out-reach and engagement strategies, including special accommodations with any difficult-to-reach family members, to increase family engagement and participation in the service process. ● Interveners build a trust-based working relationship with the child, family and/or others to support ongoing assessment, understanding, and service decisions. ● Interveners rely on a mutually beneficial
partnership
1b. ENAGEMENT - ROLE & VOICE: Degree to which family members with whom the child is living and/or will be reunited, are active ongoing participants (e.g., having a significant role, voice, influence) in decisions made about child/family change strategies, services, and results. [Role and voice in recent meetings]
with the child, family, and/others that is sustaining their interest in and commitment to a change process.
2. TEAMWORK: TEAM FORMATION: Degree to which: (1) The people who provide support and services for this child and family form a working team to meet, talk, and plan together; and (2) The team has the skills, family knowledge, and abilities necessary to organize effective services for a child and family of this complexity and cultural
background. ● TEAM FUNCTIONING: Degree to which (1) Team members collectively function as a unified team in planning for safety and reducing risk; and (2) Actions of the family team reflect effective teamwork and collaborative problem solving
3. ASSESSMENT & UNDERSTANDING: Degree to which: ● There is a
that benefited the child and family.
shared, big picture understanding of the child and family’s strengths, protective capacities, hopes, needs, safety risks, and underlying issues that must change for the child to live safely and
●
family achieve safety, permanency, and well-being (as defined in stated conditions for safe case closure). ● There is ongoing situational awareness
4. CRITICAL DISCERNMENT: Degree to which the decision agent (i.e., individual worker or team) used critical discernment in strategic decisions (e.g., substantiation, diversion, removal, return, parent replacement, safe case closure) in the life of the case as evidence by: ● 1) EVIDENCE: Assembling a fact base and interpreting accurate,
sufficient, relevant meanings to inform the strategic decision? ● 2) DECISION: Applying relevant criteria to focus and guide selection of the most appropriate near-term safety protections and most beneficial long-term outcome path for the child and family with respect to safety, risk, well-being, and permanency? ● 3) ERROR AVOIDANCE:
Detecting and avoiding possible sources or error in fact or reasoning that could yield false positive and/or false negative errors at strategic decision points?
of the child and family being maintained throughout the child and family change process.
5. PLANNING: Degree to which a well-reasoned, strategy planning process
6. COURT INVOLVEMENT: Degree to which: ● The family participates in the court process. ● Petitions and motions are filed in a timely manner with hearings conducted on schedule. ● The parent and child are receiving adequate legal representation. ● The judge is holding all parties accountable for following orders. ● The judge achieved a reasonable balance of flexibility and enforcing actions to permanency of children? ● Court orders are clear to all, with parties receiving copies in a timely manner.
was used for:
A. SAFETY by recognizing, controlling and managing threats of harm while building and sustaining protective capacities of the parents in the home and family situation? B.
PERMANENCY by 1) Reunifying the child and parent, replacing the entering parent with another, or achieving independence for an older youth; and 2) Supporting and evaluating the stability and success of the child and family in a potentially permanent home to ensure family sustainability as a condition for safe case closure.
7. RESOURCES: Degree to which: ● Supports, services, and resources (both formal and informal) necessary to implement change strategies are available when needed for/by the child and family. ● Any flexible supports and unique service arrangements (both formal and informal) necessary to meet individual needs in the child’s plans are available for use by the child and family on a timely, adequate, and convenient local basis. ● Any unit-based and placement-based resources necessary to meet goals in the child’s plans are available for use by the child and family on a timely and adequate basis.
8. INTERVENTION ADEQUACY: Degree to which: ● Change-related interventions, actions, and resources being provided to the child and family have sufficient power (precision, intensity, duration, fidelity, and consistency) to produce results necessary to achieve and maintain desired functional and supportive life goals and permanency outcomes set for this child and family.
9. OVERALL PRACTICE PERFORMANCE: ● Based on the review findings determined for the Service Reviews above, how well is the service system functioning for this child now?
APPENDIX C
Fresno County Policies and Procedures
“The Visitation Ladder”
• Supervised visits can be “from one hour to several hours long” and should generally be required less than three months before progressing to unsupervised visits. Caseworkers are required to supervise at least one visit a month so that they can observe the relationship between the parent and child and record in case notes. If supervised visits continue past three months, the caseworker is to seek supervisor consultation. Together they are to
“review the parents’ progress on their reunification case plan. If parents’ are actively participating in services and attending visits regularly, the social worker will consider moving to unsupervised visits.”
• When a family moves to unsupervised visits, the caseworker is to consider “the child’s school schedule, the parents’ work schedule, the parents family reunification services schedule and the resource family’s schedule, when arranging the visit schedule.” No suggested time frame is given for unsupervised visits, families may be moved from unsupervised to liberal visits after supervisory consultation. Again, together they are to
“review the parents’ progress on their reunification case. If parents’ are actively
participating in services and attending unsupervised visits regularly, the social worker will consider moving to liberal visits.”
• “Liberal visits are unsupervised, can be overnight, and last up to 14 days.” They “should not go on for an extended period. Generally after 30-60 days…families can begin an extended visit.” Again, movement from liberal to extended visits is to be preceded by a supervisory consultation. As with other visit decisions, the caseworker “will consider moving to extended visits” if “parents are actively participating in services and the family has done well during the liberal visits.”
• An extended visit becomes “a placement after sixty (60) consecutive days.”
APPENDIX D