by Susan M. Buckholz, Esq. THE CHILDREN’S CORNER
When an Attorney’s Best Efforts are Not Enough: The Multidisciplinary Approach to Parent Representation
“Parents in the child welfare system tend to be disenfranchised;
they are used to not having a voice and can be easily intimidated by the child welfare power structure. They need someone to stand up for them.
When they have a strong voice in the process, the system works better for everyone.” Marc Cherna, Director, Allegheny County Department of Human Services1
Few events in the life of a family are more traumatic than the removal from the home of one or more of the children in that fam- ily. The causes, which can vary widely from case to case, matter not in this regard, as the vast majority of parents are doing the best that they can with what they have to raise their children safely and appropriate- ly. Removal of one’s child brings a parent into a close and fairly undeniable encoun- ter with his or her own failures, as a person and as a parent.
My twenty-two years in the family court system, first as a guardian ad litem and then as a contract attorney in juvenile court, un- derscore for me the truth in Mr. Cherna’s words set out above. I have rarely worked with a family who has had a positive expe- rience with “the system” prior to the re- moval of their children, coming as many of them do from impoverished and/or disad- vantaged backgrounds. Several of my cli- ents have spoken with true anguish about the failure of the state to protect them dur- ing their childhoods, when they endured abuse and/or neglect that they believe far outshadows anything that happened to their children. The grief over their own loss- es, coupled with the shame of their parent- ing failures, can be paralyzing.
So, it is not surprising to me that one of the hardest conundrums facing parents and their attorneys in these matters is the forging of a working relationship with the same agency that removed the children from the family home in the first place. A parent’s reasoning is not hard to follow: if the worker assigned to help you get your kids back works for the same agency that took the kids in the first place, that work- er either:
• Must already think you are a terrible parent, so why would that person work WITH you to regain custody of your children?
And/Or • Must already think that you are a ter- rible parent, so why would you tell the state workers anything when they will
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only use that new information against you, if they can, to further “protect” your children from you?
Unfortunately, without a strong connec- tion to a sympathetic and experienced case worker, many parents have no realistic chance to regain custody of their children after a finding that the children have been neglected or abused in their family of ori- gin. The needs are great, the system com- plicated and cumbersome, the resources not always linked together in a user-friend- ly fashion.
As indispensable as parents’ attorneys
are in these cases (contrary legislation in some less enlightened states notwithstand- ing), our best efforts are not often suffi- cient to meet the needs of parents trying to regain custody of their children from the state. Certainly, we can protect their legal rights and ensure that they are heard and respected in the courtroom while receiving a fair opportunity to present their case to the court. However, the courtroom portion of these cases, while certainly important, is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Without diminishing the importance of competent legal counsel, I would respect- fully argue that a parent must also have ac- cess to a knowledgeable, trusted, experi- enced caseworker who will help them to find and engage in the services that the court has ordered them to complete be- fore their children may return home, with- out the psychological mind-bending too often experienced by parents who have only the state social worker to help them. Several organizations, around the coun- try and in the great state of Vermont, have taken this notion to heart and are attempt- ing to change the way in which we provide services to parents in CHINS/dependency cases. One of the earliest examples of this multi-disciplinary approach is the Center for Family Representation (“CFR”), which was founded in 2002 by attorney Sue Ja- cobs and others who had been advocates for children in the New York City depen- dency courts and saw firsthand how poor
THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • FALL 2012
families were torn apart. As lawyers and social workers, they set out to change the paradigm for legal services provided to poor families. As noted on their website, they knew that, in the simple words of for- mer Annie E. Casey Foundation president Douglas Nelson, “Children do better when their parents do better.” CFR provides each client with a lawyer/ social worker/parent advocate team who work together across three levels to ensure that the client has the best possible chance to regain custody:
• in the courtroom by providing zeal- ous advocacy on the legal issues;
• in the community by ensuring that all possible programming and support is secured and that obstacles such as transportation, child care for children still in the home, etc., are overcome so that services can be accessed in a timely manner; and
• in the home by including a member of the team who has been through the process of losing custody of a child him or herself and who can pro- vide true empathy and support to the client while going through the ju- venile court process.
I visited CFR in 2008 with a Vermont team looking to implement this program in our juvenile court system. We attended dependency hearings, spoke with judges, and met with Legal Aid attorneys who rep- resent children in these matters, and oth- ers involved in CFR. Uniformly, we heard praise for the organization and the model that they had implemented, and the impor- tance of their work in improving the lives of children who were before the court. Soon after that visit, the Vermont Parents
Representation Center, Inc. (“VPRC”) was formed to try to implement the team mod- el of parent representation in our state. Since 2009:
VPRC’s Family Intervention Team (FIT) model—including an attorney, a social
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