so critical the schools that use that
information uh really have a better thumb on the pulse of what's happening with their kids than schools that are not using it it's not mandated that they use it and in my opinion we give them a lot of money at the schools and i think they should spend the money to utilize this system because if you're going to have a system that tracks their grades why not also have a system to track how they're doing as a person
Speaker 53
40:54
to me that's just as important as your your grade that you're getting in algebra or whatever is
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
41:00
and we've got all this information all this
information is sitting in file cabinets it's just not centralized and that's what the technology and the data dashboard the the dashboard provides and so for some schools it is an incredibly effective tool that they use to flag those kids that are at-risk kids that are having issues. It could be that, you know, they had a gang-related offense. Well, the kids and the administrators and the teachers, they need to know that information. Probably helpful if they're getting into fights or something at school that they have that information. So there's a lot of
work, in my opinion, that needs to be made there at the school because it's a huge component in piece of them feeding the system that needs to be really looked at but and we have I will say that we have really really really worked really hard on that piece of this at our retreat last year so I wanted to say that because you know they and we also need to know if a kid is skipping school what's happening at home so that's why it cuts both ways and it's a really delicate policy to
figure out but we're happy to answer questions they are thank you all right thank you
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
42:16
all so we've got several in the queue really quick I have a question so first on this slide under
school related incident you see a fairly sizable decrease from 24 to 25 is
there anything that attributes to that or attributed to that I'm not really
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
42:34
sure I noticed it was specific in a few counties that have maybe new judges so i don't know if maybe their court isn't tracking this
because this would have to be entered into context um and it is a um as of right now in our current system it doesn't have to be it's like an optional check box um our one thing we have discussed is that in our new system it needs to be a mandatory box you have to click yes or no because if it's just a check a box then sometimes when you have turnover in clerk's offices or juvenile officers and they just skip over it then just sometimes you know again as judge said your
dad is only as good as what's inputted into
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
43:16
it so fair enough if you would go back to a couple of the slides
related to uh the diversion and then also like right there so i see that you um okay so here you no go back to the where it has the felonies um okay so
this this number corresponds with the diversion rate correct the 55 percent is that well let me get back to the
Speaker 85
43:42
there's a different diversion slide let me get to that one okay this
that's it that was it okay so
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
43:52
the diversion rate of total cases corresponds with the actual crimes committed is that is that so as we see a decrease in cases we're seeing a decrease in crimes committed is that the way i read that or no
Speaker 59
44:03
we are having an increase in diversions yes so there are some countings that
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
44:07
divert after cases are filed and there are certain areas that divert cases before they're filed um but yes you definitely can see an increase in the diversions and the case numbers
going down and i think that's while we hadn't had a big decrease in felonies there's a big decrease in misdemeanors which makes me okay that's what i was trying to get out i was
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
44:26
trying to make sure that we're seeing that corresponding data
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
44:28
point and that to me that makes sense because you're diverting misdemeanors usually right it's not usually going to be a felony so
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
44:34
so if you go to the felony slide um overall so do y'all break this down do you track the specific felonies yes sir okay but it's just not you just don't show it here but you have that data i do i probably
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
44:49
have a lot of it in here as well and i tried to bring a lot but didn't want to overwhelm y'all with the powerpoint um but any kind of data points you want on um you know the level of the offense whether it was offensive property uh person and i know that when michael crump presents all of his data as two commitments are okay these were all felonies violent crimes against a person or these were all and so we we both break our data down there and can pretty much answer any question for you perfect it'd
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
45:18
be interesting to see that okay we're going to questions now first
in the queue we have uh representative barnes you're recognized
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
45:26
thank you chair uh right here So with the increase in mental health, and it has decreased some in 2025, what are we doing to create greater access for mental health? For instance, in Pine Bluff, one of our largest mental health facilities are at risk of closing because of funding Southeast behavior. And so they are very active in the juvenile court under Judge Brown.
I'm wondering, what are we doing? Are we cutting funding while those numbers are somewhat still high? Representative, I mean,
this is a problem across our state. There are facilities closing on a regular basis. We are losing services around the state, and we are doing our best to keep up. I mean, there are certain parts of our state that are doing just fine, but in the south, We definitely have several judicial districts that are at a place where I'm concerned about, you know, them having the services they need.
The AOC has several federal grants that we are currently working on contracting with some service providers to come into areas. So we've been working pretty diligently on that. Now, Michael Crump can talk about, I mean, there are community-based providers across the state. So there are always somebody, but as Judge Braswell said, it's not a cookie-cutter approach, and there are some needs for some of our juveniles that we are hoping we can address with some of our phones. I talked to Judge Brown this week about it, and so it is something that we are always looking at,
and we always tell judges, like, if there's a lack of something, number one, call our office and see if we can help, see what we can do. The AOC actually created a position called the Statewide Behavioral Health Administrator, And she serves as a liaison between the judiciary and service providers. And she is a therapist by trade. So while she's worked in the court system, she worked with CASA for several years, she is a therapist. And so she understands this world and is really trying to help connect some resources that are out there that maybe sometimes judges don't even know about.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
47:42
All right. Representative Shepard, you're recognized. Thank
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
47:46
you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for being here today. I absolutely enjoyed your
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
47:52
presentation, and Senator, you and I, of course, share some of the same passion as it relates to juvenile justice in Arkansas. I want to take you back to, I guess, page three on
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
48:06
the slide. For me, and if I'm wrong, please correct me.
Again, this is not that I'm on some witch hunt, but I'm simply trying to gather information here. On page three on the slide, this shows the implementation of the SAVRI assessment, correct, from 2015 until 2025. If we look at the total number of cases that have been filed, there's been a significant decrease. We agree with that. But could you argue that the number of commitments to DYS is not keeping up proportionally with the number and the decrease in cases?
That's one question I have. And then the other thing that is what's interesting about this slide is we see a big jump once it became mandatory. I think the understanding is in 2015, the legislation was written to complete an assessment, but then in 2025, well, earlier in 2020, was the mandatory error in which it came. So this does not necessarily show that we are complying with statute from what you all have provided.
The specific question that was given in the email, I think Brooke would be in a better position to answer these questions since she and I communicated the most. How are we able to show that the assessments are being tied directly to the commitments? The cases are decreasing, but the commitments to DYS is not keeping up with that. And then the last one, and I'll be done. I know it's a loaded question. When we look at the diversion, the data is simply not there and it's actually missing.
And I think that has already been addressed in the beginning in regards to data. So we'll come back to that, Senator, and what we plan
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
50:09
to do about it in the future. And I'm sorry.
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
50:14
Thank you, Brooke. Yes, ma'am. And if we missed anything, just please remind us. To start, I actually think the data does show a little reduction in commitments. sound we all have to remember covid so 2019 and you see that real low jump and i think michael crumper agree with this we've talked about this a lot of times 2020 and 2021 are pretty much going
to be covid years because he has a lag of when he gets kids so right so like the commitment would be for the offense that maybe occurred maybe the prior year maybe eight months before i mean depending on the case obviously um so we we have seen i mean that i think 2020 and 2021 you kind of have to 2019 through 2021 you kind of have to take out we knew there was going to be a big jump after covid i don't think michael was surprised by that i mean i obviously know he wishes they were lower um but i i don't think that that rise after covid um was that shocking we are going in the right
direction 404 and and this also doesn't show how high the numbers were before 2015 i mean we were having 600 700 kids committed um so like the numbers really are pretty good and while total cases are going down um senator gilmore pointed this out it's the misdemeanor cases that are going down the felony cases have not gone down all that much and you know obviously while we're not just looking at offense the more serious crimes of course are going to be the more kids are going
to dys so there has been a huge reduction in misdemeanor cases um but not miss not not felonies i mean a little bit and actually 2025 numbers look incredible we didn't know what they'd look at until you asked us to pull the data um and we looked at it we're like wow and michael said well hopefully this shows for my 2026 data is going to be a lot better because his commitments are going to have a lag in time right and so um i think it the data actually does show an improvement there as for the diversions um we have a third account a third of our counties that are using
context i'll just talk about our case management system it's not the most user-friendly case management system um everybody's probably laughing around me because they know but many of our courts have been committed to putting their data in there there are other courts are using their own diversion data like they have their own program that they're doing using for diversions for us being a non-unified state to have one case management system with the data we have is pretty awesome I think I'm bragging on our CIS division but they do a really good job
and I do think in our new case management system though it's going to be much more user-friendly and I think our data will continue to improve but the diversions show I mean even though it's only a third of our counties how many we are doing I mean for almost you know 1,500 to 2,000 diversions in a third of our state that probably means there's close to 5,000 diversions a year which is I think pretty incredible compared and that does to Senator Gilmore's point kind of compare to the number of misdemeanor cases that have gone down so those are likely the cases that have been
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
53:30
I missed anything quick quick follow-up mr. chair Brooke it was asking the email the data in regards to the assessment being tied to the commitment can you all provide that to us we you mean like
Speaker 59
53:45
how many and that are committed have an assessment Yes.
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
53:48
So if the assessment shows that low-risk offenders are not to be committed in Arkansas, is that accurate?
Speaker 104
53:56
Well, they should not. They shouldn't be committed.
Speaker 105
53:59
Correct. I'm sorry, if you don't mind.
Speaker 69
54:06
This is a big deal. Absolutely. Earlier, what I mentioned was the statute says that you cannot commit a low-risk misdemeanor. Okay. A lot of the time, you will have a juvenile that is found delinquent of a rape, sexual assault. An overwhelming majority of juveniles are going to come out to be low risk of reoffending for sex offenses.
I believe the percentage is like somewhere between 81% and 85% of juveniles that commit a sex offense do not commit another sex offense while they are a juvenile. So that's part of the data and the research where a lot of kids with sex offenses are going to come out low risk. That doesn't mean that in certain situations a DYS commitment is not appropriate based on the
Speaker 58
55:09
seriousness of the offense that occurred.
So that's the big distinction on the low risk is there could be some very violent, specifically sex cases where a juvenile would grade out as low risk
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
55:23
of re-offending. Okay. Mr. Chair, this is my last question and I'll get back in the queue if you're okay. You're recognized. and this question is going to be directed towards you Judge Braswell I have the utmost respect
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
55:39
for you I think you are one of the most compassionate juvenile judges in Arkansas that I've encountered
and I respect you fully once I presented this resolution in committee after I presented it you stated on record Ms. Shepard is correct we have to do something in Arkansas off. I'm going to ask you, Judge Braswell, to explain further what you meant. Thank you, Representative Shepard, for that question. I always
Speaker 58
56:08
like it as a judge to hear somebody say what I said on the record back to me, right? It's like, yes, every day I have someone
Speaker 105
56:19
that repeats everything that I say. I'm glad
Speaker 112
56:22
my court reporter doesn't go home with me,
Speaker 58
56:25
that's for sure um representative shepherd um we're at a place where we've done a lot of hard work and we've made a lot of changes and we continue to do that and it's going to be a fight that we fight for the rest of our careers because we know that things change
Speaker 69
56:42
and circumstances change representative barnes i mean he hit on it some of the biggest issues that we have that are coming
at us as a system is what are we what are we doing for mental health and I'll tag on to that substance abuse for juveniles in the state of Arkansas I had a young man in front of me a couple weeks ago real big I mean you know 6'4 250 mom and dad that love him and that are doing everything that they can for him has a diagnosis of autism and they've come to me in a fence case
because they need services they need help and they've done everything that they're supposed to do they've taken the kid to counseling they've done everything they can and the young man continues to have moments and periods of violence in the home now the family has a relatively young child at home that's new to the family it's creating a dangerous situation at home the parents are at a loss and so when they're when the kid finally does something i hate to say bad
enough they were able to get him accepted into a mental health treatment facility okay the kid no shocker becomes violent while he's in mental health treatment based on what happened in the facility they sent him to the juvenile detention center in that area and said we're done he was violent we're done okay um that that prosecutor got that and said we're not we're not filing
delinquency case on this young man they also know that he has an open fence case in front of me so they were like we're going to let Judge Braswell figure it out and I say that a little bit joking but I what they're saying is we trust Judge Braswell to handle this and we don't want to further put this kid deeper into the system so my question is what what do I do with a kid who is a danger in the home not all the time but enough time that mom and dad are legitimately scared
and now because he's had a violent act in a mental health facility their provider has just dropped them we're done there's nothing else we can do and what I've seen
Speaker 71
59:17
happen in the past and I'm not attacking providers I'm just telling you what happens. Once that happens for a kid, it becomes difficult, if
Speaker 69
59:25
not impossible, for the parents to get that kid admitted into a different residential treatment in the state of Arkansas. And so now
Speaker 56
59:33
they're in front of me crying, basically begging me to hold their son in contempt of court and give them a couple days of safety in their home. Those are real kids
Speaker 69
59:48
and real families that are desperate for help and so the the closures that you're talking about representative barns representative shepherd what what what do we need to do it's a big task and listen the the aoc and there are a lot
of people that have been working on trying to identify providers to come into the state and provide these services and and i don't want to speak
Speaker 71
1:00:12
for them but what it seems a reality to be so often is it's like i don't know i don't know that it's worth it and so we see that especially on the substance abuse side of things where we have drug courts across the state we're working with these kids and there are kids that are crying out for more intensive help and we have zero
inpatient drug beds in the state of Arkansas. Zero. And I know that when I'm talking about
Speaker 69
1:00:45
these issues, that there are dollar signs all around both of those. That's not lost on me. I understand the hurdle that that creates. But Representative Shepard, to your question, mental health and substance abuse for our kids and families in our state is the things that we've got to tackle going forward if we're going to continue to see the change and the impact that we've had because
Speaker 105
1:01:11
it's one thing to know that a kid needs help but
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
1:01:17
if you don't have the tools to give it to him what's the point so would it
Speaker 111
1:01:23
be an accurate statement that we rely on incarceration in some instances because of
Speaker 119
1:01:29
lack of community-based services specifically mental health and substance abuse i would
Speaker 58
1:01:34
say that there there would be situations where a kid is detained for their safety and the safety of the community or those around him for a short time period to ensure that they have a safe
home and safe place to go home to so it's it's thank
Speaker 105
1:01:50
you it's a very good loaded question about that i don't mean disrespect by that but it's that's a difficult
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:02:00
one to answer good question all right thank you representative shepherd um moving on to representative in
it you're recognized if you'll hit your button again representative there we go now you're
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
1:02:13
recognized thank you mr chair i'd like to thank everybody for this presentation on this very important subject
I'd like to touch on Judge Braswell. So I have a son with autism. And so my question is, with all this data that you all have, how do you, for people with, for students with disabilities, how do you track that or do you even track that? Because I'm interested in knowing how many of our children who have special needs are in this system. Representative, that's a great question.
Speaker 58
1:02:50
My chief of staff has a son with autism, and so that's something
Speaker 69
1:02:55
that's near and dear to my heart and to hers as well. I know for our court, I don't have – I'm not currently tracking specific diagnoses or disabilities that come through the court system. I use those because if we know them, those are identified in our risk assessments, and I 100% take those things into consideration when developing that plan.
Speaker 58
1:03:25
But currently, right now, that's not a data point that we've been collecting. I have a follow-up. So how
Speaker 127
1:03:37
difficult would it be to do that moving forward? so
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:03:44
it's actually funny you ask that question because yesterday i was talking with our new our person who's taking the statewide behavioral health administrator position and she's been talking with the national centers who help state courts around the country and that they are
developing data points for the first time ever they are developing data points to track behavioral health in cases and that involves of course um criminal justice cases it's in just juvenile cases and they expect to roll that out later this year and she had literally just had a meeting with them a couple days ago about it and and we chatted about it because I said how do you what do we track is if somebody brings it up because you know are we asking people to identify this is it things that come up in a savory or does defense counsel have to bring it up so I don't know what that's
going to look like but it is something that the national center is exploring and
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:04:42
is going to roll out to state courts hopefully
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
1:04:46
very soon thank you thank you representative representative gonzales more than you recognized thank you thank you for your
presentation um you mentioned the school safety dashboard and yes yes senator um mentioned the school safety dashboard how that possibly could be
a major tool for identifying um some of the challenges that are
students may have early on can what would that look like in terms of ensuring that that that we are using that tool or if if that's if that's a very if that's one of the best way since we have it you know to move forward to identify early yeah thank you
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:05:29
I yeah I'm familiar with it because I've spent a lot of time with the developers of that program and and schools around the state some that really utilize that as an effective tool um you know I think there's just
there's room there for schools to use it and if a school comes to me especially one of the things that whenever I met with superintendents or with schools their top concern was mental health issues with their students that was their top concern and I asked well then how are you tracking that information. Because if you're not tracking it or you're not taking it, I'm going to use a word that Judge Bradswell used in his presentation. If you're not intentional, then what are you doing?
So you all have children. You probably all have stories just like I do about when my kids were in school and what was going on with my kids. And it took a lot of deciphering for me to go, oh, okay, my daughter's getting bullied in this class period that's why she's not doing well or she's coming to me crying or she's crying or the teacher's saying she's crying well okay there's something's happening are you digging down into it and to figure out what's happening who's saying what to her and why we need to now redo her entire schedule to get her away from that kid
which is what I had to do so you know to me it's a tool that should be utilized and for me their grades are very important. I'm not minimizing their grades that they're getting in algebra or whatever, but what's happening in their lives is just as important, if not more important, because that is what's happening and affecting what is happening when they're coming to the judges in the juvenile justice court system. Let's figure out a way to figure it out
in the classroom before it gets to the courtroom. That's my point. I think that it could be a tool that could be utilized to divert even before we get into the system. And we need to continue to,
Speaker 132
1:07:45
what's important to me is total cases filed from 2015 down to 2025.
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:07:51
A clear reduction of that. We want kids to be in juvenile court that it's an appropriate place for them to be.
There's a lot of kids, in my opinion, that probably might get there or that I know for a fact got there and did not need to be there. It should have been handled at the school level. Should have been handled in the classroom. Should have been handled with the family there. And I'm not beating up on the schools. They've got their hands full. They've got to be teachers. They weren't trained to do this work, but guess what? It's landed on their shore, and they're tired of seeing another student commit suicide
or seeing another kid act out violently against another child because guess what? We found out what's happening in their home life, just what Judge Braswell talked about with a 13-year-old little girl. Guess what? If I were that 13-year-old little girl, I'd probably get into a fight too if I saw my mom burn to death in a car and you're making fun of my mom? Not okay. So why did that end up to that level? Why can't we deal with it in the classroom as best we can?
But again, you have to have the community providers out there. And as you know, in rural Arkansas, that is almost non-existent. And it is non-existent when it comes to substance abuse. And if you've had a child that struggled with any kind of issues, If you struggle with substance abuse, I'm not minimizing that, drugs, alcohol. But let me tell you, folks, social media and the amount of junk and garbage that is getting put into these kids is just as dangerous as any drug or alcohol to their self-esteem, to their self-confidence, to them comparing themselves to unattainable.
unrealistic situations you are crazy or you've got your head in the sand if you think that social media is not as harmful as a high-powered fentanyl drug cocaine it is it is even more so and it has affected numbers more than we could have ever imagined so to me it is a smart and wise investment and if a school comes to me and says oh we've got issues with DCFS DYS and these
kids and blah blah blah what are you doing as a school board what are you doing as a school to engage at that level with these kids and their families or are you just putting them in the bleachers and say oh go read your go go get on your phone instead of you know being PE go sit in bleachers and play on your phone no i mean so yeah i it gets me really really fired up and frustrated so thank you for the the question but i think it's a huge continuum and it's a policy issue
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:10:55
that we really shouldn't tackle thank you thank
you representative representative barnes you're recognized all right if you'll hit that button again
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:11:13
all right don't touch it there you go yes thank you chair oh what one of for the judge what when you wouldn't you be able to say that a lot of numbers could be worse if it wasn't for judges having some degree of subjectivism.
I know the Savior is designed to try to bring symmetry to everybody, but we're doing it the same. But when it comes to some particular, say, juvenile delinquent issues, some judges choose a program instead of DYS. And that kid, in reality, really, another judge would be in D.Y.S. So, you know, in somewhat these numbers that we see, they're a reality maybe of what's going on.
But they could be a lot worse if every judge just said, okay, you robbed somebody, D.Y.S. You did this, D.Y.S. But instead, we have programs in place that try to work with those kids, and a lot of those kids end up doing better as a result of the program. When you say that those numbers could
Speaker 69
1:12:26
be worse if it wasn't for some judges. Yes, sir. I
Speaker 56
1:12:30
mean, Representative Burns, I think you can see just in the data even before risk assessments that that bears true. And it does require – I mean, look, it's real easy for people to sit back
just in the public or even people that are in the
Speaker 69
1:12:45
court and say, well, if I was the judge, I'd lock that kid up. Or if I was a judge, I'm sending that
Speaker 71
1:12:52
kid to DYS. I was a prosecutor for about eight years. I never imagined the weight that comes with making a decision to hold a kid in a detention center or send a kid to DYS. We
Speaker 69
1:13:11
have to take all those things into consideration.
But we also have to balance public safety. and so those are those should be difficult decisions that we make and I don't think it's appropriate to have a policy that says every time a kid does x it equals y I think that's why we have to know more about what's going on in the kid's family not to use as a sword against them but really as a shield to help protect them to go through life and and growing up and maturing
I mean, you know, I get blue in the face talking to kids about all the research
Speaker 56
1:13:53
that shows the impact of brain development for prolonged use of marijuana from when you're 12 years old to you're 18 years
Speaker 69
1:14:00
old and you've been smoking nonstop every day. Your brain's in full development. Well, you're smoking because you're you've got some traumatic situations going on. You're depressed. You have anxiety, whatever that may be. All the literature that's coming out is the prolonged use of marijuana significantly increases those symptoms related to depression and anxiety.
And so, Representative Barnes, I mean, you're right. We have to take those into consideration. And it shouldn't be you're going to DYS because I'm mad at you. I've told kids I'm disappointed, right? But it shouldn't be because we're mad. it should be some very serious concerns and the other thing too is and mr mr crump knows this um i do have kids that have been committed to dys for misdemeanors out of my court and i would say an overwhelming majority um are kids that have been given multiple opportunities
not to be back in the court system i mean a kid the other day that i sent it
Speaker 71
1:15:02
was his ninth revocation i'm embarrassed to say that out loud i mean like but the situation is so you know it's like just it's problematic stuff going on he's never really hurt anyone had an incident with his dad a year ago severe mental health issues in the home right poverty lack of resources but
Speaker 69
1:15:23
at some point there has to be some credibility to what we're doing and so you you you have to
have graduated sanctions in court you can't just throw everybody out of the boat um and so yeah i mean that's that's a
Speaker 135
1:15:40
great point represent barnes hadn't really thought of it the way you
Speaker 59
1:15:44
mentioned and represent barnes just to um address one part of your question you talked about some judges are sending to
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:15:49
certain programs michael runs a excellent program called c-step which i'm sure he'd be happy to share more information about um but he's been able to get more beds um we aren't able to get girls there yet but i mean he knows the judges are like give us as many beds as we
can at c-step and we'll send them to you um judges love it youth challenge was a huge hit across our state and it closing was pretty devastating for a lot of our judges um so some of these you know we talk about behavioral health um services and programs that aren't available but also these these programs instead of sending a child to dys they could send them to youth challenge um or c-step and for a while we had very few c-step beds but michael has worked very hard over the last few sessions to get more and more beds um but definitely that has made a big impact
i think also on on judges you know options if they can't send the child home what are the options to keep
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:16:47
the family and that juvenile safe thank you all right going to representative johnny
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
1:16:53
rye you're recognized thank you mr chairman You know, we know that dyslexia is a sickness. And that's probably going to have to be dealt with one way, and then you've got kids that are disturbing, fighting.
You know, it's going to be something different there, you know. And I think that what we are looking at, I mean, I may be wrong, but I think that through the years we have actually, Mom and dad has really had to buckle down to make a living, and they're not around the children as much as they should be. So it doesn't make such a good role model. And, you know, you hate to say that, and I don't think there's a cure for that because they surely don't do it on purpose.
But I think that we do need to look at seeing what we can do maybe for after school programs, things like that, that would actually help out on that end instead of the sickness end with the dyslexia. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Representative Johnny.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:18:00
Going to Representative McGruder, you're recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:18:03
I want to say thank you to you all for the presentation. The judge and I have had conversations about this, and I love the passion that he displays on this issue.
I do want to make sure I point out to Senator Irvin that I, as a PE teacher, do not send students to the bleachers to play on their phones. Just wanted to make sure I pointed that out. Probably makes them run the bleachers, though. But seriously, though, this is an issue. I appreciate you all shining a light on this, and we'll continue to work
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:18:42
towards making things better. all right thank you for that comment see no further questions I'll give everyone one last
chance I see none thank you all for being here thanks for your time thanks for your
passion thanks for your work you're dismissed all right we're gonna move to item G we'll ask director crump to come to the table
and then director you introduce yourself for the record when you have a seat and And you may proceed at will.
Speaker 143
1:20:05
Sorry, my skills are even worse than Judge Brazl's, I think,
Michael Krupp
Unverified
1:20:07
when it comes to this stuff. My name is Michael Krupp. I'm the director of the Division of Youth Services. And I appreciate the opportunity to come here today and give you some of the data that we have around the kids that are in D-wise custody and maybe a little bit of information about how things work to sort of fill out some of the other conversations. Thank you.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:20:23
And really, really quick, before you begin, I'd point out that it may be hard to read on the screen. You do have this as a part of the packet under Exhibit G. So, sorry, you may proceed. Thank you.
Michael Krupp
Unverified
1:20:36
So I started off, Representative Shepard had sent some questions in around data and some things, some questions she had about DYS and our population. So I tried to answer as many of those questions as I could with the data that we have in our system. So you're going to see the first several pages are just various graphs and data tables to give you an idea of what our population looks like. And then at the end, I have some pages that are more of a narrative focus, sort of some descriptions of how some things work, our education system, how things work on the clinical side, and some other things that are going on,
which I don't know if you want me to read those verbatim, but when I get to those, I'll try
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:21:13
to go through them, just kind of highlight some things.
Michael Krupp
Unverified
1:21:16
I think just highlight those, and then the members can read at their leisure. Perfect. Thank you. So this first graphic you'll see, there was some discussion about this before. It just shows our commitments by calendar year 2020 through 2025, and you can see it was mentioned that they were even higher prior to 2020. Things did kind of bottom out in 2020, 2021, especially when the pandemic started.
We really, that thing slowed down when the school stopped and the court stopped for a little while. Our numbers just really dropped to probably the lowest they had ever been in the history of DYS. So you could see they started to rise in 2022. We could see it coming in spring of 2022. A lot of these things are cyclical. We see in the springtime and in early fall, our numbers tend to be a little bit higher when the kids are back in school, when it's getting warm outside. There's just things you can see that wherever we start to see, at least that's why I think it happens during those times.
But we have those cyclical times, but you can see the numbers. They did hit a peak of 466 commitments in 2023. Slowly, they've started to decline since then on the commitment side. But the next graph, if you see, that is our Rite of Passage secure residential. Rite of Passage is our contractor that operates five secure facilities around the state for DYS. It was seven at one point. We had actually closed three in 2019 or so. In 2020, we were down to four facilities.
We had to add one back because of the rising numbers, reopened one that we had that was in really good condition and able to do that. But you can see in that second graph that our numbers, That's the residential numbers in those five secure facilities. They have been climbing ever since 2021. As of today, it is around 320 youth in those secure facilities. I'm hoping, I think, as Brookstein said, that there's a little bit of a lag, that if we start to see filings that have dropped off, then you start to see maybe commitments drop off. But there is a lag between the time that cases are filed
and youth are committed to our custody. So we're really hoping and we need for our commitments to drop back to close to where they were in 2020 for us to be able to have what we think is a really good healthy system to be able to do everything we want to do. The next slide I have shows the numbers for our community-based residential. We have group home contracts with a couple of places. Vera Lloyd, Consolidated Youth Services are the primary two that we have. We also have a community reintegration program that just started back in June. So those are more community-based. They're
not secure settings more of our low risk offenders or some offenders who have have done well in their treatment on the secure side and they're getting closer to going home we might step them down to one of these more community-based a little bit less secure to give them a chance to kind of prove themselves with a little more freedom before they just go back to the community they were in before and back to their home situation so you can see those numbers have actually gone up to an average of 34 in 2025 beds on that community-based side, and some of that was deliberate to be able to move
more kids into a step-down program that I did highlight later on in this presentation. The next graph here is the juvenile detention center numbers. A little bit of background, juvenile detention centers are county-operated. Those are not facilities run by DYS. There are 10 of those left in the state. There were 14 when I first came to DYS in 2018. Four have closed or closed within a couple of years after that, so we've gone from 14 to 10. We try not to utilize juvenile
detention centers to the best of our ability. We don't typically like to put a youth in a detention center for behavior reasons because it disrupts their progress in treatment, and our provider should be able to handle those behaviors. They have experience doing that, so it has to be really bad for us to put a kid there for those reasons and if you look at 2020 and 2021 our numbers were really low we had times where there were zero kids in a juvenile detention center but what you see is a result of the rising number of commitments required us to use those juvenile detention
center beds to hold youth until we had a bed in intake we have a 24 bed intake unit in bryant arkansas the alexander's facilities most people refer to it we have a 24 bed facility and so sometimes when the commitments were coming in too quickly 40 something 50 kids in a month it takes about three weeks to get youth assessed before we decide what facility they're going to when they're going to start their treatment what their needs are and what that's going to look like so sometimes when we don't have enough room and intake youth will go to a juvenile detention
center sometimes held in the community they are already in until a bed opens up we bring them in as quickly as we can and we go ahead and start the assessment process those numbers at one point did reach probably 60 youth in the juvenile detention center at one point and and the time period that they were spending before bed opened up was really high it was months sometimes now it's gotten much better we have about 20 to 22 kids typically right now in a juvenile detention center bed waiting and the wait period is is much much less than it was before it's typically a
month or less before we're able to get those youth back into our facility to be assessed the next slide or graph table you'll see here it's the we broke this down by county rather than just juvenile court jurisdiction we broke this down by county for all six of those calendar years so if you want to at your you know leisure you can go through these and look and look at each county and see the number of commitments per year for those six years just give you an idea of where the kids are coming from it's alphabetical it's not by number
of youth here and it's two pages all the way down you see Yale County there at the end of the the slide the second page there. This one we just want to give everyone an idea of how many youth there are in these counties because that does matter. You can see this is from the census data we pulled from 2020 to 2024 for ages 10 to 19 is the way it was broken down in the census so just to give you a perspective of how many kids we have in each one of these counties that we're getting those commitments from you can look at this and kind of look at the commitments and kind of get
an idea of of what it's looking like in those counties and I don't remember who mentioned it specifically but we do have certain parts of the state where we tend to get more kids than other parts I think it is probably a matter of resources largely we when I mentioned those juvenile detention centers the 10 that are left eight of those are in the more the larger cities in Arkansas The only two that we have that are not in a larger city, at least by Arkansas standards, would be in Yale County and we have Arkansas County in Dewitt.
So the other eight are all in places like Bentonville, Washington County, you have Faulkner County, Pulaski County, Jefferson County, Craighead, Crittenden. They're all in the much larger parts of Arkansas. We lost juvenile detention centers in Miller County and Texarkana. There was one in Batesville, White River Juvenile Detention Center. there was a mississippi county and then we also had um garland county hot springs so those were the four that we lost over the last i don't i don't remember the exact dates but five six seven
years those have all closed so it took some of the beds out of rotation um juvenile detention centers are used by courts to hold youth sometimes more serious offenders prior to adjudication they're also an alternative where a court can send a youth for a short period maybe to just get them out of the home for those some of those safety reasons that were discussed or or for whatever reason maybe when someone is revoked or as a you know to get consequences for that young man or young woman they might send them to a juvenile detention center for a short period
of time but i believe 90 days is the longest they stay in a juvenile detention center unless it's being held like prior to adjudication i might be there are experts in the room that know a little bit more about how all that works but i just thought it was worthwhile to tell you all kind of how juvenile detention centers work it's not just dys youth in those beds we do pay for those beds so if we have to use a juvenile detention center bed we either have a contract if we use that that detention center frequently or we pay them whatever their rate is if it's a lower amount and we use it infrequently let's see the next one i was asked to collect or bring some demographic
data around the dys population so we went into our system and pulled this out we just aggregated it for all six years. Rather than have a 50-page or 60-page presentation, we just aggregated this data to show you the whole six years. So if you look in the first table, it's broken down by race and ethnicity. You'll see that it's 45.5% African-American black, 42% white, and then you've got a few other groups that are in that four to five percent range, but it usually runs pretty
much 50 50 between white and black as far as the population inside the dys system age wise you'll see that over half of our youth it shows the 16 to 17 and up and i would say that when i look at it they're mostly 17 and up when about half of the kids so they kind of have a little different needs and we have a little different goals for those older youth than we do the younger ones the other half are obviously we've got quite a few 14 to 15 year olds thankfully we don't have a lot of 12, 13 year olds and not very many that are, you have to be 10 years old to be adjudicated
delinquent in the state of Arkansas. So you'd have to be at least 10 years old before you could be sent to DYS. It's pretty rare for us to get someone 10 years old. Going back to the pandemic years again, I will tell you that we at one point had so many elementary school kids that we did kind of open a second group home at Vera Lloyd just for those, just to get them out of the facility with the older kids we felt like it was better to put those boys together because it was a really young group now we might have we might not have any we might have one elementary school
age youth so it's you know it's kind of difficult to get the resources even for those kids when it comes to education because it doesn't make a lot of sense to keep a lot of elementary school age teachers when you don't get those kids so but thankfully it's very rare for us to get an elementary school age they usually are middle school and up the next one you'll see our population almost always runs 80 percent male and about 20 percent male i mean female so we have two we have one female only facility in harrisburg arkansas that's for our lower level risk girls um and the
ones that are less of a flight risk it's not quite as hardware secure there's not a a fence around that facility and then our more the girls with higher needs the girls that might be more prone to aggression those girls are at alexander so alexander is the only facility where we where we have both boys and girls obviously they're kept in separate dorms their education is in separate we don't put them in the same classrooms but it's it typically runs 80 percent boys with the population every year dys commitments by fence level someone mentioned this earlier you
can see here if you look at the table why should actually be at the top but when i'm sometimes when I'm dealing with my IT team they're great at grabbing data but they don't necessarily you know as a former prosecutor myself I kind of it's weird that Y is the top and then it goes ABCD but you see the number of Y felonies that we get it's it's not a it's not a large number of Y felonies 156 over that and this is the highest charge defense so you might have a youth come into our custody who has multiple offenses they might have a mixture of felonies and misdemeanors they might
have all felonies, all misdemeanors. But what we did for this data point is we took whatever their highest charged offense was just to give you an idea of offense level data. So that's how this, otherwise it would have been kind of overwhelming and, you know, somebody might have 10 offenses and someone's got one. So it's really, it's hard to tell a story if you just throw them all into one bucket and do an average. So this gives you what the highest level of each offense. And you can see the the no felonies is about 855 i i will say that i believe the no felonies data point
is capturing some of those cases that judge braswell talked about where it's a probation or aftercare revocation are also captured in there so they might have had a felony offense before and then they were released to aftercare they the reason they came back is because they didn't follow the rules on aftercare and so they were recommitted on aftercare so some of those could be showing up in there. When I look at these, and I've taken over the last few years to looking every morning, looking at every kid that comes into custody and pulling them up and kind of looking a little bit of information, writing it down so I can just keep a sense of what our
population looks like. It's about probably 25% that don't have any felonies. But also having experienced time in juvenile court, I can tell you that sometimes just because they have misdemeanors, it might have started as a felony and it was part of a plea negotiation to get that to a misdemeanor that the kid or the family or the defense attorney or whomever really wanted it to be misdemeanors and you know maybe the judge the probation officer's primary goal was to get this young person some help so it wasn't necessarily it's a little different than in the adult system in the adult system your offense is going to drive specifically how much time you stay in custody
in DYS that's not the that's not the way it works when those assessments come in we look at the assessments we get from the court we look at their school records we look at their mental health records, everything we have in front of us to decide what their needs are and estimate how long they're going to be there. And the amount of time they're there is typically, it depends on their progress. It depends on the number of incidents they might have, serious incidents. And then sometimes we'll have a youth that just reaches a point where, you know, we have to say, I'm trying to remember the phrase that my assistant director for a clinical maximum benefit is the phrase that
she uses. We do have some young people that they're doing as well as probably they're ever going to do and maybe if they've been with us for a long time we're going to go to court and say look we've kind of gotten them to the best we can get them you know they're never going to go a long long time without having some sort of outburst that's just a lot almost all of our kids we have a behavioral health diagnosis probably all of them most of them have some sort of they're usually behind in school their reading level is not up to par so we're trying to get them the best we can before we send them back to the community and not hold them longer than we need to but at the same
time if they're still displaying serious aggression that's typically going to result in that young man or woman staying a little bit longer so that's why when you talk about misdemeanor offenses and and the references were made to the assessment to really look at their their needs and what's going on in their life and not completely look at offenses there are things I will say about offenses that I kind of think you have to take into account for the the absolute most violent kids right it's for some of those y felonies and some of those things it's it's just not safe we do
get some kids that you need to be careful before sending them home because their behavior was serious enough that offense was serious enough but mostly it's it's driven by their needs and by the assessment that we get so you could see in here it's it's a lot of misdemeanors it's d felonies you know and down but we do get those y felonies those a's and b's we get the serious the serious offenders as well so all that all that data is there if you want to look at that this is the average length of stay data that we pulled together you could see it's declined over
the last two years a little bit that i think that's a lot of that's out of necessity if you look at the top line that is your absolute your wife felonies we put that in there just to give you an idea that the wife felonies do tend to stay longer because those wife felonies are murder and rape they're going to stay a lot longer and i will there's a caveat to those felonies i'll add as well we have what is referred to as extended juvenile jurisdiction cases we also have blended sentences that come from adult court for some of the more serious offenders sometimes their length of stay looks shorter not because they went home but because if they're not amenable to treatment
we will petition the court after a certain amount of trying and say we give up this this this young man is not even putting in any effort um they're still displaying really violent behaviors you know they were given I kind of look at those EJJ cases that you know the court had the option of trying them as an adult the first time and decided to give them a chance in the juvenile system you know there's a lot of incentive for that person to to do well and follow the rules to try to be able to return back to the community so in those cases you know we will if it's bad enough we will
go to the court sometimes and ask to go ahead and our recommendation will be that that person go ahead and go to the department of corrections but we'll try to do everything we can before that happens but by the time we can only keep a person until the day before their 21st birthday when they hit 21 they cannot be in dys custody so there's also that matter if we get we've occasionally gotten someone who's over 18 we've had 19 and 20 year olds because the offense happened before they were 18 and by the time it worked its way through the legal system they were 19 or 20 by the time they got to us so clearly that person's not going to stay in custody a long time because they have
to leave before they turn 21 so there's a lot of factors that go into it but if you look at the other lines underneath the wife felonies you can see it's it's it's pretty much the no misdemeanors are the bottom two lines here I mean no felonies are the bottom two lines here you've got the felonies on top and then the middle line on the bottom that bottom group is just the average overall you could see starting in 24 25 it started to decline a little bit that's I think that a little bit that's out of necessity I know my team has been working with a rite of passage our vendor
to identify youth in custody who are doing well enough that we can go ahead and go back to court and request a review hearing and just let the court know how well they're doing before we send them home and try to make some room for some of the beds to be able to get those kids out of juvenile detention centers and get them in treatment to make room for the more violent, the more serious offenders. So the length of stay has dropped a little bit over the last two years, which in my opinion, it's a good thing for the health of our system because we have so many kids.
This is a report from education. You can look at that. It just shows our graduation rates. We've had six years. We've had 222 young men and women obtain their GED. We've had another 102 graduate from high school. We are a school district. We're the Arkansas Consolidated School District. But as you can imagine, our population is a little different than every single school in this state in many ways. Obviously, they are some of the children with the biggest difficulties.
They have a lot of obstacles to learning that were mentioned here before with substance abuse, mental health, learning disabilities. Someone mentioned dyslexia. There's a lot of reasons. They typically come in several grades behind on their reading level. And so you also, when you compound that with we don't get all of our kids come in on August 27th and then stay the whole school year. They're coming in every day. They're going out every day. So some of them we're just not going to have long enough to be able to earn the credits. and they typically are way behind in the number of credits they need to graduate. But because we have 17 and up kids, we are able sometimes to, in that time they're there,
eight, nine months, a year, we're able to get them their high school diploma, or a lot of times their GED. Representative Shepard and Shorter College, we started a partnership with them a little over a year ago. We've had a lot of success at our Alexander facility. We brought someone over that Shorter had employed that had worked with the adult population on GED. We've seen a lot of success there at getting our kids their GED, which is great for those kids when they leave. It's something great to be able to go back to court and show they accomplished before they go back home. But you can see in this data not a lot of seniors.
If you look at the senior enrollment from all these years, it's typically 20-something, 30-something seniors in a year we might get that come to us as a senior. But they might come as a junior, and we do credit recovery, and we do all the things we can to catch them up, to get them as close to graduating or hopefully graduate those kids that are 17, 18, 19-year-old. And if they're so far behind that we just don't think it's going to be possible, we'll get them in a GED program and try to get them their GED so they can do something when they leave. I brought some recidivism data.
I was asked about recidivism. There's not really a set definition for recidivism in this state, or probably you get a different definition any state you go into across the country. We keep ours pretty simple. This is a dashboard we had developed several years ago. Because we have data showing who's committed to DYS and we have data showing who goes to the Department of Corrections, either in prison or on probation, we're able to do some data matching. So if you look at the top one, we're looking at youth that come back to DYS within three years.
So for each of the years listed, what you see, the big number is, that's the number of youth that discharged from our custody that year. And then the smaller number you see, that's going to be out of that bigger group, how many of those ended up coming back to DYS in the next three years. Now, I was talking to someone earlier about counting. Sometimes a kid might show up as a commitment multiple times in the same year. You might have someone come back, so they might be counted in multiple years. So if they were recommitted two years later,
they're going to show up in that two years later if they come back again. But this gives you a really good idea of the number of youth that come back to DYS. It ranges typically 15% to 19% of the youth that leave our custody end up back in custody within three years. Obviously, it could be higher because a lot of those kids, if they leave our custody and they're 18, the only way they're coming back is if there's an aftercare violation and they're sent back. If they commit a new offense, they're not going to come back on that offense because they're 18 now. So there is a certain level of their aging out of the DYS system and not being able to come back.
The next one underneath there, you'll see the Department of Corrections data. We track that for five years, and we look at all the kids at discharge. And that runs anywhere from you'll see a low of like 28% up to 42% will end up. And I've looked. I didn't bring that data that divides that. I'd say about 60% of that is ending up in prison within five years. 40% is on probation. So a little more than half of that number that you see in each year is going to be kids that actually end up in prison within five years.
years of leaving DYS custody and we only have the Arkansas Department of Corrections data we had that because it's needed for other things within DHS so we were able to tap into that data stream so it's it's not a lot of kids if you look at the bottom number and and this is the tricky thing with data that it like if you see the 42 percent on the bottom the height the peak there well if you look at the number of kids that that was from that year that ended up going to Department corrections it's only 92 that is not the highest number by far but if some of these reforms that
were discussed earlier are working and you're not sending us the low-level offenders and the misdemeanors so you're only sending us the the high risk serious offender felony kids that need a lot of help your recidivism numbers are going to be higher because you're taking those lower level kids out of the picture so it's kind of one of those things where the data can kind of not necessarily tell the real story but that's just we still track it because we want to know and I think it's really good to know that that that smaller number just how many kids do we have they're leaving our custody they're ending up in the department of corrections within the next five
years it would be great I think aspirationally to know other things you know how they're doing as far as quality of life education public benefits some things like that but that's a really heavy lift we have this data so that's what we track right now the next level there was some discussion about or the next slide there was discussion about the savory you will see that in in six years we've only had 28 youth who showed up at intake with a low score on their savory risk assessment there were six that the system didn't show one since this is going back all the way to
2020 you probably got you know a lot of the jurisdictions there were those some started during that pilot phase some didn't start till later I forget if it was 19 or 20 where it officially became a requirement and there's a lot of training that goes into training those juvenile probation officers and staff in the courts into performing the savory and you have a lot of turnover when it comes to probation staff and court staff coming through just like we do at DYS so you might some of those might be just in the early stages when people either didn't complete those six or might have not necessarily been just really good at it yet but I think you could see
that 1691 out of 2007 um as long as there's it's done with integrity when you do the savory that's a really high percentage that came in that did score high on the savory which showed that there was a risk of violence or reoffending that you could go ahead and send those kids to DYS um the next one I was asked about the number of DCFS custody um dual custody we call them um in the last are currently that's something we have now we have 28 youth who are both dcfs and
dys custody 22 of those are waiting for a bed at the time i did this um to come into dys and then we have 26 who are already in treatment it's not you know when you have we have about just under 390 ish um in dys custody right now so 28 out of 390 is not a large number of dcfs um youth but we do have some that are dual custody. We work closely with DCFS to work on placement issues and do things that we can to try to make sure they're able to transition out of DYS custody as soon as
possible. The next one I have here, I was asked about the cost of incarceration. You'll see underneath what our costs, we pay $320 a day for those in the secure setting. That's not counting their pharmacy as a separate expense. And if there's offsite medical, if we have to take them the emergency room or the dentist or something of that nature, we're going to have to pay for that. Medicaid does not, if a juvenile is incarcerated, their Medicaid coverage is turned off, it's suspended. The only time that changes is if they leave and they are admitted as an inpatient. If
they go to a psychiatric facility or they have to stay in a hospital overnight, then their Medicaid can be turned back on and Medicaid can pay for those expenses. But for medications and for, you know kids breaking arm playing basketball or whatever it may be that that comes out of our budget on top of that 320 a day it's not a huge amount but it is a little more than just 320 and you'll see the juvenile detention centers they range typically 90 to 100 a day i think probably 10 15 years ago that was 50 a day everything's we all know at the cost of labor
everything's gone up so if you look at the budget numbers here you'll see our residential contract treatment centers and secure side you can see our the expenses that we've had since 2020 as the commitments rise our expenses rise every time a kid comes into our custody we have to take them we find a bed we get them assessed as quickly as we can and we start treatment so you'll see the rise in expenses over the last six years it that's also reflected in the juvenile detention center expenses you'll see that as we've had to utilize more juvenile detention center beds
that expense has risen as well this is where i get to um and i'll just i'll i'll go through these really quick just kind of give you a highlight really quick sentence for each one i was asked about interag interagency collaboration with these different groups i mentioned dcfs already they're on the same floor as us i know tiffany and her team really well we work closely with them to try to deal with any issues around our dcfs dual custody and we also are working more on When it comes to community reintegration and some of the placement options that are out there,
we're trying to figure out a way that we can make sure that we're utilizing the beds the best way for both of us and with both of our youth because they share a lot of needs. The DCFS and DYS youth, their treatment needs are very similar. Juvenile courts, I work closely with juvenile courts, with the administrative office of the courts. I go to as many of their conferences and meet with judges as I can. My phone is always on, and I'm always open to talk to judges about any concerns they have. So we work with them, and we work closely with their juvenile probation officers, that last slide.
We attend their meetings. They have a couple of annual conferences every year. Again, Administrative Office of the Courts has someone that works with juvenile probation. We do everything we can to share information about the savory, about treatment. We're working right now on giving them access to our system where they can see their kids' progress in DYS and the documentation without waiting on us to send it to them because a lot of things get lost in communication when you're waiting on emails, people are changing, things like that. So we work a lot with the juvenile probation officers. We've had more than half of them, probably two-thirds,
we've brought out to tour our facility at the Alexander facility in the last year and a half just so they can, if they hadn't already, we wanted them to see the facility. Department of Education, primarily there's a lot of oversight because we're a school district, so obviously we're audited at the very highest level because of the nature of our population and the high needs. Also, when it comes to the schools, we primarily get the information on the youth's academic progress when they come in, and we send that data back when they go back to their school
and let them know what credits they've earned and send all their education. It's all pretty much electronic now, and we utilize a lot of virtual Arkansas, which makes it easy as well because all the schools use virtual Arkansas to some extent, so we use that. We're working right now with our provider to try to get to do more face-to-face. Virtual Arkansas has been really good for us because when it comes to efficiency and those records being able to transmit instead of just having to send paper records, when you have a 24-bed facility, some of our smaller ones, it's hard to meet the education
needs and hire all those face-to-face teachers. Among those 24 kids, you've got a wide variety of grade levels and different types of education needs so virtual arkansas allows us to have one teacher teach a class at all five of our facilities so you know we're trying to place kids at some places based on gender we have an 18 to 21 year old facility in dermot just for males so the needs are different but it allows us to be able to do that but we're trying to move to more face-to-face there's a teacher in the classroom there are paraprofessionals in the classroom
but some of the the work is done with a virtual arkansas teacher as well on the computer screen but i think for our population and if you've ever been out there with these boxes we had to build around the computers just to protect our computers it's kind of difficult line of sight and everyone's not facing the teacher so we're trying we we're talking to our vendor right now about hiring more in person and they have a plan to be able to do especially maybe starting at our largest campus in alexander of doing more face-to-face and utilizing virtual arkansas just in certain situations for certain populations that we might not have enough need but we're going to keep that
as a piece of it i think virtual will always be at least part of what we do with education our community-based providers this is a big part of what we do we have 10 community-based providers around the state of arkansas that cover the entire state the regions are divided up and we have contracts with them they provide both diversion and prevention services for those FINS cases that were mentioned, for those intake delinquency issues, for those kids who have been adjudicated but not necessarily committed to DYS. They do a lot in the community for that population
that has not come to DYS, and we're trying to do what we can to keep them from coming in our front door. They also handle aftercare, so when every person leaves DYS custody, they're going to have an aftercare plan. The community-based provider is going to be in charge of monitoring their adherence to the aftercare plan, assisting where they can, providing some cognitive behavioral therapy, some life skills. We have vocational coaches that we pay them to hire to help them if they need help filling out resumes or applications or finding further education. So our community-based
providers are a big piece of that. They're stretched really thin as well, like everyone is. Their caseloads are really heavy, but they do a really good job helping us on the prevention side and aftercare. In the last couple of years, we've been able to utilize intensive in-home services family center treatment which is now i think a medicaid covered family center treatment service a limited basis we've been able to use that as a prevention measure and for some of the youth leaving aftercare it just provides another level of in-home visits to the family to deal
with everything that's going on in the home like we've talked about here it's typically not just the youth but it's the things going on at school the things going on at the home so if you're just We can take a kid into DYS custody for six months, nine months, a year, provide them structure. We tell them when to go to bed, when to get up, they're going to eat, when they're going to go to school. Everything is structured out, which is not something they're typically used to, and they might leave in a really good place. But without those step-down options and without that additional support when they go home,
it's kind of hard to go cold turkey back to an environment where you might not have that support Because, you know, single parent, grandparents, whomever it is, just doesn't have the time or energy to supervise at that level. So there's been some tools we've been starting to use to try to help do that. It's just we don't have probably enough of it, but I think it's been pretty beneficial so far to provide those things. And our community-based providers are a big piece of that puzzle. Let's see. I mentioned here we started a prevention unit about a year and a half or two ago.
And we've grown that to three individuals now to just really have a DYS unit that's focusing on prevention work. What we've tried to do is go to those areas of the state where we are receiving the most commitments and see what we can do there to help. We started off in South Arkansas. We've had a large meeting where we went out and recruited different groups that were out there and wanted to help but maybe just didn't know who to reach out to and got them in a room with the courts and with the probation officers to make those connections so that, you know,
since everyone else is stretched thin, just to give them some more resources that they can turn to when a kid comes into the home that are in the court so that they can help that young man or woman and their family. If there's somebody else they can reach out to who has their own funding and the interest and they want to do this, we want them to be able to help as well. So a lot of that, we've developed a database for probation officers where we're going to try to keep up with, you know, on our website, here are some resources you can tap into. but it really is, depending on where you are, there's just not as many resources in every single part of the state,
but we're doing our part to try to grow that. It just takes a lot of time, and we have 28 judicial districts. So as you can imagine, you can kind of do one at a time. Let's see, the next page. This one's just an overview of the clinical process. It's going to tell you how things work when youth come into custody. It tells you a little bit about them. They typically all have a behavioral health, mental health diagnosis of some kind when they come to us. Almost every kid that comes to us, if they're not already enrolled in a pass, we get them enrolled in a pass before they leave DYS custody.
So, you know, they can maybe access some services when they leave that are not available to them in DYS or maybe they didn't have access to before. Educational challenges, 80% of our youth, according to my education staff, are reading at or below a third-grade level when they come to us. It's a struggle, but we try to do what we can. We do dyslexia screenings. We try to do everything we can to get them the help they need when it comes to education, do credit recovery, and get them. I think we have, I think it was 55% of our population is on either a 504 or an IEP, which I think is significantly higher than in a traditional school.
Substance use, I will tell you, from my experience, the last seven or eight years, virtually all of our kids utilize at least marijuana. I mean, there's very few that don't at least smoke marijuana. And then we have some that have more serious substance use issues. We have peer support. We have therapists that work on that. But I do agree that it would be, and I think there's some coming online soon, but we need more out in the communities to help these young people with substance use issues. We had a brief period where we used some grants to operate a substance use facility back during those low commitment years.
But it was opioids only. and we didn't see a lot of youth in the age range that we were looking at that had opioid issues or stimulants. So we do have substance use and the trauma and behavioral risk. Most of our kids, you know, and trauma obviously could be just not having your basic needs met at home all the way up to physical abuse and everything in between. So almost all the kids come in, have some sort of trauma when they come into DYS custody, and we try to address that while they are in our custody.
And this is just the intake process. It's going to tell you how long it takes, all the different things that they are assessed for when they come into custody. And it's going to tell you about how the treatment team that we have meets at least every 90 days once they've started treatment on every youth to look at their progress and make recommendations. You know, I wish we could meet more, but that's a lot of kids and it's a lot of time to pull our therapists and all of our different staff into meetings. When they're in meetings or when they're on the road to go to court for hearings, That means they're not providing services to the kids.
So, you know, you need to be able to have oversight. They all have a case coordinator assigned. They all have a case manager assigned to them. They all have a therapist assigned. It's tough to keep those positions filled. It's been better the last couple of years, but staffing is just, it's a lot of turnover, especially when it comes to teachers and therapists. It's really hard to get the, you have to find people who just have a passion for working with this population. It's they could probably make more money in other areas and not be with our population behind a razor wire fence.
Just to be blunt, might not be as attractive to some people to get them to even look at these jobs. But we do get some great staff that just have a passion to do this. So they want to do this work. But we have a lot of turnover education. I mentioned it already. We are a school district, consolidated school district. So we operate on the same rules as everyone else. We have to follow all the standards. We're audited. I wanted to kind of highlight one of my last pages here, something that's been my goal over the last year and a half or so, is to turn our focus to be a lot more intensive on vocational and job training.
Since half of our population is 17 up, I think the kids that I can do the most good for, if we can find ways to tap into the funding and get these things done, the kids I think we can do the most good for are those kids that are old enough where they're about ready to set out a path on their own right and get an education and find the right employment to get the stability they need and as they say break the cycle for a lot of these families so we've been really focusing on that our community reintegration that we have in haskell the first of those that we opened in
partnership with counseling clinic we have a 12-week career exploration program with the saline county career and technical center it's really great they do two-week modules where they learn about construction mechanic networking they get certifications while they're there and then they go back and it kind of gives them an idea we have some things we do on the inside of our facilities as well to do some career exploration some things we're adding we've had some kids do recently we've got a group right now going through tower climbing telecommunications tower there's some grant funding that the saline people had so we've been putting you through a tower climbing program where
you can get certified to climb the big 200 300 foot towers which can be pretty good jobs if you're up for it some of the kids find out pretty quickly that's not for them and that's fine but a lot of them really took to it and it's it's just something good for their confidence as well we've had a couple of kids get their cdl a lot of challenges around cdl i think it's a great opportunity and there's a lot of jobs out there the the hurdle we run into is a lot of these kids don't have a driver's license learner's permit and they don't have a car at home that they can drive so you know some do we've been able to get a couple of kids their cdl and we're kind of trying
to figure out how we can at least get them sent home with a learner's permit so they can start developing that skill. Arkansas Baptist College, I think you're going to hear from Coach Fitzhill in a little while. We've been doing a program called Meta 24 with them. We have five youth right now that finished a boot camp, and they're at Arkansas Baptist College going to school during the week, and then they come back, as long as they're in DYS custody, they come back to our facility on the weekends. Once they discharge, they can just keep going to school, but they stay in the dorm. We screen and pick those kids based on how well they do in the boot camp. Those that
go to the boot camp are the ones we screen to see how well they've been doing to earn the right to go to that boot camp so it's a really good incentive it's something we're looking at is trying to find two-year colleges that have a residential option so some of these kids that are older when they go if they're left to try to be able to get the class on their own and they have no car they don't have much support at home chances aren't real good but if we can find places where they can take advantage of Pell Grants or whatever it may be and live on campus I think it's going to give them a better chance so that's shorter college we're working with like I said
on GED we're looking at some grant opportunities to do maybe construction or CNA with them as well the Arkansas Rural Health Alliance we have an MOU we've drafted just trying to figure out the funding to do patient care tech medical assistant classes some of the jobs that you know they could leave and get immediately and go work at a hospital CNA classes we've talked about doing more of It's where they could go work at a nursing home if they needed to. And then the virtual career exploration I mentioned, we use transfer, which I think is through Workforce Services.
And then we also have a program called ICEV, who our juvenile ombudsman helped me get in touch with them. That's going to let us, the kids at Dermot, those older boys, are going to be able to do career exploration at their own pace and give them some more things to do. So that's the end of my piece. There's a piece here the last couple pages. DCFS provided a little bit more background when it comes to those dual custody kids, sort of where they come from in DCFS, where they go when they leave DYS custody. I will just leave that to you all to read and maybe follow up later
if you have any questions about those slides that have to do with what the kids look like at DCFS coming in and leaving. And then at that, I guess I've concluded my slideshow here, and I'll take any questions you all have. All
Speaker 139
2:03:58
right, looks like we have a couple in the queue. Thank you for the
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:04:03
presentation. Going straight to Representative Barnes. Thank you,
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
2:04:07
Chair. One question, do Job Corps connect with you all? Job Corps
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:04:12
is, I think we've had a couple of youth we've placed in Job Corps,
but not routinely, and I think, you know, there was some question a while back on the funding for Job Corps. I'm not really, we're trying to develop some of our own programs, and I think you'll probably hear some of that a little bit later that we could use. In my time there, there has not really been a strong relationship with Job Corps. I think some time ago, DYS, before I was there, tried that and maybe just didn't have a lot of success. We've been having meetings with Workforce Services as well to see what we can do as far as funding some of these things. And so we're going to figure out how to tap into, like, WIOA funds or REAB or whatever it may be,
Because this population is ripe for that type of, it's not a large number of people when you just think about it, but they're the ones that need this the most. Okay. Thank you.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:05:03
You're welcome. Thank you, Representative. Go in to Representative Shepard. You're
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:05:07
recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for being here today, Mr. Crump. I'm glad
that you put out there that you and I have worked together in the past in full transparency to this committee, and I'm hoping that we'll continue to work together and do great work. Absolutely.
Related to your presentation, on page 10, where you have the annual cost of incarceration, which as in my opening statements I listed, that was one of the reasons it me filing a resolution. So does that number still equate to roughly $127,000 annually to incarcerate one child in Arkansas? It has to be
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:05:45
in that range, because just on the $320 a day, you're talking, I think, $112.
I'd have to do the math on my calculator, but one bed is going to cost us just on the $320 probably $112, $114,000 a year. And then when I mention the other things, their medical needs and their medication needs and things of that nature, yeah, that
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:06:08
sounds reasonable. So this confirms the earlier statement in the report that this is a costly system that we're relying on. It is
Speaker 148
2:06:16
expensive. I think Arkansas, from what I've learned, is probably on the lower end
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:06:21
as far as what we pay per day.
So you can imagine how much it can even get higher. But it is expensive to incarcerate a person
Chair
Unverified
2:06:30
for a full year. Another comment I want to make on page 13. And a lot of
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:06:38
the commentary that, I don't know if she's still in here or not, Senator Irving gave earlier, she related back to education in Arkansas. And basically the school-to-prison pipeline is what she was eluding to, and those are my words. But if you look at the second bullet on page 13,
it states that over 80% of the youth that are committed to DYS read at or below the grade level reflecting substantial impairments in literacy, comprehension, and academic readiness. So over 80% of the kids in DYS custody barely read at a third grade level. And I think, if I may, I think if
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:07:24
I've got a hunch that Coach Fitzhills is probably going to talk about this too,
the need is not just for these kids in court. I mean, you need to get upstream to get those kids in second and third grade because when they fall behind and they can't read, when they start getting in third, fourth, fifth grade, that's when they start acting out. And when they start acting out in school, they fall behind further, they kind of get labeled, and then you end up getting suspended. I mean, it starts really early is my point. I talked about 10 being the youngest we can get, but really the need is even earlier. Reading is, I mean, it's a huge issue for us.
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:08:03
I agree, because what's happening is we're seeing the progression of the school-to-prison pipeline. It's happening in the younger years, and it's maturing over into the juvenile justice system, and it's costing the state of Arkansas over $100,000 a year for one kid. Now, here's a follow-up question, Mr. Chair. I apologize for talking out of turn. You mentioned virtual Arkansas. virtual arkansas if you can explain to the committee how that works because that's an interesting point if nearly 80 percent of the kids cannot read but they are on a virtual platform
once they enter the system sure i can
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:08:43
do that i will i think it's um explained in here but the good thing about our use of virtual arkansas is the teachers that are assigned through the virtual arkansas contract only work with our kids there are no other kids from the state of arkansas in those classrooms so we can find teachers that are going to learn how to work with this population that maybe has some issues around reading and find other ways to teach them and to help them make progress. So, I mean, if you come to us and you're 15, 16 years old and you're reading at a
third, fourth grade, fifth grade level, obviously there's going to be challenges. I think when it comes to virtual, my kids did a lot of virtual, especially during COVID, especially, but even before that even in college there's you know there's they're staring computer screens a lot so i think this is i think you have to balance out the fact that they're going to be looking at computer screens for the rest of their life but i do think that facing the teacher and having that one-on-one engagement is really important so we do have teachers in the classroom we're just trying to figure out a way to make sure that it's not that the the virtual aspect is not interfering
with their ability to lock in and actually engage in their education. Thank you, Mr.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:09:55
Corral. You're welcome. All right. Thank you, Representative. Thank you. I was about to move on, but it looks like Representative Gonzales-Worthing got
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:10:05
it in. Here we go. Going to
you. Yes. Thank you, Chair. You mentioned that many of the kids, obviously you mentioned that they're not reading at grade level, about 80% of them. And then many of them are 504 or special ed background.
I was curious as to how many of the kids come in with not yet proficient in English, English language proficiency background. And then how is that, if you have kids who are still learning English, how are they being taught? I can get you some numbers. I can think of just some
Speaker 149
2:10:46
individual cases where we've even had to bring in someone to translate.
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:10:54
It's not common. I mean, it's not very often. Most of them, at least, English is their first language, almost all the kids we get. But we've had a couple of instances of that happening. If you give me some time, I'll be happy to dig in and see over the last six years how many came into custody that were not. You're welcome. Thank you. If you would, just forward that
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:11:17
to staff and have them send it to the committee.
I can do that. Okay. Seeing no one else in the queue, thank you so much.
Thank you for your presentation. Thank you for being here. And it looks like we are going to move to item H. And I know we've had folks sitting out in the audience being patient. I know it's been a long committee. We've got a couple more items
to go. So I'll ask that we be succinct and keep an eye on time because it is getting late. So, yes.
Speaker 163
2:12:03
all right if you would introduce yourself for the record good afternoon courtney solace forward for the department of education stacy smith deputy commissioner
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:12:17
with the department of education okay and you have uh
an exhibit that was in in the packet that's exhibit h um if you have any remarks you would like to offer on that or you want to go straight to questioning that's up to
Speaker 164
2:12:30
you um we could do some quick remarks we'll make them very quick um so really the questions that
were sent over to the department and first off thank you for including us in this conversation um and it was very interesting listening to the the speakers before us because we could actually connect with several of the things that they were saying so thank you for including us um several of the questions that were asked us pertained around data points um specifically on attendance as we listened to the conversation today um the data points we gave you on attendance I don't think a line. What I really think look at was chronic absenteeism. And so I had sent over some texting people in my office to say, what's our chronic absentee rate for the state? And
chronic absenteeism is defined as missing more than 10% of a school year, calendar year. And so about 15% of our students are considered chronically absent. All right. And so when you were talking earlier with the judges and they were talking about FINS petitions and court, You get to the point where you get those really high-level chronic absenteeism, FINS referrals happening. So that's one thing I think we need to look at. When you think about chronic absent kids, the highest group, that's 18%, 19% of kids that are chronically absent, are in that 9th, 10th, and 11th grade.
The other group that's really really high is kindergarten. Those mamas don't want to let their babies go to school, and so that's really about educating parents about their kids going to school. But your biggest group is that 9th, 10th, and 11th grade. So chronic absenteeism, I think, was more of the attendance questions that were sent over. Data for suspension and expulsions, that's kind of clear cut. The suspensions, that could be repeated, the same kid more than once, all right?
Expulsions are unique kids. So 857 individual kids were expelled from school last school year. And then on alternative learning environment, that's actually a K-12 program where schools set up alternative learning environments. It's part of a categorical funding. There are rules that follow how ALEs look. We broke that down by the number of students per grade level. The highest grade level there, as you're going to see, are 12th grade students.
And a lot of times what you see with 12th grade students and 11th grade students are dropout prevention, kids that are so far behind in their credits and them trying to keep them from dropping out of school. So a lot of
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:15:03
times that's what you see there. Courtney, do you want to
Speaker 163
2:15:07
get into some of the other topics? Yeah, so I'll be brief as well. I think some of the other questions we were asked was about ensuring that educational services are being provided in these facilities. Juvenile detention centers, DYS, and alternative learning environments, all of them
are expected to meet the standards for providing education to those students we monitor each of them each one has a little bit of a nuance set out in law as to who is responsible whether it's the facility or the district where that facility is located or even the resident district of that student and so i'll leave that to questions if any of you want specifics on that but happy to speak on that as well as addressing some of the mental health issues that have have been brought up or any other questions that you all have.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:15:52
Thank you. All right. So first in the queue, Representative Bentley, and then to Representative Shepard. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:15:59
for being here today. I had a meeting last week with my superintendents in my district. They have pretty much cover a very rural district, and they're just really at a loss about to do with some students that are violent in their school. They don't have any options, don't have any programs there. So what are the parameters for them to expel a child? Because to me, it's like they don't have the opportunity to expel a child that's been absent. And the amount of paperwork they have to do to verify that the student is so disruptive in their classroom,
it's harming the education of the 50 other kids in the room. So do we have any hope for these superintendents and rural districts, what they can do? Because I'm just, anyway, they're just at a loss. And it's really been one of the biggest issues
Speaker 163
2:16:40
that they're dealing with right now. So I'm going to let Ms. Smith talk about some of the other alternatives. But one thing I want to say is where districts are limited is because of a state law that says students in kindergarten through fifth grade cannot be expelled or receive out-of-school suspension unless they are physically violent.
And so that's when they are left to find those alternative options. And I'm going to, again, let Ms. Smith talk about some of the
Speaker 165
2:17:05
things we're doing to try to help with that. Yeah, we have heard from schools, and actually Judge Braswell, when
Speaker 164
2:17:11
he was talking earlier about kids who have been admitted into a residential facility and then, or a mental health facility, and then for their extreme behavior for violence or disruption, they get kicked out, and then they end back up in his courtroom. Well, the same thing happens to school.
They end up right back at school. And so we have heard a lot from schools on what do we do, right? we don't have the resources we don't have the wraparound services so we have been working with some districts on some pilots around the state in Jefferson County in Pine Bluff area they have a multi-tiered ALE there that even offers a evening ALE for some of their students that don't need to be around some of the other kids it's very unique to that area in northwest Arkansas we've launched
a pilot up there as well and it's kind of what is it when it's beyond a kid that a traditional ale k-12 public school can handle right but but no one else is taking the kid courts are involved the pilot we're doing there we're trying to make that a cross-agency collaboration about what could this look like as a state i'm trying to find that in between ground between a traditional ale where where the school's helping and something a little bit more that's not necessarily a residential facility so we are doing some pilots there I also know we've done the pilot with mental health and
the concierge service that this legislature has heard about
Speaker 163
2:18:40
right we brought to you a few months ago a contract with care solace a care coordination company and so we all know schools have a lot that they're doing and the counselors in those schools have so much on their plate they can't provide the intense time that they need with students who really need therapy and counseling and so through our care solace contract the counselor at the school can reach out and try to identify providers in their area who can serve those students because it's not always that the parent or
the school doesn't want to get help but they just don't know how to find it and so this care coordinator can help them identify it they can make appointments for the parents they can help the parents navigate insurance and other avenues. We know that DHS does a good job of preparing and serving those kids who are Medicaid eligible, but there's a large population that don't have Medicaid or underinsured or uninsured. And so through our Care Solace contract, we're really trying to help identify that. And then the next step will be trying to identify more telehealth
providers, because as many of you know, in rural areas, there just are not the, there's not enough providers or counselors in those areas and so um we're continuing to look at that and to look at how we can continue to find more providers to provide the mental health services
Speaker 175
2:19:56
through telehealth for these students as well thanks for the update and i will tell you that one of my
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:20:03
superintendents is using care solace is very happy with the results they were getting out there in a rural district so thank you chairman thank you for sharing that thank you representative and coming
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:20:14
to representative shepherd you're recognized thank you mr chairman and thank you all for being here today and thank you for the explanation because I was quite surprised when we received this exhibit based on what the information that was asked of you
Chair
Unverified
2:20:26
all so can we get a follow-up now that you know what's being asked and present that information the data that came through the email the chronic absenteeism yes yes ma'am
Speaker 176
2:20:36
yes ma'am I will type that up for you and get it and send it over for them to distribute okay because that would be great because some of the questions that
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:20:45
were asked by my colleagues were referenced in that email related to disability and things of that nature. But really quickly, with what you did provide us, are we saying that roughly 37,000 kids are not attending school on any given day? Yeah, when we were looking at the daily average attendance, the difference between
Speaker 165
2:21:05
that, was there a 92%? So yeah, you've got 8% of those total kids that are not that are absent yes
Speaker 176
2:21:12
so basically we have a small city of kids not at school on any
Speaker 163
2:21:19
given day yes thank you yeah if i may representative shepherd i'd like to add um because i know i've had many conversations with judge briswell and he even said he wished he had um and brought this up when he was up at the table but we are working with him in his court and a school district in his area on an attendance addressing pilot having almost like a liaison between the court and the school to identify those kids who are at risk for ending up in court because of their chronic
absenteeism and how can we be more proactive in in finding out the why why are those students not at school because we know they need to be there and we know oftentimes there's more reason to why they're not there than just they don't want to go to school but maybe it is maybe the parent doesn't want to bring them and so um that's a pilot that we are looking at and working with judge broswell um and that we hope to eventually upscale so that we can reduce
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:22:18
those numbers thank you all right thank you representative going to representative gonzalez word then you're
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:22:23
recognized thank you thank you for your
presentation um it was mentioned previously that approximately 80% of our kids who are incarcerated or court-involved are not reading at grade level, third grade reading level. And so it was also mentioned that with chronic absenteeism, we have a lot of 9th, 10th, and 11th graders. But yes, kindergarten is one of those grades in which we have a lot of parents oftentimes
they do want to hold on to their kids at the same time that's their first time to be in you know formal education which means that they haven't had the pre-k resources so essentially that's when the fundamentals of reading and reading literacy foundation the strong base happens is in that early grade so that by the time they get to third grade they're reading on grade level so
i was just curious as to to help to prevent these particular kids now as they continue in school they're not reading on grade level and um and now they're they're they're in court involved etc they continue to be absent and then we see what happens and you know in ending up being incarcerated So I'm just curious as to what we can do in terms of just ensuring that we can provide more resources at that end, especially with early childhood, kindergarten.
I know that there's been some grants, et cetera, that are going to be focusing on that, and I wondered if that was going to be part of that or what we can do at that very early kindergarten age because it's
Speaker 164
2:24:20
critical with their literacy foundation. We agree with you on that, and there is lots of conversations going on, especially around early childhood right now and early literacy. State legislation in recent years has required that 30-day screener. it's required interim assessments it's required screening for at-risk reading especially in
kindergarten first and second grade all of that is in place lots of work being done right now in the coordinated services between especially pre-k moving into kindergarten and defining what kindergarten readiness looks like looking at curriculum materials for our early learning centers is another area that's being worked on right now so that is definitely an area that there is a task force the early childhood commission is is tackling
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:25:02
that right now and there's there's several conversations happening about
Speaker 182
2:25:11
that all right uh representative lincoln burnett you're
recognized thank you chair um i had one
Representative Lincoln Barnett
Unverified
2:25:18
well i have two questions the first one is regarding the 2024 2025 suspensions and expulsions data that was shared with us and i wanted to know do you have comparative data that can be sent to us for a prior year so that we can see whether or not expulsions and suspensions are trending upward or downward and then the other question that i had in as it relates to expulsions do we have a way of tracking how many of those expulsions result in
school dropouts. Is there a way for us to know how many students are returning to school after an expulsion and completing? I definitely can get you the trending data, so
Speaker 164
2:26:02
we'll make sure and do that, and then I'll dig in and look at the other. I mean, our statewide graduation rate right now is 90%, so that means 10% or not. That's the four-year graduation rate, so definitely see if we can look for a link between expulsions and that percentage that's not graduating on time.
Now, we do have a group of
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:26:26
those kids who do graduate, you know, in five years, right. So, but we can definitely
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:26:34
go back and dig into that. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Representative. Thank you both for being here. Really appreciate
the information. You're dismissed. All right. Last, but certainly not least, on the agenda item, I'm going to go ahead and ask if both would come to the table, and that way you can both present and then take questions.
And I understand presentations are different,
Speaker 188
2:27:11
but on similar subjects. Okay, I will ask you to introduce yourself for
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:27:33
the record and whichever one wants to
Speaker 192
2:27:39
go first. You can you can certainly do that. All right. Good afternoon members and thank you chair. My name is Kesa Smith Brantley. I'm the executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and it is a privilege to be with you today to talk about juvenile justice. I want to start by thanking Representative Shepard for continuing to uplift juvenile justice. Senator Missy Irvin may have stepped out, but I equally want to thank her for always being a champion for the children that are just as involved
and seeing our children as opposed to their charges, because that's often a real reality. Also, Chair, I'm very cognizant of the fact that we are letter I, so I will try to be as brief as possible so you can get out of here. I'm not so far removed from my state employment days that I don't know that you all are ready to go. So with that said, I think it's important. We're here as long as you're willing to be here. Got it, got it. So I think it's important for this conversation to have a little bit of context about the juvenile system
because you've heard about reforms and you've specifically heard about the savory system. But I want to give you some context from the administrative side of state government. So in 2015, I was working as the deputy director of children and families, or excuse me, youth and families for DHS, and on Governor Hutchison's first day in office, my boss at the time got a call, Director John Selig, and we got a call directly from Governor Hutchison, and
his request was that he wanted to visit the Alexander facility, and he did not want any members of leadership to go with him because he wanted to see the facility as it was and he wanted to see it that day in the next hour or so and after he went to the facility while we were all shocked and nervous he went to the facility and he felt as we did that we were running the facility with fidelity but he did say there is not enough being done for kids in this
in this state, and he noted that it was going to be one of the top priorities of his administration to focus on children that were justice involved. And shortly after I had that, we got that phone call, I got a call from Justice Wood. She was aware of Governor Hutchison's desire, and what she wanted to do was look at the savory system, which you all have heard a lot about. One of the things that Justice Wood was very aware of was the challenges that we were having in the system
specifically around children that were coming into this the system and not being assessed properly and what we knew was that there were children in our facilities that did not need to be in long-term residential facilities when we had children that were defacing property or stealing items from gas stations or having incidents at home or at school Namely, because of undiagnosed mental health conditions, they did not need to be at DYS, specifically for two reasons.
One, juvenile offenders that are committed on these types of crimes, but then find themselves removed from their families, their education, their school, often came out of the system worse than when they went in. And equally, reason two was that these children were much better served by evidence-based community programs that held them accountable, because I'm not ignoring accountability, but allowed them to stay home or close to it. And I believe that, Representative Barnes, you mentioned the efficiency of many of these programs.
So back in 2015, we started on a significant reform effort that included the SAVRI system, but also included creating a statutory law and a reform board that looked at institutional change. On top of SAVRI, that included streamlining DYS assessments of youth when they came into the system, so making sure that we were able to give medical assessments so we could diagnose some of these children who had gone undiagnosed for years.
Equally, opening more beds for juvenile sex offenders, which was a particular problem. I don't want to speak for Director Crump. Maybe finding beds for those children are no longer a problem, but it was significant at the time. Finding solutions pertaining to substance abuse were all things that we were able to do because there was a concentrated look at the system. Savory ended up being so successful for us in really determining what were the right children and their right placements that we were ultimately able to close two facilities, the Colt facility
and the 11 to 17-year-old facility located in Dermot. And equally, we were able to repurpose the Louisville facility and use that for children that were struggling with opioid use. and as Director Crump has noted, that facility wasn't quite used as much as DYS was expecting at the time and was left unopened for some time and then unfortunately now is back to taking residential commitments because the numbers have increased.
But the point of the historical context is to say that before our reform, I received concerns all the time from parents and stakeholders and advocates, and their biggest concerns were, one, the condition of our facilities and the lack of treatment that was happening at the facilities at the time. And equally, their secondary concern was, why were there not more community-based programs? And could we not serve children better, especially when we're talking about 13- and 14- and 15-year-olds,
better by serving them in the community, having a way of getting them away from the things that tempted them to get into trouble, but equally being aggressive about the need to help them close to home so that they can turn their lives around. And so when we closed two facilities, what we were able to do with permission from the legislature is repurpose the funds that were going to residential to try to, or excuse me, going to those individual beds to improve the facilities.
But even with all of the work that we did, we were not able to find a consistent funding source for community-based programming. And we wanted to do that in conjunction with the judges because you've heard from them today. So you've heard them talk about the fact that, you know, their needs are not cookie cutters. So what Judge Braswell needs in Conway is not necessarily what Judge Hess, who was also here, needs in Forest City. And we wanted to be respectful of that, but in no way were we able to find a way to consistently give them the funding that they need.
And so in wrapping up, because I am in fact closing, one of the things that I would like to point out is the fact that we have not looked at the juvenile justice system since that time in the same way. And that was over 11 years ago. You're hearing a lot of needs being expressed. You will probably hear even more, and I'm sure you're hearing it directly from your constituents. In 2015, we didn't have, not to say that we didn't have violent children, but we are hearing incidents and things increase as the years go by, especially after the pandemic.
And so there is a real need to do a needs assessment of the juvenile justice system. And I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the fact that on top of all of the things that the system needs, there is a real reality in that we do not fund it with any type of consistency. So if you're wondering about how the juvenile justice system is funded, I'll just high-level note that state general revenue funds primarily go to the Division of Youth Services. And the majority of the way that those funds are used, I don't want to, again, talk out of turn
because I've been going from state government for three years, but I can imagine by looking at Director Crump's report that the majority of those funds are still being used on residential beds. meaning they're not being used for preventive services, and they're not being used for community-based programming. And that is a function of need. I'm sure knowing the individuals at DYS that if they could dedicate more money to community-based programming, they would. Equally, there's some small general revenue that goes to AOC that they use for administrative functions.
Federal revenue for juvenile justice is limited. Typically, those are given out in small grants to community programs and organizations that support this work. And then that leaves much of the front-end administration of this system on however counties choose to fund it. Many counties fund their juvenile systems and their juvenile courts very well. Others don't have the capacity to do that. And what we see is a little bit of judges trying to figure it out on top of having to utilize fines and fees and things of that nature, one for punishment, but also as a funding source.
And I don't see Representative Bentley, but that is an issue that we attempted to address in this last legislative session and something that should be noted. If we are going to see improvements pertaining to our children, particularly our children that get in trouble, we can't leave it to happenstance as to how we address when they start approaching trouble. And I'm not asking for specific funding, and I know that funding is limited right now, but I do think it is important that we look at the needs of the system
and determine if there is not capacity within the state to fund those programs that we know will help turn children around because what I know after being in state government for several years and now being on the advocacy side is that a slot in a community-based program or a bed in a residential facility that serves children that have substance abuse issues is a lot cheaper than a bed at the Department of Corrections and so it is incumbent we have seen children's lives been being turned around a child making a mistake at 14 and 15 does not have to
dictate what they do for the rest of their lives but it is important for the state of Arkansas for us to
Speaker 196
2:38:16
think about what we need to do to ensure that our children are on a better path so
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:38:22
thank you chair and thank you members all right thank you any questions for miss smith brantley
all All right. Ms. Shepard, Representative Shepard, you're recognized. And Mr. Chair, I
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
2:38:33
don't have a question, but I have more of a statement. And Ms. Smith-Brendley, I
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:38:38
want to thank you so much for that presentation.
You all were saved until last because we wanted to hear advocate sides, what's really happening. Not saying the state agencies aren't doing what they're supposed to do, but I really appreciate that. And I'm going to follow up with the chair with some additional comments in regards to funding for community-based programming as an alternative to incarceration. So thank you for that. All
Speaker 197
2:39:03
right. Coach? You're recognized. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 198
2:39:09
And thank you, Representative Shepard, for the invitation to come and present to the Bureau of Legislative Research.
And as I was listening, after serving seven years on the state board and working with Stacy and her team, with Senator Key, I was over the discipline committee as one of the things that I kind of led the leadership on. And it was just amazing to listen to how all the research has come together and understanding how this is actually working and looking at the suspensions and continue to see how this manifested itself over a period of time and see where we are today.
I didn't know that at the time, how that was working out. But visiting schools throughout Arkansas as a state board member, I was just going to share anecdotally some things that kind of pull this in perspective, because we've heard the data, we've heard the numbers, and so I want to make this come home as we close down today. But perfect example, I'm visiting a school in the Delta and going to the school with the superintendent. And I vividly remember the young man, fifth grade, couldn't be, sixth grade.
And he was getting ready to suspend him. And he was crying. And so I asked the superintendent, what plans do we have for this young man right now? They said, well, he's been violent in school, and we're going to suspend him. And I said, oh, okay, so what's the game plan for him when you're suspending? And so he was still crying when I came back. And then he said, well, we can't send him home because mother says she can't come get him. And so we'll just kind of push him out and end up.
Those are the students that we find out to the question you asked that will end up dropping out later on because we're suspending our kids oftentimes back to the trauma that caused the suspension. And as we continue to look forward and I continue to hear the third grade reading level. And it is a, you know, you hear data about this number all the time. third grade reading level is where you count prison beds and things but I want to say as Secretary Putnam came to me and asked about the 500 beds the 500 juveniles and that's how I met
Mr. Crump and have been working very closely with him and Kim Bell in trying to find alternative measures for rehabilitation and so just over a period of time of assessing where we are today and looking at the four to five hundred students that we're dealing with, the thing that excites me is that it's only five hundred. Because as I travel to Chicago, to Harlem, to Detroit, looking at the metal program he was talking about from one or two communities,
they have the number of children that we have. And so I can get excited about a plan that we can possibly over a period of time of 10 years of coming with a strategic recovery plan if we truly understand how we're birthing our pipeline to prison population. So in point, when we look at this, it is a battle because it's like being in combat. It's our land and sea. So you can't just fight this on one front. You have to fight it on all three fronts. And when you look at what's birthing our pipeline, the prison population, you go back and you look at the factors that we realize we want the hungry estates.
That's poverty. OK, you come back and you look at the rate of our teenage pregnancy. And as I do the anecdotal surveys of the students, young men and women that I have come to the population with, one factor that stands out to 85% of the students who we get to work with, and I've been to all five facilities, that 85 to almost 90% of those that I just do and ask to stand up have multiple elementary school suspensions.
So then when I sit there and survey those individuals and I said, OK, what we find out is over 60 percent come from teenage mothers. Then from that, you look at an impoverished background. So what we're doing, we are Arkansas is really good right now in providing attempting to provide things to to help what I'm saying, divert and intervene. But the prevention mechanism, as we all say, is where I think we have to contribute to most of our resources. because I work specifically in a population to address the black male homicide in our community
because I've had several killed on campus while I was president. And so understanding what that social factor means is that a black male born to a teenage mother in poverty upon conception has a 50% chance of going to prison. And so what we have to do is understanding that from a prevention, intervention, and a diversion standpoint on what do we do. And we talked about the third grade reading level. I think there's a book by Roger Thoreau called The First 1,000 Days After Conception. Well, what the research will show us in that book is that that first 1,000 days is really impacting the third grade reading level of our students.
And so we must not only continue to pull them out, but as Nelson Mandela mentioned, we have to look at why they've been thrown in. And I think once we can look at this and process this tragedy that we're dealing with, with the violence in certain zip codes, in certain communities, and realize to be specific on how we're going to address this and understand that school is sometimes a place of refuge. And when we suspend our kids, I'll give you another example. I was visiting another school and this young man came back to campus after being suspended.
All right. They had him arrested. And I asked him, why was he arrested? Well, you know, he's been suspended. You know why he came back? For lunch. He wanted to eat because he didn't have any resources to eat. So we have to look at the judge that said, hey, these things are not one size fit all. Every individual is different. And so how can we bring a supportive community from the churches, from the faith base, from the business community to look at how can we come in to address these through the systems that will be transformative with working with our population of students that need the help the most.
Stacey mentions only 10% of those drop out of Arkansas or do not complete high school. And so if you go back and look at that population of what we're dealing with with violence in our community, there's direct correlation to that. So what we're trying to specialize in, and everybody can is that Arkansas Baptist work with Mr. Crump in trying to find those students and give them a specific track plan of life that works in rehabilitation for their lives because the Department of Justice says that 84% of students in juvenile detention facility
within five years of release without a specific life plan will recidivate within five years with the average prison sentence and adult prison of being 12. And so as you mentioned, Representative Shepard, the money that we're spending to incarcerate, that's a four-year college degree for one year. You're getting that in one year that could pay for training and welding, all the things, as Mr. Crump has mentioned, that sometimes kids can be applied to learn to do
rather than putting them in the classroom and thinking, okay, we just heard that the average reading level is under third grade. So how are we going to give these students applied learning lessons that they can deal with their hands and then teach them literacy skills as they go? So as I summarize, and I'd be glad to continue on. I know it's been a long day, but you're welcome any conversation because it's not a cookie cutter approach. This is somebody's child. And this is the United States of America. and everybody, regardless of the birth that you have,
deserve the right to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thank you
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:47:17
so much. Thank you for your comments. Well stated. Any questions?
All right. Representative Gonzalez-Worthin, you're recognized. No
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:47:28
question. Just wanted to make a comment. Thank you for all of the work that you're doing and everything to reduce the recidivism and to keep our kids safe in the community
and not continuing this pathway to prison. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. All right. Any other comments?
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:47:49
I was hanging on for you, Representative Shepard. This is for the ending, though,
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
2:47:56
if it's okay. Not directed towards them. Okay. Well, if that's the
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:48:00
case, thank you both for your time. Thank you for your work. And thank you for being here and sharing your thoughts with us. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. You're dismissed.
All right. Representative Shepard, now to
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:48:18
you. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I want to thank everyone for being here today. I think this was conversation that was definitely needed amongst all organizations. So, Mr. Chair, my request is, and I don't know if you can help me put my thoughts together, of the agencies that came today, I would like follow-up meetings with them, if they can identify a representative. The reason being, I believe what we learned today was is that this is a very costly system.
There are some gaps as it relates to the data tracking and the information that's needed. Additionally, I think it came out today and unless I'm proven wrong, there's a need for alternatives to incarcerations, specifically as it relates to mental health, additionally as it relates to substance abuse. And the last thing I'll add is what was just offered here at the table, there needs to be some discussion in regards to a funding stream for possibly funding community-based programs as an alternative to incarceration.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:49:25
okay thank you representative what i heard there was the need to continue this discussion and i
don't disagree with that be happy to visit with you offline or have other discussions in committee i would say that for those who are here that you want to continue to to communicate with from various agencies please reach out to them do so and i'm sure they will be responsive and of course staff as always will be available to help facilitate that um so yeah look forward to continuing the conversation thank you mr chair thank you
representative seeing no further business uh thank you all for being here i know it's been a long day but i think a worthwhile day and thank you for your time for those in the audience thank you for your time and patience and for the agencies present as always thank you for your work with that we are adjourned Thank you.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Consideration to Approve December 10, 2025, Meeting Minutes [Exhibit B]
C. Appointment to the Child Maltreatment Investigations Oversight Committee
D. Arkansas Infant and Child Death Review (ICDR) Program Annual Report [Exhibit D]
1. Laura Taylor, Director, ICDR
2. Kevin Cleghorn, Chair, Arkansas Infant and Child Death Review State Panel
3. Sherry Williamson, Member, Arkansas Infant and Child Death Review State Panel
E. Discussion of HCR1010 by Representative Tara Shephard – Requesting the House Committee on Aging, Children and Youth, and Legislative Affairs and the Senate Interim Committee on Children and Youth to
Study Ways to Improve the State’s Juvenile Justice System for Youth Committed to the Division of Youth
Services of the Department of Human Services [Exhibit E]
- Comments by Sponsor Representative Tara Shephard
F. Discussion of Compliance, Enforcement, and Implementation Concerning Arkansas Juvenile Code
§ 9-35-423 [Exhibit F]
1. Senator Missy Irvin, District 24, Arkansas Senate
2. The Honorable Rhonda K. Wood, Associate Justice, Arkansas Supreme Court
3. The Honorable Kathie Hess, Circuit Judge, 1st Judicial District
4. The Honorable Troy Braswell, Circuit Judge, 20th Judicial District
5. Brooke Steen, Juvenile Division Director, Administrative Office of the Courts
G. Division of Youth Services (DYS) [Exhibit G]
- Michael Crump, Director, DYS
H. Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) [Exhibit H]
1. Courtney Salas-Ford, Chief of Staff, ADE
2. Stacy Smith, Deputy Commissioner, Division of Elementary and Secondary Education, ADE
I. Discussion of Advocates Perspective for Juvenile Justice [Exhibit I]
1. Keesa Smith-Brantley, Executive Director, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families
2. Dr. Fitz Hill, Pastor
J. Other Business
K. Adjournment
Documents
Speakers
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
Speaker 11
Representative Justin Gonzales
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Speaker 22
Speaker 24
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Representative R. Scott Richardson
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Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
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Representative Tara Shephard
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Senator Missy Irvin
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Representative Glenn Barnes
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Representative Denise Jones Ennett
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Representative Lee Johnson
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Representative Jessie McGruder
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Michael Krupp
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Chair
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Representative Mary Bentley
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Representative Lincoln Barnett
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