Children & Youth Committee- Senate & Aging, Children & Youth, and Legislative Affairs- House
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Bills discussed (1)
| 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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- October 2, 2026
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
3:45
right members gonna 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 any discussion see none all in favor say aye
any opposed ayes have it before we move on to item C I'll ask if my coach here if she has any comments great. perfect. right we're gonna move on to item C which is the appointment to the child maltreatmentvestigations 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 uhittee on Children
and youth and the senate interimittee on Children and youth so with that I'll entertain a motion have a motion to have a second I have a second any discussion is to be in time now to tell all the things you think about Representative Bentley OK, I'm gonna keep it open for a little bit longer right seeing none will committee all in favor say aye any opposed ayes have it congratulationspresentative Bentley you don't have as many detractors as I thought. know all I'm joking of course
right moving on to item number item D Arkansas infant children Deathview if 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
5:52
Hello Laurrataylor Good afternoon Kevin Cleghorn Sherry Williamson 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 cover75
counties in the state the team reviews unexpected deaths of Arkansas children ages0 to17 years as required by Act 1818 of205 annual report was completed in December 25 and includes deaths that occurred in 2023. there were a 170 total nonnatural 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 s sufficient records
therefore those 22 could not be reviewed so of the 170 nonnatural 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, asphyxxia fires or other injuries which can be found on page 10 and 11 of your of your report our suicides and 18 homicides which is on page 12
and47 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 and34 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 the infant and child death review process that this report will help guide that work thank you very much for for your time and we can open for questions at this time if you would like
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
8:16
thank you for that overview any questions from the committee at this time?
anybody up there we go. Representative gonzalezoren you are recognized
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
8:31
yes I really appreciate the recommendations from the report and I was just curious
as to how do you see these recommendations being move forward
Speaker 22
8:42
how can we help move this forward? I thank
Speaker 24
8:50
you. I am as Kevin mentioned it it really is a tool for any, you know, organization agency nonprofit anyone who's interested in trying to put in
place some prevention activities or programs. These are very broad recommendations so it was really helpful for the teams in the panel to kind of summarize the findings and be able to put 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 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 would love to see all groups of people who are interested in in prevention activities using it as a guide. thank
Speaker 28
9:41
you at excuse me, 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 proposal5 specific
recommendations to for people to make applications for grants if they're willing to develop a program that would help assist with one of these recommendations so how
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
10:15
oh excuse me because so how might an organization find these particular types of grants is is open to any organization in Arkansas that's a great question. we are the grants are open to state
Speaker 28
10:36
agencies um, higher education nonprofits and we actually just sent out the RfP that this last week and we've sent it out to all of our contacts to ask them to share it with their contact
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
12:08
s we would be happy to share it So
Unknown speaker
12:53
with guidance from the Arkansas
this committee to not look away
at the data that would be
presented to us today and to
actually confront what will be
Speaker 58
16:34
so with that I think we're going I didn't know we're gonna have walkup music right Senator River we'll start with you and your recognized to proceed and introduce yourself. you can think of some
Speaker 61
16:46
other walkout songs some people might play for me that might be a little bit different I'm
Speaker 62
16:54
Senator Missy Irvin, represent Senate District 24.
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
17:25
collaborated with each other on and this would 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 they we knew they needed and the ability to try to get those services outside of a incarceration system into
their 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 past and I invite you to look at the history of of that piece of legislation and what happened with it but that did not deter myself Ju 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 continue 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 EKseC Foundation with the juvenile judges and I I credit
judgedge Hannah at the time he was our chief justice of the supreme court and Judge Hannah created the commission on Children, youth and familiesmilies 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 onut and youth and familiesmilies 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 juveniles 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 multimillion 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 and so these validated risk assessments is known as our savory tool and these assessments not they don't only apply for just the child. it
applies to the entire family and the entire situation 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 and so and and this is statewide and we have incredible engagement from juvenile judges across the entire state working with us to really
fine tune this policy these tools and see what more we can do and how we need to move about creating that we the that 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 systemwide improvements have really been exceptional and and I want to say too if you if you paid attention to some of the things that were happening in other states in this country it was unbelievable and 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 one kid ended up committing suicide because of what happened to him and and 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 stakeh old ers 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. we went to a retreat this past past summer incredible work we are working with incredible people nationwide that are giving us excellent advice 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 gonna turn it over to them thank you senator judgedge, thank you for being here. thanks for
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
23:31
all your work on this you're recognized thank you Mr chair and thank you
Speaker 58
23:36
senator Irvin for that overview of the hard work that we certainly put in over the years what I also hope to do today is give you some
Speaker 56
23:47
additional background information on kind of how we got to where we are today I'm not very good atowerPoint so
Speaker 58
23:53
I'll that'll be awesome that'd be great be great you think clicking would be easy but sometimes a struggle in 200fi5 the juvenile justice reform
Speaker 56
24:07
boardard was created and implemented and the main goal was to how do we identify areas in the system where we need additional support and modifications I had the honor of eventually being named the chair of the juvenile justice reform boardard justice Wood chairing the supreme Court Commission on youth and familiesmilies we decided why are we meeting separately let's meet together let's pull our resources and so we've been doing that well as long as the reform board was in
Speaker 56
24:41
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 Conwaylin and Marshall to participate as a pilot court program and I can remember very vividly being in a a meeting room at the supreme court and the creator of the risk assessment was going through everything
and it 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 in the
Speaker 71
25:18
home substance abuse they take a mental health assessment a substance abuse assessment what is going on in this kid or this
Speaker 56
25:26
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 to know what risk factors a kid may have
Speaker 69
25:42
in their life but to me the the bigger question is once you know those things what are you gonna 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 gonna come and sit down with the 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 question
Speaker 56
26:15
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 assess these assessments well for me in my community absolutely it's worth it and
Speaker 69
26:34
what I can tell you is it's not 10%. 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 to 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 and not only in the 20th judicial district but across the state and you can see there on the slide and 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 youthervices 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 for some that may be unfamiliar based on the assessment and the results of that a child is determined to be
low moderate or highris 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 and some have heard this story but 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 got into a fight at school and I'll tell you I 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 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's a wreck this young lady and her siblings were able to get out of the car 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.
Speaker 56
29:50
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 I talk to that young lady without that
Speaker 69
30:06
information it would be very easy for me to write off the bat come down heavy and let her know what the expectations of her behavior would be at school. and she would leave that courtroom
Speaker 56
30:21
without being seen or without being heard and
Speaker 69
30:26
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 can't I wish that I could make it where 1415 and six 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 so I'm not minimizing what happened
Speaker 56
30:51
I understand how you got to that bolling 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 you
Speaker 71
31:01
the tools that you need whether that be coping skills right 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 an idea of what you're gonna
Speaker 69
31:17
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 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 interests is senator Urban pointed out that kids be at home in the community and they have the support that they need unfortunately there are times that that that's not possible because of safety risks 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 and you can see these are delinquency cases filed statewide at55% reduction in the number of kids that are coming through court on a delinquency case right so delinquency any time 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 this many kids and families that
s set through that process and we're given an opportunity for that individualized court plan and plan for rehabilitation diversions we 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 was part of a legislative
Speaker 56
33:49
package session or two ago that really opened the door for more diversion programs to keep kids out
of court and that's the Ohio youth assessment
Speaker 69
33:58
tool that's what we use early on for diversion the the savory the maisie 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 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 that these are all the things that we look at to come up with that you know probation plan but you know that's tailored specifically to that kid. total delinquency cases yet we've looked at that38% reduction there on felonies60% reduction on misdemeanors,48 reduction in revocations and this is statewide and these these mirror
my numbers are a little bit different but you can see that it's drastically had a made a huge impact on the kids and families in our communities I just wanted to point out here on DYs commitment data you the breakdown between felonies and misdemeanors in Arkansas you can't commit a lowris misdemeanor to DYS OK? and there's there's two schools of fight 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 a fencebas so the first guiding principle is what is the offense for which they're in court for and that you're sentencing options disposition options should be limited based on
Speaker 69
35:50
risk assessment and the results contained in that is a better guiding principle because it gives us a greater in in depth look of what areas of
risk that a kid might have and so the last one is just a probation revocation or aftercare violations so a kid is committed DYS gets outs on aftercare let's say a period of six months they commit a violation that ends up sending them back to
Speaker 58
36:16
DYS that's the third row there on the right and I believe umineen is
Speaker 71
36:23
going to go through the remainder of this slot. yes I'll be brief on this s side umpresentative shepherd did ask
Speaker 59
36:32
us to bring some school data so ours we
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
36:35
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 and 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 shepherd and so I did want to provide the data we have even though it's only 10 out of our um75 counties that were record there now the fins data
is accurate for those that are not familiar with finns it's family in need of services and the triancy 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 judged help us we need to get these kids back in school and finns take up a lot of our juvenile judges times and I'm sure they could tell you all about it but the the finns 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 over the last five years and we of course had you know a little bit of a different around COVID but we we are not really seeing a slowdown in fins that's still occurring statewide 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
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
38:22
that y'all may have. if I 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
there's some there's some barriers potentially there because the 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 with our s 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 vin and things like
that it can cut both ways you know you ' ve got 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's 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 school's 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 and and I will tell you it it's so critical the schools that use that information really have a better thumb on the pulse of what's happening with their kids then
schools that are not using it it's not mandated that they use it in 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 to
Speaker 53
40:59
me that's just as important as your your grade that you're getting in algebra or whatever is and we've got
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
41:05
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 atris kids that are having issues it could be that you know they had a a gangrelated offense. Well the the the kids and the the administrators and the teachers they need to know that information. probablybably helpful if they're getting into fights or something at school that they have that information so 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 peace 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 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 all so we've got
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
42:21
several in the queue really quick I have a question. So first on this slide under schoolrelated incident you see a fairly sizable
decrease from 24 to25. Is there anything that attributes to that or attributed to that? I'm
not really sure I notice it was specific in a few counties that have maybe new
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
42:44
judges so I don't know if maybe their court isn't tracking this because this would have to be entered into context and it is a as of right now on our current system it doesn't have to be it's like an optional check boxxx or 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 boxxx then sometimes when you have turnover in clerk's offices or juvenile officers and they just skip over
it then just you know again as judged said your dad is only as good as what's infided
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
43:21
into it so fair enough if you would go back to a couple of the slides
related to the diversion and then also like right there so I see that you ok so here you no go back to the where it has the felonies ok. so this
this number corresponds with the diversion rate, correct? The55% is that
Speaker 85
43:46
well let me get back to the there's a different diversion slide let me get to that one. OK. This that's it that was
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
43:57
it OK. so 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? We are
Speaker 59
44:08
having an increase in diversions yes so there are some counties that divert after cases are
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
44:12
filed and there are certain areas that divert cases before
they're filed but yes you definitely can see an increase in the diversions and the case numbers going down and I think that's why we hadn't had a big decrease in felonies. there ' s a big decrease in misdemeanors which makes me assume that to get out trying to
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
44:31
make sure that we're seeing that corresponding data point
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
44:33
and that and to me that makes sense because you're diverting misdemeanors usually right it's not usually going to be a
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
44:39
felony so so if you go to the felony slide, overall. so do y'all break this down? do you
track the specific felonies sir ok but it's just not you you just don't show it here but
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
44:53
you have that data do I probably have a lot of it in here as well and I try to bring a lot but didn't want to overwhelm y'all with theowerPoint but yeah any kind of data points you want on you know the level of the offense whether it was offense of property person and I know that when Michaelcrump presents all of his data as two commitments are 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
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
45:23
on that'd be interesting to see that ok we're going to questions now first in the queue we have uhpresentative Barnes
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
45:31
you're recognized thank you chair right here with the increase in mental health and it has decreased some in 2025. what are we doing to create gre greater access for mental health for instance in pine bluff when our largest
mental health facilities are at risk of closing because of funding southeastha and so they are very active in the juvenile court under Ju 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 and 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 and 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 commun communitybased providers
across the state so there are always somebody but the as Judge Briswell 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 funds 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 withosa for several years. She is a therapist and so she understands this world and is really trying to help make connect some resources that are out there that maybe sometimes judges don't even know about rightpresentative shepherd
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
47:47
you're recognized thank you Mr chairir and and
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
47:52
thank you all for being here today I I absolutely enjoyed your presentation and and
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
47:57
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 the slide. for me and
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
48:11
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 this slide this shows the implementation of the savory 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 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 mandator y I think the understanding is in 2015 the legislation was written to complete an assessment but then in 2025 well early in 202 was the mandatory era in which he 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 and 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 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 to do about it in the
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
50:14
future and I'm sorry thank youroook yes ma'am if we miss
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
50:19
anything just please remind us and to start I actually think that data does show a reduction a little reduction commitment so we all have to rememberOVID so
2019 and you see that real low jump and I think Michael Crump would agree with this we've talked about this a lot of times.20 20 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 be occurred maybe the prior year maybe 8 months before I mean depending on the case obviously so we we have seen I mean that I think 2020 twenty021 you kind of have to 2019th through
2021 you kind of have to take out we knew there was going to be a big jump afterOVID. I don't think Michael was surprised by that. I mean obviously know he wishes they were lower and but I I don't think that that rise after COVID was that shocking? We are going in the right direction.404 in and this also doesn't show how high the numbers were before 2015. I mean we were having600700 kids committed and so like the numbers really are pretty good
and while total cases are going down and 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 a fence 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 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 and we looked at it and we're like wow andmi 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 I think it the data actually does show an improvement there as for the diversions and 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 and 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 that are using their own diversion data like they had their own program that they're doing using for diversions for us being a nonunified state to have one case managements the system with the data we have it's pretty awesome I think bragging on ourCIS 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 and 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 1500 to2,000 diversions in a third of our state that probably mean s there's close to5,000 diversions a year which is I think pretty incredible compared and that does totenurgilmore's point kind of compared to the number of misdemeanor cases that have gone down so those are likely the cases that have been diverted. and judge I
Speaker 102
53:26
don't know if I missed anything u ick quick follow up Mr chair
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
53:38
brooke it was asking to email the data in regards to the assessment being tied to the commitments can you all provide that to us we you mean like
Speaker 59
53:50
how many that are committed have an assessment if the
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
53:53
assessment shows that lowris offenders are not to be committed in Arkansas is that accurate? they should they
Speaker 104
53:59
shouldn't be committed if you don't mind let me this is a this
Speaker 69
54:11
earlierlier what I mentioned was there the statute says that you cannot commit a lowris misdemeanor 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
I believe the percentage is like 8 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 gonna come out lowri that doesn't mean that in certain situations a DYS commitment is not appropriate based on the seriousness of the
Speaker 58
55:15
offense that occurred so that's the big distinction on the low risk because there could be some very violent s specifically sex cases where a juvenile would grade out as low risk of reoffending s Mr
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
55:28
Char this is my last question and I'll I'll get back in the queue if you if you're question is going to be directed towards you Judge Bradswell I I have the utmost respect for you I think you are one of the
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
55:46
most compassionate juvenile judges in Arkansas that I've encountered and I respect you fully oncece I presented this resolution in committee after I presented it you stated on record Miss Shepherd is correct. We have to do something in Arkansas. I'm going to ask you Juge Brasswell to explain further what you meant thank you uhpresentative shepherd for that that
Speaker 58
56:13
question always like it as a judge to
hear somebody say what I said on the record back to me right yes every day I have
Speaker 105
56:22
someone that repeats everything that I say I'm glad that my court reporter didn't
Speaker 58
56:30
umpresentative Shepard 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 gonna be a fight that we fight for the rest of our careers because we know that things change in circumstances changepresentative
Speaker 69
56:47
Barnes 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 know64250 mom and dad that love him and
that are doing everything that they can for him has a diagnosis of of autism and they've come to me and ainn's 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 it everything they can and the young man continues to have moments and periods of violence in the home now the family has a 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 OK? 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 OK? 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 fins case in front of me so they were like we're gonna let Judge Braswell figure it out and and I say that a little bit joking but I 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
59:22
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 not
Speaker 69
59:30
impossible for the parents to get that kid admitted into a different residential treatment in the state of Arkansas and so now they're in front of me crying basically
Speaker 56
59:40
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 and real families that are desperate for help
Speaker 69
59:55
and so the the closures that you're talking aboutpresentative Barnes representative shepherd what what what do we need to do it's a big task and listen the the aoC and they're a 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 for them but what it seems a reality to be so often is
Speaker 71
1:00:17
it's like mm 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 Arkansas0 and I know that when I'm talking about these issues that there are
Speaker 69
1:00:50
dollar signs all around both of those that's not lost on me
I understand the the hurdle that that creates butpresentative shepherd to to your question mental health and substance abuse for our kids and families in our state is is the things that that we've got to tackle going forward if we're going to continue to see the change in the impact that we've had because it's one thing to know that a kid needs help but if you don't have the tools to give it to them
Speaker 105
1:01:16
what's the point? so would it be an accurate statement that we rely on
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
1:01:26
incarceration in some instances because of
Speaker 111
1:01:28
lack of community based services specifically mental health and substance abuse. I would
Speaker 119
1:01:34
say that they're there would be situations where a kid is
Speaker 58
1:01:39
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 it's a very good loaded question
Speaker 105
1:01:57
about that. I don't mean disrespect by that but it's that's a difficult one to answer
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:02:05
a good question all right thank you Representative Shephpard. moving on to Representative Enneitt you're recognized if
you'll hit your button againpresentative there we go now you're recognized thank you Mr
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
1:02:18
Chair. I'd like to thank everybody for this presentation on this very important subject. I 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 the system Representative that's a great question my chief of staff
Speaker 69
1:03:00
so that's something that's near and dear to to my heart and and to hers as well I know for our court I don't have I I'm not currently tracking specific diagnoses or disabilities that come through the court system. I use those because those are if we know them those are identified in our risk assessments and I100% take those things into consideration
Speaker 58
1:03:28
when developing that plan but currently right now that's not a data point that that we've been collecting have a fault follow up so how
Speaker 127
1:03:42
difficult would it be to do that? moving forward so it's
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:03:49
actually funny you asked that question yesterday I was talking with our new our person who's taking the statewidehaal healthal administrator position and she's been talking with the
national Cents who helps 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 criminal justice cases in just juvenile cases and they expect to roll that out later this year and she had literally just had a meeting with him a couple of days ago about it and and we chatted about it because I said how do you what do we track? Is it 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 is going to roll out
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:04:47
state courts hopefully very soon. thank you thank youpresentative uhpresentative gonzale
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
1:04:51
more than you were gonnaist thank you thank you for your presentation. you mentioned the school safety dashboard
and yes yes senator mentioned the school safety dashboard how that possibly could be a major tool for
identifying 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 ways since we have it you know to to move forward to
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:05:34
identify early yeah thank you I you know 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 you know I 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 they're top concern was mental health issues with our students that was our top to
concern and I asked well then how are you tracking that information because if you're not tracking it or you're not taking I'm going to use a word that judgedge 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 ok 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 ok 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 al ger or whatever but what's happening in their lives is just as important if not more important because that that is what's happening and affecting what is happening when they're coming to the judges in 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 what's important to
Speaker 132
1:07:50
me is total cases filed from 2015 down to 2025. A clear reduction of that
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
1:07:56
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 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 in their home life just what Judge Braswell talked about with a thirteeny 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 burned to death in a car and you're making fun of my mom. not ok 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 nonexistent and it is nonexistent when it comes to substance abuse. and if you've had a child that's struggled with any kind of issues whether it be if you struggle with substance abuse that I'm not minimizing thatugs alcohol but let me tell you folks social media and the amount of junk and garbage that are 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 highpowered 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 Ppe go sit in the bleachers and
play on your phone. no I mean so yeah 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 that we really shouldn't tackle. Thank you. Thank youpresentative Reative barnes you're recognized right if you'll hit
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:11:05
that button again don't touch it there you go
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:11:19
thank you chair 11 of for the judge when 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 savory 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 on another judge would be in DYS so you know in in you know in in and somewhat these numbers that we see they are reality to me but what's going on but they could be a lot worse if every judge just said ok you you rob somebody DYS you did this DYS but instead we have programs in place to 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 that those numbers could be
Speaker 69
1:12:31
worse if it wasn't for some judges yes sir I mean
Speaker 56
1:12:35
Representativeurns I think you can see just in the data even before risk assessments that 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
1:12:51
court and say well if I was the judge I'd lock that kid up. or if I was a judge, I'm sending
Speaker 71
1:12:57
that kid to DYs I was a prosecutor for about 8 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 have to take all those
Speaker 69
1:13:16
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 I don't think it's appropriate to have a 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 is a shield to help protect them to go through life and and and growing up and maturing I mean, you know, I I
get blue in the face talking to kids about all the research that shows the impact of brain
Speaker 56
1:13:58
development for prolo prolonged use of marijuana from when you're 12 years old to you're 18 years old and you've been smoking nonstop every day
Speaker 69
1:14:05
your brain's in full development well you're smoking because you're you've got some tra traumatic situations going on and you're depressed you have anxiety whatever that may be. all the literature that's coming out is the prolonged use of of marijuana significantly
increases those symptoms related to depression and anxiety and so representative Barnes you're I mean you're right we have to take those into consideration and and it shouldn't be you're going to DYS because I'm mad at I've told kids I'm disappointed right but it should be that it shouldn't be because we're mad it should be some very serious concerns and the other thing too is and and mis Mr Crump knows this I I do have kids that have been committed to
DYs for misdemeanors out of my court and I would say an overwhelming majority are kids who have been given multiple opportunities not to be back in the court system I mean a kid the other day that I sent it was his 9th revocation I'm embarrassed to say
Speaker 71
1:15:07
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
Speaker 69
1:15:27
right? poverty, lack of resources but 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. and so yeah I mean that that's that's a great
Speaker 135
1:15:45
pointpresenting barnes hadn't really thought of it the way you mentioned and represent
Speaker 59
1:15:49
barneschester and address one part of your question and you talked about some judges are sending a certain programs Michael runs an excellent
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
1:15:54
program called CStep which I'm sure he'd be happy to
share more information about but he's been able to get more beds 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 seat step and we'll send them to you judges love it you challenge was a huge hit across our state and it closing was pretty devastating for a lot of our judges and so some of these you know we talk about behavioral health services and programs that aren't available but also these these programs instead of sending a child to DS they could send them to you
challengeenge or Ct step and for a while we had very few Ct step beds but my has worked very hard over the last few sessions to get more and more beds 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 the family in that juvenile
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:16:52
safe? Thank you right going to Representative Johnny Rye you're recognized thank you Mr Chairman
Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
1:17:01
you know we know that dyslexia is a sickness and that's probably gonna have to be dealt with one way and then you got kids that are disturbing fighting you know gonna be something different there you know and I think that what we are looking at I mean I might be wrong but I think that through the years we have actually mom and dadd has really had to buckle down to make a levin and and and they're not they're not around the children as much
as they should be so it doesn't make such a good role model and and you know you hate to say that but but it and and I don't think there's a cure for that because they don't 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 that would actually help out on that end instead of the the sickness in with the dyslexia thank you
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:18:05
thank youpresentative Johnny. we're going topresentativemcGruder you're recognized thank you Mr
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
1:18:08
chairir. 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 but probably makes him run the bleachers though but seriously
though this is an issue I I appreciate y'all shining a light on this and we'll continue to work towards making things better. right
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:18:47
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 right we're going to move to item G
as director rump to come to the table and the director you introduce yourself for the record
when you have a seat and you may proceed at will.
Speaker 143
1:20:09
sorry my skills are even worse than Judge Brazwell's I think
Michael Krupp
Unverified
1:20:12
when it comes to this stuff my name's Michael Krupp I'm the director of the division of youth services and I appreciate the opportunity to come here today and and give you some of the data that we have around the kids that are in DY's custody and maybe a little bit of information about how things work to sort of fill out some of the other conversations and
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:20:28
really really quick before you begin I 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 exhibitg so sorry you may proceed thank you
Michael Krupp
Unverified
1:20:40
so I started off Ipresentative shepherd 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 gonna 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 or 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 through to those I'll try to go through them just kind
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
1:21:18
of highlight some things I I think just highlight those and then
Michael Krupp
Unverified
1:21:21
that 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 our commitments by calendar year 2020 through 2025 and you can see it was mentioned that they were even higher prior to 20 twenty0 things did kind of bottom out in 2020 20
021 especially when the pandemic started we really that things slowed down when the schools stopped and every 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 they started to rise in 2022 we could see it coming in spring of 2022 a lot of these things are cyclical we 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 there's just
things you can see that where we start to see at least that's my that's why I think it happens during those times and but we we have those cyclical times but you could see the numbers they did hit a peak of466 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 passages secure residential right of passage is our contractor that operates five secure facilities around the state for DYS it was7 at one point we had actually
closed3 in 2019 or so we 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 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 around320 youth in those secure facilities I'm hoping I think as 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 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 The next slide I have shows the numbers for our communitybas residential we haveroup homeme contracts with a couple of places eer loyd 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 communitybas they're not secure settings morere of our lowris 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 communitybas 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 could see those numbers have actually gone up
to an average of34 in2025 beds on that community baseds side and some of that was deliberate to be able to move more kids into a step down program that I I did highlight later on in this presentation the next slide or graph here is the juvenile detention center numbers a little bit of background juvenile detention centers or 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 in2018 4 have closed
or closed within a couple of years after that so we've gone from 14 to10. 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 our provider should be able to handle those behaviors they have experience doing that so it would has to be really bad for us to put a kid there for those reasons and if you look at 2020 2021 our numbers were really low we had times where there were0 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 24bd facility and so sometimes when the commitments were coming in too quickly40 something50 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 gonna 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 probably60 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 the standby county for all six of those calendar years so if you want to at 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 it's alphabetical it's not by number of 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 to2024 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 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 8 of those are in the more the larger cities in Arkansas we have 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 eid are all in places like Bentonville you know Washington County you have Faulkner County pulaski County, Jefferson County, Craighead, Crittenon they're all in the the much larger parts of Arkansas we lost juvenile detention
centers in Miller County and Texarkana. there was one in Batesville, White Riverjuvenile detention ent er there was a Mississippi county and then we also had Garland County hott spprings so those were the four that we lost over the last I don't I don't remember the exact dates but56,7 years those have all closed so it took some of the beds out of rotation juvenile detention centers are used by courts to hold you 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 him 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 their experts in the room that know a little bit more about how 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 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 or60 page presentation we just aggregated this data to show you the whole six years so if you look in the first table it's it's broken down by race and eth ethnicity you'll see that it's 455 % African American black,42% white and then you've got a few other groups that are in that4 to5% range but it's it's it usually runs pretty much 5050 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 to17 and up and I would say that when I look at it they're mostly 17 and up when it about half of the kids so they kind of have a 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 fi5 year olds thankfully we don't have a lot of t213 year olds and not very many that are you 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 the 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 Ver loyd 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 schooling up the next one you'll see our population almost always runs 80% male. and about 20% 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 and 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 isn't separate we don't put them in the same classrooms but it's it typically runs 80% boys with the population every year DYS commitments by offence 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 it kind of it's weird that why is the top and then it goes AB Cd but you see the number ofy felonies that we get it's it's not a it's not a large number of white felonies 156 over that and this is the highest charge defense so you might have a youth coming into our custody who has multiple fences 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 charge defense was just to give you an idea of a fencele data so that's how this otherwise it would have been kind of overwhelming and you know somebody might have 10 offense s 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 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. Id I will say that I believe the no
felonies data point is capturing some of those cases that judgedge 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 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 at 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 are missed that don't have any felonies but I also haven't 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 offence 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 free 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 gonna go to court and say look we've kind of gotten into 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 beha a behavioral health
diagnosis probably all of them most of them have some sort of they're usually behind in 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 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?'s for some of thosey 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 defense 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 def felonies you know and down but we do get thosey felonies those as's andbs
we get the sever 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 we put that in there just to give you an idea that the why felonies do tend to stay longer because those why 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 they'll link to stay look 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 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 and20 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 gonna 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 Y felonies you can see it's it's it's pretty much the 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 in that bottom group is just the average overall you could see starting in 24 and25 it started to decline a little bit. that's I think that a little bit of 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 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 it's a good thing for the health of our system because we have so many kids this is a report fromation. you can look at that on it just shows our graduation rates we've had6 years we've had 222 young men and women obtain their GED we've had another
122102 graduate from high school it's a little we're a a a school district where the Arkansas Consolidated School District but as you can imagine our population is a little different than every single school in this state in in many ways obviously they are some of the children with the 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 you compound that with we don't get all of our kids coming on august twenty7th and then stay the whole school year. they're coming in every day, they're going out every day so you know some of them we're just not gonna have long enough to be able to earn the credits and they typically earn 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 8,9 months a year we're able to get them their high school diploma or a lot of times their GED umpresentative shepherd and Shorter College we started a partnership with them a little
over a year ago we've had a lot of success in our Alexander facility we brought someone over that shortter 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 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 year from over these all these years it's typically 20 thirtysomething 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 a a set definition for recidivism in this state are 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
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 it ranges typically 15 to19% 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 they're gonna once 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 ofrections data we
track that for ive years and we look at all the kids that discharge and that runs anywhere from you'll see a low of like 28% up to42% will end up and I've looked I didn't bring that data that that divides that it's I'd say about60% of that is ending up in prison within5 years40% 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 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 you it's it's not a lot of kids if you look at the bottom number and and and this is the tricky thing with data that like if you see the42% 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 the department ofrections. 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 highris serious offender felony kids that hadn 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 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 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 that are leaving our custody they're ending up in the department oforrections within
the next5 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 and 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 the next slide there was discussion about the savory you will see that in in six years we've only had 28 youth who who showed up at intake with a low score on their savory risk assessment there
were6 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 slay 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 1,691 out of 2007 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 a risk of violence or reoffending that you could go ahead and send those kids to DYS. the next one def I was asked about the number of DCfS custody
dual custody we call them in the last or 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 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 under390ish in DYS custody right now so 28 out of390 is not a large number of DCfs 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 pay320 dollars 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 to the emergency room or the dentist or
something of that nature we're we're gonna have to pay for that medicaid does not if a juvenile is incarcerated their medicaid coverage is 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 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 that320 dollars
a day it's not a huge amount but it is a little more than just32 and you'll see the juvenile detention centers they range typically $90 to $100 a day I think probably 10fi5 years ago that was50 dollars 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 are 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 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 and I'll just I'll I'll go through these really quick just kind of give you the a highlight really quick sentence for each one I was asked about 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 that 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 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 of the DCfS and DYS youth that their treatment needs are very similar juvenile courts I 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 are probably 2/3 have we brought out up 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 we were 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 you know when it comes to the schools we when it comes to schools we primarily we 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 in some 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 24bd facility some of our smaller ones you know it's hard to to meet the education needs and hire all those face to face teachers when among those 24 kids you 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 to21 year old facility inermont just for males so the needs are different but it 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 a pair of professionals 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 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 case s that were mentioned for those 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 communitybas provider is going to be in charge of monitoring their adherence to that 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 you know, 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 preventionite
and aftercare in the last couple of years we've been able to utilize intensive in home services family centered treatment which is now I think in Medicaid co ver ed familyent 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 inhome 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 DY's custody for six months 9 months a year provide them structure they're getting we tell them when to when to go to bed when to get up they're gonna eat, when they're gonna 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 stepd 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 you don't single parent grandparents whomever it is just doesn't have the time or energy
to 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 it probably enough of it but I think it's been pretty beneficial so far to provide those things in our communitybas providers are a big piece of of that puzzle let's see I mentioned here we've we've we started a prevention unit about a year and a half or two ago and it's we've we've grown that to three individuals now to just really have some a DYS unit that's focusing on prevention work and 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 in just to give them some more resources that they can turn to when a kid comes into the home that are in 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's 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 you 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 the past 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 are reading at or below a third grade level when they come to us it it's a struggle but we try to do what we can to 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 was55% of our population is on either a504 or an IEP which I think is significantly higher than in a in a traditional school
Substance use I will tell you it from my experience the last7 or 8 years virtually all of our kids utilize it at least marijuana I mean it's 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 Id I do agree that it would be and I I think there's some coming online soon but we need more out in the communities to help these these young people with substance use issues we had a brief period where we used some grants to operate a
substitute facility back during those low commitment years but it was opioid s only and we didn't see a lot of youth in that 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 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
the lie here we go and this is just the intake process it's gonna tell you how long it takes all the different things that they're assessed for when they come into custody and it's gonna 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 therapist and all of our different staff in the meetings where they 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 s 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 a 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 consolidate school district so we operate on the same rules as everyone else we have to follow all the standards we're audited I 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 that 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 and get get these things done. kids I think we can do the most good for those kids that are old enough where they're about ready to set out on a path on their own right and and get an education and find the right employment to 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
high school the first of those that we opened in partnership with counseling clinic we have a 12 week career exploration program with the Salinene 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 explorations 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 ele people had so we've been putting you through a tower climbing program where you can get certified to climb the big 200,300 ft 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 hurdle we run into is a lot of these kids don't have a driver's
license, learnarer's permit and they don't have a car at home that they can drive so you know some do and 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 learners's permit so they can start developing that skill umarkansas 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 ive 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 if they're left to try to be able to get the class on their own and they have no car and 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 orc andA with them as well the Arkansasrural 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 uhc andA classes we've talked about doing more of so 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 are our juvenile ombudsman helped me get in touch with them that's gonna let us the kids atermont 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 that's the end of my piece there's a piece here the last couple of 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 to read and 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 right
Speaker 139
2:04:03
looks like we have a couple in the queue. thank you for the presentation
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:04:08
going straight to uhpresentative Barnes thank you chair.
Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
2:04:13
One question do Joborp connect with you all Joborps is I
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:04:17
think we've had a couple of youth we've placed in Job Corps but not routinely and I think I you know there was some question a while back on the funding for Joborp I'm not really it's 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 we could use I in my time there that there was not really been a strong relationship with jobborp 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 gonna figure out how to tap into like we we owe a funds or rehab or whatever it may be because this population is is ripe for that type of it's not a it's not a large number of people when you just think about it but they're the ones that need this the most thank you you're welcome thank youpresentative going to Representative
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:05:08
shepherd you're recognized thank you Mr chair and thank you for being here
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:05:14
today Mr Crop I'm 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 related to your presentation on page 10. where you have the annual cost of incarceration which as it in my opening statements I listed that was one of the reasons in 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 in
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:05:50
that range because just on the320 dollars a day and you're you're talking I think 112 I I'd have to do the math on my calculator but onebid is gonna cost us just on the320 probably 112114 $1000 a year and then when I mentioned the other things they their medical needs and their medication needs and things of that nature yeah it that sounds reasonable so this this
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:06:13
confirms the earlier statement in the
report that this is a costly system that we're relying on. it is expensive I
Speaker 148
2:06:21
think you know Arkansas from what I've learned is probably on the lower end as far as
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:06:26
what we pay per day. so you can imagine how much it can even get higher but it is expensive to incarcerate a person for a full year yes i want to make on page
Chair
Unverified
2:06:35
th3 and a lot of the commentary that I don't know if she's still in here or not. Senator Irvin gave
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:06:47
earlier she related back to education in artkansas and basically the school to prison pipeline is what she was alluding 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 DYSreid at or below the grade level reflecting substantial impairments in literacy comprehe comprehension in academic
readiness so over 80% of the kids in DYS custody barely read at a third grade level think if I may I I think if
Speaker 152
2:07:26
you look at that level and and I I've
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:07:29
got a hunch that coach Fitzhill 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 2nd and3rd grade because when they fall behind and they can't read when they start getting in3rd,4th,5th grade. that's when they start acting out and when
they start acting out in school they they fall behind further they kind of get labeled and then you know then you end up getting suspended. I mean it's just it starts really early is my point I talked about 10 being the youngest we can get but really you the need is even earlier. reading is I mean it's a huge
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:08:07
issue for us 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 is 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 term 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% of the kids cannot read but they are on a virtual platform once they enter the system. Sure I
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:08:48
can do that I will I think it's explained in here but the good thing about our use of virtual Arkansas is the teachers that are assigned to 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 may be has some issues around reading and find other ways to teach them and and and to help them make progress so I mean if you're if you're if you come to us and you're 1516 years old and you're you're reading a third,4th grade,5th grade level. obviouslybviously there's gonna
be challenges I think when it comes to virtual I 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 you're welcome all right thank youpresentative thank
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:10:00
you was about to move on but it looks like representative gonzalezworth and got it in. Here we go. going to you. Yes thank you
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:10:10
chair you mentioned that many of the
kids obviously mentioned that they're not reading at grade level, you know about 80% of them and then
many of them are504 or s 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 if you have kids who are still learning English how are they being caught I can get you some numbers I I
Speaker 149
2:10:52
can think of just some individual cases where we've even had to bring in someone to to
Michael Krupp
Unverified
2:10:57
translate it's not it's not common I mean I don't it's not very often most of them at least English is their first language almost all the kids we get but we've we've had a couple of instances of that happen and if if you give me some time I'll be happy to dig in and see over the last six years how many we came that had came into custody that were not you're welcome all right thank you and if you would just forward that to staff
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:11:24
and have them send it to the committee. OK seeing no one else in the queue thank you so much thank you for your presentation thank you for being here and 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 of more items to go. so I'll ask that we be
succinct and keep an eye on the time because it is getting late
so Yes right if you would introduce yourself for the record. Good afternoon
Speaker 163
2:12:15
Courtney Salisfod for the department of Education. Stacysmith deputy commissioner with the department of Education and you have an
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:12:22
exhibit that was in in the packet that's
exhibit h if you have any remarks you would like to offer on that or you want to go straight to questioning that's up to you we could do some quick
Speaker 164
2:12:35
remarks we'll make them very quick so really the questions that were sent over to the department and and first off thank you for including us in this conversation 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. several of the questions that were asked us pertained around data points
specifically on attendance as we listened to the conversation today the data points we gave you on attendance I don't think lying. 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 it about 15% of our students are considered chronically absent right and so when you were
talking earlier with the judges and they were talking about Finn's petitions and court like you get to the point where you get those really high level chronic absenteeism Fins referrals happening so that's that's one thing I think we need to look at when you think about chronic absent kids, the highest group that's 1819% of kids that are chronically absent are in that 9th,10th, and 11th grade. the other group that's really real 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 but your biggest group is that that 9th,10th and 11th grade. so chronic absenteeism I think was more the attendance questions that were sent over. data for suspension and expulsions that's kind of clear cut this suspensions that could be repeated the same kid more than once right? expulsions are unique kids so 857 individual kids had were
expelled from school last school year and then on alternative learning environment that's actually a K12 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 is you're going to see are 1elth 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 them trying to keep them from from dropping out of school so a lot of times that's
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:15:08
what what you see there Courtney do you want to get into the
Speaker 163
2:15:12
some of the other topics so I'll 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 been brought up or any other questions that you all have? you all right
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:15:57
so first in the queue Representative Bentley and then to representative shepherd thank you chairman thank you for
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:16:04
being here today I had a meeting last week with my superintendents in my district they have pretty much cover very rural district and they're just really at a loss of what to do with some students that are violent in their school where they're not having very they don't have any options they don't have any AU programs there so what are the parameters for them to to expel a child because to me it's like they don't have the opportunity to expel a child who'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 help for these
superintendents and rural districts what they can do is I'm just don't know they're just at a loss and it's really been one of the biggest issues that they're dealing with
Speaker 163
2:16:45
right now. So I'm gonna let Miss 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 received 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
gonna again let Miss Smith talk about some of the things we're doing to try
Speaker 165
2:17:10
to help with that. Yeah we have heard from schools and actually judgedge Browswell when he was talking earlier about kids
Speaker 164
2:17:16
who have been admitted into a residential fac il ity and then our mental health facility and then for their extreme behavior for violence or disruption they get kicked out and then they end 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 the resources we don't have the wrapround services so we have been working with some districts on some pilots around the state and Jefferson County in pine bluff area they have a multi tiered ALE there that even offers an 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 trying to find that int between ground between traditional ALE 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 also know we've done the pilot with mental
health and the concierge service that this legislature has heard about. right we
Speaker 163
2:18:45
brought to you a few months ago a contract with Careolisce care coordination company and so we all know schools have a lot that they're doing and the councilors 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 carolis 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 that don't have Medicaid or underinsured or uninsured and so
through our careolis 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 or counselors in those areas and so 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 through telehealth for these students
Speaker 175
2:20:01
as well. thanks for the update and I will tell you that one of my superintendents is using
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
2:20:10
careolis who's very happy with the results that we're getting out there in a rural district so thank thank you chairman thank you for sharing that.
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:20:18
Thank you rosinative and coming to Representative shepherd you're recognized thank
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:20:21
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 all so can we
Chair
Unverified
2:20:31
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 ma'am yes ma'am.
Speaker 176
2:20:42
I will type that up for you and get it and send it over for them to distribute ok because
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:20:49
that would be great because some of the questions that were asked by my colleagues were referenced in that email related to disability and things of that nature but we really quickly with what you did provide us are we saying that roughly37,000 kids are not attending school on any given day yeah when we were looking at the daily average attendance the
Speaker 165
2:21:12
difference between that was there a 92% so yeah you've got 8% of those total kids that are not that are absent
Speaker 176
2:21:17
yes on a day we have a small city of kids not at school on any given day yes thank you yeah
Speaker 163
2:21:29
if I may Representative shepherd, I'd like to add because I know I've had many conversations with Judge Braswell and and he even said he wished he had and brought this up when he was up at the table but we are working with him and his court and and a school district in his area on
an attendance addressing ilott 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 that's a pilot that we are looking at and working with
Judge Braswell and that we hope to eventually upscale so that we can reduce those numbers thank
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:22:23
you All right. thank you Representative going to Representative gonzalezorthen you're recognized thank you
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:22:29
thank you for your presentation. it was mentioned
previously that approximately 80% of our kids who are incarcerated or or court involved or not reading it at grade level,3rd grade reading level. and so it was
also mentioned that with chronic absenteeism we have a lot of 9thth 10th and 11th graders. but yes, kindergarten is one of those a 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 bases happens in that early grade so that by the time they get to third grade they're reading on grade levels. So I was just curious as to to help to prevent these particular kids now as a continue in school they're not reading on grade level and and now they're they're they're in court involved etc. they continue to
be absent and then we see what happens in you know ending up being incarcerated. So I'm just curious as to what 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 etc 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 critical with their literacy foundation.
Speaker 164
2:24:25
We agree with you on that and there's lots of conversations going on especially around early childhood right now and early literacy. you know state legislation in in recent years has required that 30 dayy screeners it's required interim assessments it's required screening for atrisk reading especially in kindergarten 1st and second grade and 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 finding what kindergarten readiness looks like looking at curriculum materials for our early learning centers is is another area that's being worked on right now so that is definitely an area that there is a task forcece the early childhood commission is is tackling that right now and there's there's several
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:25:07
conversations happening about that right. uhpresentative uhlinncoln Barnett you're recognized
Speaker 182
2:25:20
thank you chair. I had one well I have
Representative Lincoln Barnett
Unverified
2:25:23
two questions. The first one is regarding the 20242025 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 airer is there a way for us to know how many students are returning to school after an expulsion and completing it definitely can get you the trending data so we'll make sure and
Speaker 164
2:26:07
do that and then I'll I'll dig in and look at the other. I mean our statewide graduation rate right now is 90%. so that means 10% are not. that's the four year graduation rate. So definitely see if we can look for a link between
expulsions and that that percentage that's not graduating on time now we do have a group of those kids who do graduate
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:26:31
you know in5 years right so but we can definitely go back and dig into that thank
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:26:39
you all right thank youpresentative 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 gonna go ahead and ask if if both would come to the table and
that way you can both present and then take questions. And I understand presentations are different but on similar subjects so
OK I will ask you to introduce yourself for the record and whichever one wants to go first you you can you can
Speaker 192
2:27:47
certainly do that right good afternoon members and thank you chair. My name isissa Smith Brantley. I'm the executive director of Arkansas advocates for childrenldren and Families. and it is a privilege to be with you today to talk about juvenile justice I wanna start by thankingpresentative Shephpard 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 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 we're here as long as you're willing to be here gott 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 specifically heard about the savory system but I wanted to give you some context from the the administrative side of state government so in 2015 I was working as the deputy director of Chiren and
families or excuse me youth and families for DHS and on governor Hutchinson's first day in office my boss at the time got a call director Johnelig 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 are stealing items from gas stations are having incidents at home or at school mainly 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 found 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 I'm not ignoring accountability but allow them to stay home or close to it and I believe thatpresentative Barnes you you mentioned the the efficiency of many of these programs so back in 2015 we started on a significant reform effort that included the savory system but also included creating a statutory law and a reform board that
looked at institutional change on top of savory that included streamlining 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 forrector Ccrump maybe there that finding beds for those children are no longer a problem but it was significant at the
time finding solutions pertaining to substance abuse where 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 and really determining what were the right children and their right placements that we were ultimately able to close two facilities the cult facility and the 11 to se7 year old facility located in Dermont and equally we were able to repurpose the Louisville
facility and use that for children that were struggling with opioid use and as asrectorrump has noted that facility wasn't quite used as much as DYS was expecting at the time and now and was left unopened for some time and then unfortunately now is back to taking residential commitments 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 where children 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 the 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 we're 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 communitybased 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 judgedge Braswell needs in conway is not necessarily what Judge Hess who was also here needs in forest C and we want it 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 cause 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 juveniles 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 and 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 highle 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
umrector 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 that's not necess I'm sure knowing the individuals at DYS that if they could dedicate more money to communitybas 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 and organizations that support this work and then that leaves much of the front in 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 seepresentative 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 as I 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 oforrections 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 think about what we need
Speaker 196
2:38:21
to do to ensure that our children are on a better path. So thank you chair and
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:38:27
thank you members thank you any questions for Miss Smith Brantley
all right Miss Shepherdpresentative Shepherd you recognized and and Mr Chair
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
2:38:38
I don't have a question but I have more of a statement and in Misssmith
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:38:43
Branley I 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 gonna follow up with the chair with some additional comments in regards to funding for communitybas programming as an alternative to incarceration so thank you for that
Speaker 197
2:39:07
coach you're recognized thank you and
Speaker 198
2:39:14
thank you Representative shepherd 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 researchers 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 pulled this in perspective because we've heard the data we've heard the numbers and so I want to make
this come home as as as we closed down today but perfect example I'm visiting a school in the delta and going to the school with the superintendent and and I vividly remember the young man fifth grade couldn't be sus sixth grade and they was getting ready to suspend him and he was crying and so I asked the superintendent what what plans do we have for this young man right now they say well he's been violent in school and we're going to suspend him and I
said oh ok so what's the game plan for them 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 often time 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 the 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 the500 beds the500 juveniles and that's how I met Mr Cromp 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 what we are today and looking at the the4 to500
students that we're dealing with the the thing that excites me is that it's only500 because as I travel to Chicago to uhharlem 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 our pipeline of prison population. so in in point when we look at this it is 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 of prison population you go back and you look at the factors that we realize we want the hungriest steaks that's com that's poverty OK you come back and you look at the rate of our
teenage pregnancy OK? 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 would get to work with and I've been to all five facilities that 85 to almost 90% of those that I just do it has 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 over60% come from teenage mothers then from that you look at an impoverished background so what we're doing we're 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 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 a50% 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 talk about the third grade reading level I think there's a book byRoger Turrell called the 1st 1000 Days after conception well what the research will show us in that
book is that that 1st 1000 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 and process this tragedy that we're dealing with with the violence and in certain zip codes in certain communities and realized 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 anecdotal 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 he's been suspended. you know why he came back for lunch. he wanted to eat because he didn't have any resources to teach so we have to look at the judge and 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 the systems that will be transformative with working with our population of students that need the help the most Stacyins is 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 in everyard Kansas that
Arkansasbaptists work with Mr. Crump and 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 the department of in in juvenile detention facility within five years of release without a specific life plan will recidivate within five years with the average prison sentence in adult prisoner being 12 and so as you mentioned Representative Shed the money
that we're spending to incarcerate that's a four year college degree for one year you're getting that you're getting that in one year that could pay for training and welding all the things that's that Mr Cromp has mentioned that sometimes kids can be applied to learn to do rather than putting them in the classroom and thinking ok we just heard that the average reading level is under3rd 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 you know 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 there's not it's not a cookie cutter approach this is somebody's child and and and and this is the United States of America and everybody regardless of of the birth that you have deserve the right to pursue life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. thank you so much thank you for your comments well stated any questions
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:47:29
right uhpresentative Gonzalez Worthen you're recognized no
Representative Justin Gonzales
Unverified
2:47:33
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 to keep our kids safe in the community and not continuing this pathway to prison. thank you ma'am right any other comments
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:47:54
I was hanging on for you Representative shepherd.
Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
2:48:01
this this this is for the ending though if it's ok not directed towards them
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:48:05
well if that's the case thank you both for your time. thank you for your your work and thank you for for being here and sharing your thoughts with us we appreciate it thank you so much you're dismissed right Representative shepherd, now to you. OK, thank you Mr
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
2:48:23
chairir and and I want to thank everyone for being here today I think this was conversation that was 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 what 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 communitybas programs as an alternative to incar OK thank youpresentative what I heard there was the need to
Senator Ben Gilmore
Unverified
2:49:33
continue this discussion and 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 were 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 so yeah look forward to continuing the conversation.
thank you thank youpresentative seeing no further business 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 agcency present as always thank you for your work. With that we are adjourned
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
Unverified
Speaker 22
Speaker 24
Speaker 28
Speaker 58
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Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
Speaker 56
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Representative Glenn Barnes
Unverified
Speaker 53
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Representative Tara Shephard
Unverified
Representative Matthew J. Shepherd
Unverified
Speaker 102
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Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
Speaker 127
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Representative Lee Johnson
Unverified
Representative Jessie McGruder
Unverified
Speaker 143
Michael Krupp
Unverified
Speaker 139
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Chair
Unverified
Speaker 152
Speaker 149
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Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
Speaker 165
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Representative Lincoln Barnett
Unverified
Speaker 192
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