PLUMAS COUNTY

UNIFIED FAMILY COURT

ACTION PLAN

by Jeff Cunan

INTRODUCTION:

In July of 2002 the Plumas County Superior Court received a “planning grant” from the Administrative Office of the Courts to plan a new Unified Family Court (hereinafter referred to as “UFC”) for Plumas County . After the planning grant was acquired (through the efforts of Judge Ira Kaufman and Chief Probation Officer Tom Frady), the author was hired as a consultant/project manager to steer the UFC planning efforts, put together any findings and recommendations, and create this Action Plan.

By way of disclaimer, it should be noted that the author is a future stakeholder in any UFC created for Plumas County . The UFC planning project is to be completed by January 6, 2003 . That same day the author takes office as District Attorney of Plumas County. There are both advantages and disadvantages to using a stakeholder as consultant for this type of project.

Among the advantages is that far less time has been needed to familiarize the author with local stakeholders and their particular needs than if an outside large consulting firm had been used, as was done by several participating courts. Further, as has become clear through the research, the District Attorney’s Office is often an obstacle to the creation of UFCs, since any alternative handling of domestic violence, child crime-victim, child crime-witness, and other criminal and delinquency cases must be approved by the D.A. Further, as a future department head and stakeholder, the author has a vested interest in a workable, time and cost efficient UFC program.

Among the disadvantages of this arrangement is that the author inevitably has biases concerning what type of UFC components would be best for him and his future department. The author has made every effort to purge such biases from his recommendations, primarily by basing them on a broad collaborative approach employing the input of many local UFC stakeholders. Further, the recommendations will speak for themselves. Plumas County Superior Court will be free to choose from and modify the recommendations at its pleasure, further ensuring the identification and deletion of bias-driven work product.

Over the last three months a great many research works on the subject of UFCs have been gathered, read, processed, and organized by the author. There have been over a hundred emails and phone conversations with the authors of some of these works, and with others directly involved in working UFCs across the United States . The author has met with over thirty stakeholders of any future Plumas County UFC and conducted three large meetings and several small ones, after each of which the outline that ultimately led to this draft was modified. In September, a team of local stakeholders attended a two-day UFC Symposium in San Jose . The team (Judge Garrett Olney, Tom Frady, Bill Abramson, Esq., Roger Diefendorf, Marsha Nakawatase, the author) attended a series of UFC planning and informational seminars and workshops, and met to discuss the parameters of a Plumas County UFC. What follows is the draft product of these efforts thus far.

WHAT IS A “UNIFIED FAMILY COURT?”

Many legal researchers have attempted to define UFCs and establish whether there is a need for them nationwide. The author has developed a fairly extensive library of such work from a variety of sources, which will be available in binder form to help future development of any Plumas County UFC. One characteristic that UFCs all seem to share is their flexibility to respond to changing needs, and their county/jurisdiction-specific attributes. “To suggest that there is a standard definition of a unified family court would be unfair to the many states and court jurisdictions that have struggled with and ultimately developed a unified family court system over the last four decades. No unified family court mirrors another.” (Unified Family Courts: A Discussion Paper Jeffrey A. Kuhn, Esq. Center for Families, Children and the Courts 410-837-5750, p. 1).

Still, there are specific characteristics found in most UFCs. One of the better discussions of these can be found in Unified Family Court: A California Proposal Revisited, written by the Hon. Donna M. Petre to describe Yolo County ’s efforts to create a UFC in 1999:

The efficacy of the traditional court structure, which routinely assigns a family’s divorce case to the family law judge while a juvenile judge presides over their teenager’s delinquency case, continues to be questioned by legal scholars. A parent who seeks a civil domestic violence restraining order does not appear in front of the juvenile court judge who hears his or her child’s dependency case. Grandparents who file a guardianship petition will appear in a probate court, even though the family law judge has significant information about the parents’ drug and violence issues garnered during their divorce proceeding. The traditional court’s legacy for these families is conflicting orders, multiple appearances, uncoordinated treatment plans, unnecessary delays, repeated interviews with the children, lopsided resources, and incomplete information, all of which impede informed decision making.

In response to these multiple proceedings and the multilayered problems of families in crisis, a national trend is to restructure traditional family, probate, juvenile, and, in some courts, even the criminal jurisdictions to create unified family courts. The central principle of a unified family court is that a single, highly trained and committed judge hears the family’s multiple cases under a comprehensive jurisdiction. A significant corollary to the unified family court is that a multidisciplinary team of therapeutic and dispute resolution professionals makes recommendations to the judge and provides therapeutic support to the family throughout all proceedings.

PLUMAS COUNTY ’S IDENTIFIED NEEDS/GOALS:

Many of the problems driving the need for UFCs statewide do not exist in Plumas County . Most people in California live in large-population counties with multiple judicial districts and sometimes hundreds of judges. As one Los Angeles County judge observed at the UFC Symposium: “I think we’ve got about 430 judges, though there’s no real way to tell precisely at any given time.” Judges in such counties often must specialize, hearing only one or two types of cases. Choosing among such jurists to become UFC, multi-jurisdiction, one judge-one family judges can create radical improvements in coordinated court services to families.

On the other hand there is Plumas County , with two sitting judges servicing one countywide judicial district and hearing the entire case load, including civil, criminal, juvenile, traffic, and family cases. Some UFC researchers argue that counties with one or two judges are already “de facto” Unified Family Courts. (e.g. Creating Family Friendly Courts by Victor Flango c. 2000 American Bar Association, p. 4).

However, while Plumas County ’s judges do have a family by family depth of knowledge that larger jurisdictions do not have, such knowledge is often anecdotal and criminal law driven. Also, specific incidents involving children can be forgotten after a few years, though the children, and their families’ court-related problems, are around for decades.

Discussions with stakeholders and court users in Plumas County have resulted in a consensus that our court system could significantly improve the way it addresses the needs of children and their families. It would seem important to keep in mind the unique rural mountain-towns definition of Plumas County as we cull through UFC components developed elsewhere. Following are the needs, goals, and concerns most often expressed by the subjects of this project, each of which should be addressed among the recommended Plumas County UFC components below.

Keep it simple. Any over-ambitious complete overhauling of the existing court system will be viewed skeptically. Plumas County ’s courts work relatively well with families; therefore, an entire revision of the system would appear unnecessary, undesirable, and an inefficient use of limited available resources.

Any UFC driven changes must not increase work load/time commitment of existing, often-overworked agency employees and department heads. Each recommendation is designed with the goal of a net increase in time efficiency.

Improved delivery of services. Approximately 30 agencies, both public and private, provide services on some level for children and families in Plumas County . Many believe that some of these services are being underused, while others are frequently overlapping. The court, with a UFC, is one of the best places to coordinate these services, at least with respect to families with multiple case filings, which are likely to be the families most in need of the array of services available.

Avoidance of conflicting stay-away orders. Several people mentioned this problem in Plumas County . Local attorney and Family Court Services mediator Alice King gave the following example: Dad gets drunk and attacks Mom who calls the sheriff. As a result a criminal case is filed, and the case is in front of Judge Kaufman. Meanwhile Mom gets help in filing for a restraining order under the Domestic Violence Act, which goes before Judge Olney. The end result in such cases often ends up with conflicting restraining orders. It seems like it would be very easy to get these two cases in front of the same judge.

Funding a full-time case manager/coordinator. In line with number 3 above, it would seem that any significant systemic change will require a full-time case manager/coordinator to bring it all together. Funding for this may be difficult at this time when many are declaring a statewide fiscal crisis.

Independent components. Wherever possible, costly components should be separated from less costly ones to allow courts the option of gradual change, prioritizing and implementing from a list of possibilities.

PROPOSED PLUMAS COUNTY UFC COMPONENTS:

Any UFC for Plumas County should be developed closely with both the Family Court Services director(s) and the Children’s Systems of Care program run by Plumas County Mental Health Services. The scope of services that Family Court Services is intended to provide significantly overlaps the services provided by any effective UFC. Therefore, Plumas County ’s new Family Court Services directors Roger Diefendorf and Marsha Nakawatase should be engaged to work closely with the development of a UFC, as they were when they both generously agreed to attend the UFC Symposium in September.

Similarly, the components of Children’s Systems of Care, which has been up and running successfully for over two years, headed by Pat Leslie, are significantly similar to the multi-agency court case management style envisioned by UFC advocates.

Following are the five component areas that the author recommends be developed to create a UFC system in Plumas County . They are independent of each other. Therefore, if funding and motivation is available, they may all be adopted; if not, the court can pick and choose among them:

I. A Pilot Project to case manage 5 high intensity families. Existing courts with UFCs almost invariably have a multidisciplinary team of therapeutic and dispute resolution professionals who come together regularly to discuss the array of issues surrounding included families’ multiple problems, then make recommendations to the UFC judge (who then makes well-informed orders) and provide therapeutic support to the families throughout the proceedings. The author recommends that Plumas County do this through a pilot project that addresses five families selected through a nomination process.

a. The UFC Team: Team members could include the following. It should include at least those highlighted.

1. The UFC judge

2. The Case Manager/Coordinator

3. Probation

4. Family Court Services

5. District Attorney’s Office

6. Public Defender

7. CASAs

8. Social Services (probably Child Protective Services)

9. School District

10. Alcohol & Drug

11. Mental Health (possibly someone with Children’s System of Care)

12. Health Services

13. Plumas Rural Services

14. Sheriff’s Office

15. Victim/Witness advocates

16. Local churches (some UFCs use church meeting rooms for court ordered supervised visits).

b. Case Management Meetings: The most time efficient case management meeting schedule would appear to be contiguous with Drug Court meetings, since it is probable that many of the same players/families will already be scheduled to meet at that time.

c. Included Families Criteria:

i. The family must be involved in multiple Plumas County court filings.

ii. Specific reasons for referral include:

1. Complex dependency cases involving cross-over multiple filings (this is Butte County ’s main source of UFC cases);

2. Criminal cases involving children and cross-over multiple filings (this is Deschutes County Oregon’s main source of UFC cases);

3. Previous termination of parental rights;

4. Failure of the family to address court-ordered evaluations or treatment;

5. Chronic family mental or physical health problems;

6. Multiple filings for parenting plan modifications;

7. Allegations of sexual or physical abuse, or neglect, of children;

8. Multiple actions in the past involving sexual or physical assault of a family member;

9. Juvenile delinquency in families with a history of multiple case filings;

10. Parties who are pro per or in circumstances that would benefit by UFC case management and tracking;

11. Other similar bases as recognized by the UFC judge.

d. Domestic Violence Protocol: A good UFC has as an integral component a protocol for dealing with domestic violence cases/issues that arise amongst the included families. Sample protocols will be attached to this proposal as an Addendum. Any ultimate protocol should be generated carefully, around a table that includes the Management Team, the D.A., the Sheriff’s Office, and Victim/Witness advocates.

e. Nomination Procedure:

i. Nominations may come from any source. The nomination procedure and form will be specifically made known to those listed in a. above. Sample referral forms will be attached to this report as an Addendum.

ii. Upon receipt of the nomination, the Case Manager will conduct a search for any active cases involving any members of the family, gathering all case files and preparing a list of cases and their current status. The Case Manager then distributes the case summary to the team.

iii. The team, together with the UFC judge, then reviews and evaluates cases and families to decide which families will be accepted for the UFC.

iv. Those families accepted by the team are then notified to appear, if they wish to participate in the UFC, at the next scheduled court date amongst the cases involving that family already before the court, or at the next UFC meeting date, whichever comes first.

v. UFC participation is voluntary. If any family member with an open case objects or refuses to sign the confidentiality waivers, then the family is ineligible for UFC participation.

vi. Those families rejected by the team are referred to the local service provider that best corresponds to the need for which the family was referred to the UFC team in the first place.

f. “Family” identification/definition: “How does one define a ‘family’? This is both a practical and philosophical question. All of us have encountered cases where a stepparent or even a nonrelative can have a more nurturing relationship with a child than the biological parents. Additionally, we encounter situations where one woman has several children, each fathered by a different man, some of whom may be involved with the children and others not. From our experience, it is usually clear who forms the core of the family unit. These are the persons whose consent and authorization we seek and the persons to whom services are provided.” (One Judge-One Family: Butte County’s Unified Family Court Hon. Steven J. Howell Journal of the Center for Children and the Courts 1999, p. 175.).

The author recommends that “family” be defined around children. Taking each child identified through the nomination process, the Case Manager lists the make-up the household(s) (there can be several with multiple custody children) of the children. Each household member is then deemed a member of the family for UFC purposes.

g. Family Case Identification: It is anticipated that the computer case management system used by Plumas County in 2003 and beyond will include the ability to access pending and past cases of all types indexed by name. Therefore, once a family unit is identified, a list of pending cases for each member of that unit can be easily generated by the Case Manager, and all files on the over-all list can be placed on the UFC calendar (see also component IV. below).

h. Confidentiality:

i. Waiver Forms: In order to participate, each family member must sign a broad release of information form, which addresses the confidentiality issues that often bar the exchange of information between and among various service providers and case management team members. Plumas County Children’s Systems of Care uses such a waiver form, drafted by our local County Counsel . Examples of this and other waiver forms will be attached to this report as an Addendum.

ii. Welfare & Institutions Code Sec. 345, 346: Dependency and delinquency court proceedings are confidential and shall exclude members of the public “unless requested by a parent or guardian and consented to or requested by the minor….” Therefore, minors and their parents together have the power to waive the exclusion of management team members from juvenile court proceedings. Further, “[t]he judge…may nevertheless admit such persons as he deems to have a direct and legitimate interest in the particular case or the work of the court,” such as members of the case management team.

iii. Welfare & Institutions Code Sec. 827: The sharing of information and records is further authorized for all anticipated UFC management team members, since “a [juvenile] case file may be inspected…by the following:”

1. 827(a)(1)(F): The superintendent or designee of the school district where the minor is enrolled or attending school.

2. 827(a)(1)(J): Members of children’s multidisciplinary teams, persons or agencies providing treatment or supervision of the minor.

3. See 827 et seq. for other possibly applicable confidentiality exceptions.

i. Outcomes Assessment:

i. Some of the best working UFCs in California have little or no outcome assessment procedure. This is because there is almost no way to compare the results of UFC case management with anything else. Butte County ’s H.O.P.E. court (in this author’s opinion one of the best UFCs in California , after which some of the above has been modeled) has serviced 42 families in the five years it has existed, with a protocol of servicing only 15 nomination-based families at a time. Of the 42 families, the H.O.P.E. court has deemed 16 “successful,” 12 “unsuccessful,” 4 “unknown,” and 10 still pending. Is this a successful outcome? Compared to what? Were the cases involving these families, even the “unsuccessful” ones, at least managed better and more efficiently than if they had not participated in the UFC?

ii. One Outcome Assessment tool that might be considered is to track a series of characteristics involving both UFC accepted and rejected families and their cases (number of court appearances, personnel hours expended, family unification, children’s school performance and attendance, etc.) to compare the “success” rate regarding these characteristics between UFC and non-UFC family cases. Among the drawbacks of this approach are the time drains associated with keeping such statistics, including functional time sheets among the participants.

iii. Another approach would be to survey participating families, most of the adults of whom will have been intimately familiar with the court system for many years, regarding their experience with the UFC process compared to their past court experiences.

iv. The author believes that given the limited size of Plumas County ’s court system, the court will know, after a year of the pilot, whether the case management component of the UFC is preferable to the court’s prior system.

j. Funding a Case Manager: See V. A case manager with the dual function of a juvenile protection/delinquency prevention investigator, below.

II. A new database system to avoid conflicting stay-away orders. This component should be relatively simple to create. It is believed that Plumas County ’s computer case management system includes/will include the ability to contain a Restraining Order master list that is automatically augmented each time a restraining order is issued. This list can then be indexed by name so that every time a restraining order is considered by a court, the master list can be easily consulted by the court clerk to see if the party(ies) before the court are the subject of any existing orders. If this procedure is followed, conflicting orders should never occur.

III. A Resource Guide to help courts coordinate disparate services for families throughout Plumas County. Improved delivery of services is a key component to any successful UFC, where courts increase their responsibility to connect available community services, both public and private, to the families and children who find themselves before the court. To do this, the court must be aware of the full repertoire of family services available. Therefore, a comprehensive Resource Guide should be generated, maintained and available on the judge’s bench.

To this end, as part of this project, the author is creating a Resource Guide for family and child services based on contact with a variety of Plumas County agencies, both public and private, indexed by the services each agency offers. It is hoped that this guide will be useful to the courts in their effort to improve the delivery of services. The guide will also be formatted for easy expansion and regular updates.

Currently, the list of guide participants is as follows:

1. Alliance for Workforce Development, Inc.

2. Almanor Basin Community Resource Center ( ABC Center )

3. Community Assistance Network (C.A.N.)

4. Employment Development Department (EDD)

5. Environmental Alternatives Foster Family Agency

6. Family Court Services

7. Feather River College – CalWORKS Office

8. Mountain Circle Family Services

9. Plumas County Alcohol and Drug Program

10. Plumas County Arts Commission

11. Plumas County Board of Education

12. Plumas County Community Development Com. & Housing Authority

a. Housing Rehabilitation, Community Development

b. Public Housing, Energy Programs

13. Plumas County Department of Social Services

a. Adult Protective Services

b. Child Protective Services

c. Self-Sufficiency Division

14. Plumas County District Attorney’s Office

15. Plumas County Library

16. Plumas County Literacy Program

17. Plumas County Mental Health Services

a. Overview

b. Children’s System of Care

c. Drop-In Center

d. Sierra House Board and Care

e. Special School Programs

18. Plumas County Probation Department

a. Adult

b. Juvenile

19. Plumas County Public Health Services Agency

a. Clinic Services

b. Family Resource Guide

c. HIV Prevention

d. Plumas Children’s Network

e. SAFE KIDS

f. Tobacco Use Reduction Program (TURP)

g. California Children’s Services/Child Health Disability Prevention California Children’s Services/Child Health Disability Prevention

20. Plumas County Veterans Service Office

21. Plumas County Victim/Witness Assistance Program

22. Plumas Crisis Intervention & Resource Center (PCIRC)

a. Family Development Workshops

b. Resource Center and Emergency Services

c. SAFE - Sexual Assault: Freedom and Education

23. Plumas Rural Services

a. Program Services

b. ALIVE Program

c. Child Care Resources and Referral

d. Domestic Violence Services

e. Family Empowerment Center

f. Family Focus Network

g. Women, Infants and Children (WIC)

24. Portola Healthy Start

25. Roundhouse Coucil

26. Salvation Army

IV. A system for family (household) indexing and case tracking. In addition to the Family Case Identification procedure described in I.f. above, it is recommended that Plumas County create a Family Case Index. This component would require an initial substantial investment in data input time, after which it would be maintained automatically by Plumas County’s computer case management system.

a. First, family units involved in multiple court proceedings would be identified through informal court user inquiry, and a list/index would be begun. Identifying all such families would probably be impossible, but a far higher percentage of Plumas County court user families can be identified this way than would be possible in larger counties. Any initial database corpus will be better and more useful than none at all.

b. Once the families have been identified, the members, and their cases, can be clustered around an identifying “family case number.”

c. Thereafter, each time a person who has a family case number is involved in a new case, Plumas County’s computer case management system automatically adds the new case to the list under the family case number.

d. Once this system is generated, though initially incomplete, it will create a pending and historical court case database, to which various types of information can be added as resources and desire allow. At the very least, the information associated with a family case number can be printed out and included in each file that includes such a number, informing the judge of family related cases and histories even in cases not involved in a more extensive UFC program.

V. A case manager with the dual function of a juvenile protection/delinquency prevention investigator. Whether or not a UFC case management system such as that described in I. above is created for Plumas County, the author recommends that a Family Case Officer (this is a working title, subject to change) be hired by Plumas County.

a. The potential role(s) of this position are as follows:

i. UFC case management;

ii. Home investigation of UFC families;

iii. UFC services coordinator;

iv. Criminal/delinquency investigator to augment existing investigators in the District Attorney’s Office with the special knowledge gained through UFC work;

v. Assist Child Protective Services in situations where a trained investigator with a badge, investigation skills, and warrant powers/training would be useful;

vi. Truancy abatement; through home visits to truants, whether in or out of the UFC system;

vii. Coordinate collaboration between agencies (D.A.’s Office, CPS, Sheriff’s Office, Probation, Victim/Witness, etc.) in child-involved cases, including:

1. Juvenile Delinquency cases;

2. Child victim cases;

3. Child witness cases;

4. Other cases that require child participation in the court system.

viii. The investigative portion of this position would be modeled after the Elder Abuse Investigative Assistant position currently held by Don Robinson in the Plumas County District Attorney’s Office.

ix. The author believes that the tremendous success of this elder abuse collaboration on behalf of Plumas County’s senior citizens should be duplicated on behalf of Plumas County’s at-risk children, an equally if not more vulnerable segment of our community.

b. Funding sources that may be possible for this position include:

i. Shared funding between Plumas and Sierra counties. The possibility of collaboration between our two counties in funding additional personnel needed for a UFC has been tentatively discussed with Sierra County’s Judge William Pangman, who seems warm to the idea, particularly given our counties’ traditional, geographic, and future close relationships.

ii. Partial funding from the Administrative Office of the Courts who is the source of this planning grant, future mentor grants, and the push to create UFCs statewide. Such funding might possibly come from the Family Court Services budget.

iii. Partial funding from the Plumas County District Attorney’s Office, such as that being provided for the Elder Abuse Investigative Assistant position now.

iv. Partial funding from the Plumas County Department of Social Services, such as that being provided through Adult Protective Services for the Elder Abuse Investigative Assistant position now (this has been very tentatively discussed with Social Services Director Elliot Smart).

v. Partial funding from the School District for the Truancy Abatement portion of the position, which, theoretically, would result in some reimbursement to the schools for any increased attendance (this has been very tentatively discussed with Superintendent of Schools Dennis Williams).