State panel hires 2 experts to guide child welfare reforms

The state blue ribbon committee created to spearhead improvements to Clark County child welfare and the court system has added two additional experts to guide its work before the 2015 Legislature begins.

The state has found money to bring on board national expert Sophia Gatowski to help shape the committee’s recommendations. Consultant Stephen Rubin, a retired Arizona judge, also has been invited to work with the committee.

“This is a step, I believe, in the right direction,” Nevada Supreme Court Justice Nancy Saitta said Tuesday during the committee’s second meeting in Las Vegas.

The committee, appointed by Saitta, outlined some of its preliminary objectives, which include having one family work with the same judge to provide consistency as the case is resolved. The panel also wants more professional development for Family Services workers in following policy and procedure and suggested a public campaign informing the community about what foster care is and seeking foster parent volunteers.

The committee will meet a third time at 1 p.m. on Jan. 15, before the Legislature convenes Feb. 4.

Rubin said Gatowski will produce a report for the committee, which she will start writing after the January meeting. The retired judge will assist her in writing the report, which could go to the Legislature and might be made public.

The committee heard several presentations on requested reforms from Brigid Duffy, chief deputy district attorney for the Clark County district attorney’s juvenile division, Clark County Family Court Judge Frank Sullivan and Denise Tanata Ashby, executive director for the Children’s Advocacy Alliance. They all agreed on the recommendation to have one family, one judge.

Clark County Family Court would need more judges for that to happen, they all said.

However, Duffy also felt strongly about another recommendation for the committee to address the issue of having court-appointed guardians for every child in they system. That’s required under the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and by state statute.

Under state statute, after a petition is filed that a child is in need of protection, the court should appoint a guardian ad litem for the child.

“Yet we don’t do it in our courtrooms,” she said.

A court-appointed guardian ad litem represents the best interest of the child while considering what the child wants, Duffy said. Attorneys in the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada’s Children’s Attorneys Project represent the child’s desires and their legal interests.

“Right now there are more kids’ attorneys than guardians ad litem representing our kids, which is a great thing,” she said after the meeting. But “we need both.”

Duffy said she’s heard various reasons as to why not every child has a guardian ad litem, but the biggest one has been the lack of resources.

There are also the court-appointed special advocates, or CASA volunteers, who ensure that the best interest of every abused and neglected child is represented in court, that every child is placed in a safe home and that every child achieves permanency in a timely manner, according to Clark County’s CASA program.

But less than one-third of children who need them have a CASA advocate, Duffy said.

Clark County has about 3,000 children in the child welfare system at any given time and about 41 percent of those children are in the foster care.

Rubin has looked at child removal data from the Clark County Department of Family Services.

“They don’t support the theory that (Family Services) is removing too many children,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t too many children in foster care and that all removals are good removals.”

In 2013, over 70 percent of children who were removed were reunified with their families in less than 12 months, he said. It could be possible that in some of those cases, children could have remained at home if the agency had provided the necessary services.

But the judges also play a role in that.

“Were there reasonable efforts made to prevent removal? he asked. “Are the judges making that kind of inquiry in every case? There certainly are cases where the agency fails to make reasonable decisions to prevent removal.”

Contact Yesenia Amaro at yamaro@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0440. Find her on Twitter: @YeseniaAmaro.