€¦ · Web viewIs it a truancy problem that is really driving that school to prison pipeline? ... but at the end of my slides there is a reference to the responder manual

NCJFCJ & NCMHJJ Webinar Series, Webinar #4: Tools for School-Based Diversion Success | May 19, 2016

Jacqui: Hello everyone and welcome to the webinar on Tools for School-Based Diversion Success. Just a couple of pieces of housekeeping before we get started, first there should be a file transfer tab that popped up on your screen for you and there is a handout in there and also the slides for the webinar are available for you to download if you'd like to have the slides during the webinar. We will also be recording this webinar and posting the recording to the link you see on that slide and we will post the slides up there as well. If you don't download them right now but you want them later you can access them at that link. We will be having time for questions and answers at the end of this webinar after our presenters talk to you about great information that they have for you today.

[00:01:00]You can use the chat function that you see on the right side of your screen to ask questions. Just type your questions in the chat box and we will gather those questions throughout the webinar and have a chance to ask them of our presenters before our time together is over. If you are having any kind of technical challenges with the webinar today please feel free also to use that chat box and let us know what you're struggling with and we will try to help you out with it so you can have fully complete access to our webinar. We are providing you this information today through the School Justice Partnership National Resource Center. That resource center is supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

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It's led by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and we here are from the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice and serve as a core partner in that resource center along with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Association of State Boards of Education and The National Child Traumatic Stress Network. This webinar today is the fourth in what has been a four-part series on developing and implementing effective school-based diversion programs that identify and address behavioral health needs for young people. We call that a responder model and in the first webinar we give you an overview of what those models in Connecticut and Summit County Ohio look like.

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In the second webinar we gave you some information about strategies to engage the stakeholders who are absolutely critical to getting any kind of responder program up and running, law enforcement schools, families and behavioral health providers. In our third webinar we give you some concrete information about how to actually identify kids who might be having behavioral health needs in school and some processes for connecting those kids to services and also the role of trauma and how trauma can impact destructive behavior in schools and maybe a behavioral health need that you're seeing amongst your kids. Today we're really focused on providing you some very concrete tools and resources to help you in thinking through how you might get a responder program up and running in your jurisdiction.

Today we're hoping that we can kind of give you the fuel that you can blast off like the rocket ship here on this slide. We hope we've kind of planted an idea with you of something that you might want to do in your locality and we're really hoping to give you some strategies for success that could really catapult you on your way to developing a responder model in your jurisdiction. You're going to hear about some very concrete tools that you could use about how to select a school, how to do a


needs assessment, what kind of training and data you will use in order to make a responder program work in your locality. How memorandum of agreement can help.

[00:04:00]Things like a graduated response grid, some very concrete steps to get you started, a flow chart and some tools of family engagement are all going to be covered during our webinar today. We will get right to the content for you today and I want to let you know again to be sure to put your questions in the chat box if you have them along the way and we'll hope to get to as many of them at the end as we can. We're going to start today with Dr. Jeana Bracey. Dr. Bracey has a Ph. D. in Clinical Community Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She currently is the director of School and Community Initiative at the Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut. She's also the coordinator for Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative, where she's going to be talking about today and she's the project director for the Connecticut network of care transformation. Jeana

Jeana:[00:05:00]

Thank you Jacqui and good afternoon everyone. I'm very happy to be back with you again and share some additional information and particularly the resources we've developed through the Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative or SPDI and I am going to do this primarily by walking through a free tool kit that we've developed. We'll just jump in and get started. As a brief overview, here's what I'll be presenting. I'm not going to go into great detail of the model itself. I'd refer you back to the first webinar in the series or to the resources provided at the end where you can find additional details about that but I will be talking about the tool kit that Jacqui mentioned and some of the core components of the general Arrest Diversion Model as well as some specific resources to share.

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The School-Based Diversion Initiative or SBDI as we refer to it is really a school level initiative to promote positive outcomes for youth at risk of arrest due to emotional or behavioral health challenges and we do this by four primary efforts. One is sort of general arrest reduction efforts and secondly, really thinking about linking to community based services and supports as well as professional development for school staff and also discipline policy consultation for the school or the district. SBDI model was initially developed in two thousand and nine with funding from the MacArthur Foundation Models for Change Mental Health Juvenile Justice Action Network and currently are fully state funded as part of the governor's Second Chance Act with additional state funding from our judicial branch, our Department of Children and Families or Department of Mental health and addiction services and the state Department of Education.

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As Jacqui mentioned, I'm with the Child Health and Development Institute and we serve as the coordinating center and co-developers of this model. To talk about our goals of this model of the SBDI initiative, I would really first to reduce the number of discretionary arrest in schools as well as reducing expulsions and out-of school suspensions. We want to build knowledge and skills among teachers, school staff, resource officers; anyone who related to the discipline policy process or serving children in the school, to recognize and manage behavior health crises and to access needed community resources and finally we're really interested in linking youth at risk of arrest to appropriate school community based services and support.


We frame this model on a three tiered approach and I'll focus today just on the primary level of intervention, things that all schools or communities can implement. That's really sort of our universal level or bottom level. As we move up to tear two we're just integrating additional supports and consultation around particular areas of the model and our third or sort of highest intensive level of SBDI model is really getting the full professional development series, the consultation, the discipline policy review and all of the core components of the model. Again, today my focus is really on the tool kit and this is the product that's available free of charge. It can be downloaded on our website. We also have hard copies available if people are interested and we really realize the need to reach more schools more quickly.

[00:08:00] When this started in two thousand and nine we were working with three schools and two communities here in Connecticut and while we were able to sort of quickly increase the model, to where we served over twenty one schools in ten districts, we still found a need to be able to get this information out more broadly and also to attract those schools who aren't necessarily the highest needs schools in our state or in our community but that need to put in some basic supports or want to start the framework for a school based diversion model. Here we have our tool kit and we think about, look at some of the contents of the tool kit. It really includes a self-assessment guide so it gives you information about how to determine yourself whether this type of model will be useful for you. It gives you an immediate action steps that you can use to implement right away and I'll give you those at the end.

[00:09:00]There is also support for data informed decision-making, how to make referrals and coordinate services and a host of appendences that give you some concrete tools. Again, I'll be sharing some of those today and here's the few steps to just get you started with implementing a school based diversion model and the first is school selection. How do you choose the schools that you would be interested in working with and often we start with needs. Which schools have the highest arrest or school discipline rates or which ones have the lowest service referrals? All of those are very important especially when dealing with limited resources and you want to really get the best thing for your buck and it's in sort of addressing the schools that have the highest need but we also must consider interest. Are you willing and interested in changing.

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Is there buying at all levels in the school or in the district and we know that that's a very important indicator as well and capacity is our third indicator and that refers to time. Do you have the time professional development days or staff meeting time to be able to have the professional development that's needed to support this model? Do you have the availability to collect and share data to track how the intervention is going and are you able to change policies and practices sort of at all levels? Those are some things we really need to know as we're getting started and that I would courage you all to think about as you're considering this type of model, is how do they stack up in terms of interest needs and capacity?

Once you've identified those schools the next step that we start with is really a needs assessment survey as well as a focus group process. It's really more of a


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comprehensive process to determine what needs the schools have and again it's grounded by the core components of our model. How do they relate to the need for community based resources the professional development and the consultation? Back to the needs assessment, we have a survey that takes just about five minutes to complete. We provide it online or in paper copy, it's the school's choice whichever they feel they'll get the best return rate and the goal here is really to determine how the school identifies youth with juvenile justice behavioral health needs and how those youth are referred for services.

The responses are aggregated and also supplemented with focus group or interview data that we collect to further determine what the needs and strengths are of each particular school. Here's a quick screen shot of what the survey looks like. It is included in your file transfer that Jacqui mentions so I would encourage you to download that and to adapt it for your use as needed. A couple of sample items that are on here, one would be students in the school who have mental health needs are likely to be referred to the juvenile justice system. We want to know if that's mostly true are or folks disagree with that statement or if they are unsure.

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A second one item would be our school has clear policies guidelines about mental health emergencies or crises? Another item would be the school collaborates well with law enforcement or SROs when it comes to students with mental health needs and SROs refers to first to School Resource Officers that maybe in the schools. That again gives you a sense of, what are the competencies around mental health juvenile justice and in terms of the content as well, the processes that are happening in the school and then at the end we give our staff a chance to rank order our professional development topic so that they can determine which best fit their needs for at this time. How do they prioritize the training?

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Once the training needs are identified, a professional development series is developed in sort of customized, semi customized for that particular school. The goal here is to enhance the knowledge, attitudes and skills among school staff to support arrest diversion principles and practices and there's a list of our core modules here. Some are done in full staff trainings, others are done and more of a work group format that allows for skill building, processing and quality improvement processes and we've also built an eLearning collaborative approach to expand and sustain training opportunities and really build a statewide network of current and alumni schools through interactive online technology as well.

Now I'm going to move to another component of this work and to really build on the system level strategies for supporting this as a school level intervention, we have had the work in an expanded school mental health framework and you can read more about that in this report given our time today. The general idea is to really have schools serve as a hub for integrating care and services to better just the students' needs and we really help build the school's capacity to do this through the referral and service coordination, discipline policy revisions and graduated response consultation and training and professional development. We are going to talk more now about the referral and service coordination component.


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Again, the goal here is to reduce the burden placed on schools to address mental health concerns. We know that schools are being asked to do more and more with less and less resources often and that includes responding to more intense needs or more -- A higher level of need that has been seen previously perhaps in the student population. How are schools being equipped to address those needs and if they don't have these resources internally, how can they better meet those needs by linking up with the community based services that are available? This is just a sample of what Connecticut has to offer in terms of community coalition building with local resources. Your rate may be similar or very different and I'll talk about one of these in particular, the Emergency Mobile Psychiatric Services EMPS.

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EMPS in Connecticut serve as our responder in this model. This is a statewide mobile crisis service that will respond to any two children in any situation in any setting. It will come to school, come to your home, anywhere in the community where a behavioral health crisis is happening and their goal is to really do immediate crisis stabilization. They do a brief assessment, brief treat treatment and also will link to ongoing care. They will follow the child up to forty five days and serve them for forty five days while they're linking to other services as needed. This is state funded so it's available free to all Connecticut children and it is available everywhere, every community in our state simply by dialing two one one you can get access to this service and pretty quick rapid response to behavioral health crises.

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Our mobility rate is over ninety percent on average for the state so any time you call you're more than ninety percent likely to get someone come out to you in person and most likely within forty five minutes or less and oftentimes it's within thirty minutes or less. Again in Connecticut we use EMPS as our hour of onsite crisis responder for the schools but you may also use in school crisis intervention team or other similar community based team that's available to you. We hope that we’ll clarify the relationship between the school and the EMPS provider through a memorandum of agreement and we've consistently used this through the SBDI model where we sort added this and make it fit with the particular school and the particular provider but it really helps provide some clarity and guidelines about that relationship between the school and the local provider.

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Recently, actually in two thousand and thirteen, there was legislation passed in our state following the Sandy Hook tragedy here that actually put in the legislation that schools and the EMPS providers need to have a memorandum of agreement. We have this available on the state website as well and many schools have already complied with this and have their MOAs in place outside of schools participating with SBDI. I want to turn now to discipline policy consultation. This is basically the third primary component of the model and the goal here is really to examine and revise disciplinary policies and practices where needed to support diversion efforts.

One of the things involved convening a work group ideally building off of an existing school team so maybe it’s the Crisis Intervention Team, maybe it’s the school climate team and their role is to really help develop a graduated response model and I'll give an example of that in just a moment. We really want to help schools think about restorative justice practices as alternative approaches to traditional discipline and also


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again bringing those linkages to the community to find alternatives to supporting these efforts. Here we're also looking in to developing memorandums of agreement, this time between schools and police and a way that can address behavioral incidents through strategies that encourage and support diversion from the juvenile justice system without compromising school safety.

Again, we're helping to clarify the roles and responsibilities and also guide on communication and follow ups between the schools and police. This is where it really helps to clarify what is a school discipline issue and what should be handled by law enforcement, which is identified as a criminal issue. The how do you sort of make that determination, whose responsibility is it, who sort of takes the lead in those situations when both are the school personnel and the police are involved and what should be the follow up with that? In Connecticut our juvenile justice advisory committee had developed a model memorandum of agreement between schools and police.

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That's also available online. There's a link there as well and there are several other pages to this. I just pulled out two just to show you what it looks like but it does give a very structured approach to building that relationship between the school and the police and one particular component of this is the graduated response model which really is just a matrix or structured approach to reduce exclusionary discipline in the form of suspension, expulsion and arrest by providing specific strategies to align with levels of behavior intervention. For example, most things we would want to be handled at level one at the classroom intervention level, that's the lowest level of intensity.

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Level two would be the school administration levels to which things are happening more frequently or a higher level of severity that the school administration should become involved. The third level assessment and service provision, so here we're really thinking about when does the referral need to be made either for further assessment or perhaps [inaudible 00:19:54] individual education planning needs to be put into place or other behavioral health services or supports that need to be identified and put into place that would happen here, and finally level four is really the highest level where law enforcement intervention would fit and we are talking about formal law force an intervention and we really want to make arrests as the last resort.

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Here we often provide a lot of consultation around schools about how to involve law enforcement without just being in the arrest process. How do you use school resource officers as an actual resource? How can you involve them in the process without it having to result in arrests? Those are some of the things we walk through whether providing competition to schools and we really help them create a diagram or flow chart of how this diversion process work. Here's an example of this. It's especially helpful for those who think, “Well if we if we don't arrest or if we don't punish, what's the response and where is the accountability?” This helps to really show that there is a flow and that there accountability built in.

If you start with a behavioral incident. The first step to sort of assessing, is there an immediate threat of harm to self or others? If that's yes then maybe that does involve


calling law enforcement, calling an ambulance nine one one and having the police help stabilize the situation, and at that point possibly that's when the referral for mental health screening is put into place. If so, from there it's always a yes or no. Is there behavioral health treatment referral needed? Do you do a graduated response process? Can you use restorative practices, and always tracking data and outcomes. If we go back up to the top and assessing immediate threat of harm to self or others and if that answer the no, that's where you can involve some of these other diversionary processes involving your crisis team, involving in our situation the EMPS, the mobile crisis team. Maybe it's your in-school crisis team.

[00:22:00] Who is going to come and stabilize that situation? Do the screening and referral for what's needed as a next step and determining whether options are available to you is alternative and as again as I mentioned, always tracking data and outcomes. When we look at data informed decision-making, this really is an ongoing process throughout all of the models so not only is it sort of at the end point, but it's also as we talked about earlier, then your school selection process from the beginning. Which schools are reporting higher rates of arrest or higher disciplinary referrals? What are the students characteristics look like among those students who are being arrested or are being referred at a higher rate?

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Connecticut has several disproportionate minority contact committees who look specifically at discrepancies within race and ethnicity in terms of how students are being referred and finally, data tracking helps us identify our patterns, highlight improvements, address challenges and plan for sustainability. You can see what kinds of things are working and how you can build that into longer term success. We have their own data collection and evaluation process. Where have come up with very positive results for this initiative among schools who participating in their first year. We've seen court referrals go down on average of forty five percent and we've seen referrals to emergency mobile crisis. Psychiatric services and mobile crisis services go up by ninety four percent and so we're very proud of those results and we kind of look back to these core components of an arrest diversion model based on what we found to be successful.

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If we just sort of summarize, here's what we consider to be the key elements and that includes a school-community-family-work group. Again not only just looking internally to the school but how do you involve the family, the community providers and how do you involve families in making decisions about what's happening to the students? What sort of alternatives and solutions are available to prevent future involvement? We have the professional development series, a school discipline policy consultation, again thinking about that more structured framework, whether that includes the graduated response model as well as memorandums of agreement, building a crisis response team, whether that's in school or community based and also building a behavior health screening.

You're making very informed decisions about how to properly intervene with students who are showing behavioral health needs, providing access to those services. Again, if they're not available in the school, how do you link to them in the community? Integrating restorative practices as alternatives and I didn't talk a lot about that but


[00:25:00]

those are things like formal resort processes could be things like restorative conferencing, it could be things like mediation. Also with circle process, connecting with community based services like juvenile review board that can have a restorative component to them and then finally the data collection and evaluation process which I talked about as being critical throughout the entire process. I just want to leave you with a few of the immediate action steps, the four immediate action steps that are identified in our toolkit.

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Again, these are things that we feel you can implement today. First is monitoring your data. Do you actually know the level of need in your community or in any particular school? Have you met with a crisis response provider who again is that someone within the school or it's a community based team who can provide that level of response? Third would be connecting with your local systems of care or other community based entities that have a sense of what services are available, how to make those referrals of linking up to those providers that are in your area and finally developing a school police memorandum of agreement is one very critical key step to really making sure the police department and the schools are on the same page with how to intervene. Finally, I just want to point out where you can find additional resources including our tool kit as well as two videos explaining our model and I want to thank you again for this opportunity to share. I encourage you to contact me directly with any questions and I'll turn it back over to Jacqui.

Jacqui:

[00:27:00]

Thanks so much Jeana and I would just echo Jeana’s encouragement for you to go to the link for the tool kit and download it because all of those things she talked about, those tools, the needs assessment, the MOAs. There are examples of all of those in the toolkit. A lot of things that you could take as a baseline and then tailor to meet your particular community’s need. We're lucky now to also be joined by Judge Linda Tucci Teodosio. Judge Teodosio was elected judge of the Summit County Juvenile Court of Common Pleas, Juvenile division in November of two thousand and two. She previously served as a judge in the Cuyahoga Falls municipal court and prior to becoming a judge she served as a magistrate in the Akron municipal court, a staff attorney in the Ninth District Court of Appeals and is an attorney in private practice. Judge Teodosio is active in many organizations.

We are lucky to have her time, including the board of Andrea Rose Teodosio Foundation that was established in memory of her late daughter, the Board of Governors for the Ohio State Bar Association and Secretary of the board of directors of Walsh Jesuit high school. She has been named a champion for change by the MacArthur Foundation for her work in juvenile justice and is a past recipient of the St. Thomas More award. She has certainly been a huge change agent in the juvenile justice world both in Summit County and nationally. She's a graduate of the University of Akron and the University Of Akron School Of Law. Judge Teodosio.

[00:28:00]Linda: Thank you and thank you so much for the opportunity to present. We're really excited

to change -- To share some of our information about our school responder program and I think one thing that you'll notice right away if you're participating in this webinar, is that both Ohio in particular in Summit County and Connecticut have


similar goals and worked together through the mental health Juvenile Justice Action Network to develop our programs but they look slightly different. The reason that I point that out is because I believe it's very important that as you approach this process that you remember to keep the individuality of your community in mind, that this is certainly not a one size fits all type of program.

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I'm hoping that throughout my presentation I can provide you with some ideas as to how things can be done but a lot of that will depend upon the resources you have available; be it monetary, be it service wise or whatever the case may be, the relationship between the players and your particular community as well as the willingness of those participants to take part in this. I'm going to give a little bit of background about our school responder program. I know if you've attended the prior webinars you're already somewhat familiar but just as a matter of review and update for those who are attending the first time. We really looked at putting a school responder program in place here in our community because we recognize that school represent one of the primary sources of Juvenile Justice referrals and many youth are referred to our court as a result of behavior that comes about as a result of untreated or undiagnosed mental health disorders.

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One thing I found to be particularly telling for me as a prior elementary education major is that the number of teachers that I've gotten to know throughout the years that always tell me that they could have predicted some of the kids that are on my docket would have been there and it certainly seems to me that if a teacher can see that a child is heading down the wrong path and likely to end up in the in the juvenile justice system, why not interrupt that school to prison pipeline and provide some services? That was really one of the things that we were looking to do. We certainly know that some of the policies that have developed in the schools such as their zero tolerance policies, suspension, expelling students as a result of disruptive behavior can really lead kids down the path of further involvement in juvenile justice and we really want to make sure that we help children avoid these negative educational outcomes as well as avoid increased delinquency by providing them with services in the community that can assist them in being more successful and to make sure that they do that in such a way that coincides with the expectations of the school as far as behavior and attendance goes as well.

[00:31:00] We started our responder program in two thousand and nine and again we set this program up as being an option for the schools. The last thing that we wanted to do as the court is to step in and tell the schools how they had to monitor the behaviors within the school, but we recognize that many times teachers for calling the police or calling upon school resource officers to intervene and provide a complaint with the court because they were out of other options on how to deal with youth. Many times I believe the courts are looked at as a vehicle to provide youth with mental health disorders if that can be ordered especially if it has been suggested in the past to a family and they have not participated.

We really wanted to give the schools a tool that was something short of a full blown involvement with the juvenile justice system that gave them some assurance that the mental health needs of a child would be addressed and that there would be some


[00:32:00]accountability or follow up through the court responder program. Our goals were really to promote early intervention, to facilitate early recognition of possible mental health disorders, to in turn by providing youth with the necessary treatment to improve school performance and attendance and to really involve families as a valued part of the team, recognizing that many times with these kind of disorders families are frustrated and are at the end of their ropes and to help them recognize that we're not here to criticize parenting skills or anything else but to provide some further support for that family with them as part of the team being a primary participant and identifying their needs.

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We want to empower the schools with confidence about the referral process, so that they knew that the needs of the youth would be met if they made the referral and that youth wouldn't be tagged as having a mental health disorder if in fact the needs of the family indicated that it was something else. We wanted again to direct the children away from the juvenile justice system toward mental health but we wanted to do that in such a way that provided accountability so that if the inappropriate behavior continued, if they family was not taking advantage of the services that the school knew they could still resort to a more traditional means of dealing with truancy or those behavioral issues by making referrals directly to the court. What I hope to do today is to just give you some ideas about maybe how to get started and how to put in place a responder program in your particular community if you are experiencing those same kind of needs and see that your community would benefit.

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In getting started, I think the most important thing to do is to identify what is the problem that you hope to solve in your community. Are you seeing a lot of referrals to the court for a child to get mental health services? Is it a truancy problem that is really driving that school to prison pipeline? Are you having schools experience a lot of behavior issues and in the school? The other things to think about is, are the schools using school resource officers and the court as a means to provide youth with discipline that perhaps would be more appropriately handled by school or mental health? Once you're able to identify what is the distinct problem that you wish to solve, I think you can from there go ahead and identify who your stakeholders would be.

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For example for us, we really wanted to make sure that youth were identified early so that if there was a truancy issue or a behavioral issue that the school was experiencing that could possibly be linked to a mental health disorder, we wanted to treat them at the earliest possible intervention point even if the youth were too young to really be competent to be involved in our court system. We identified stakeholders as being our mental health system, the schools at all levels and when I say all levels I mean that in every sense of the word. We wanted to involve different grade levels to see where the intervention would be most appropriate and we also wanted to involve from the top down; the superintendent, building principals, school counselors, teachers in the classroom as being part of the team that would look at how that would be. Each of their involvement is very important in making sure that the model works.

We also wanted to involve the police, in particular the school resource officers that


[00:36:00]

were assigned to the schools. We wanted to involve both our mental health and chemical dependency communities, parents that maybe had prior experience with the court or prior experience with children with mental health disorders, as well as court staff and anyone else whose life would touch these students. I think that in identifying stakeholders it's very important to identify who the convener is going to be. Who is going to be the individual that is going to have the pull to be able to bring these people together and conduct a conversation where all stakeholders feel that their concerns can be addressed as well as each of the stakeholders feels that they have the ability to bring to the table those things that they can contribute to making these children more successful in school?

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As well, you might want to consider because certainly there may be some funding issues involved with that. Are there particular agencies that might be appropriate to provide some funding as you move forward that you can bring to the table at the beginning so that they can understand the process and the goals and feel comfortable as a funding source that it fits within the parameters of what they can do. At that opened discussion, I think it's important to talk about the goals. As the court, my goal is certainly always to divert kids away for a low level of offenses if that's possible and to make sure that they get the most appropriate treatment. For the school, the goals may be a little bit different and I think it's important to recognize the goals, each of the participants as well as the concerns of each of the participants.

To give you an example, at our open discussion with our teachers, we found that they were very fearful of liability if they identified the youth as having a mental health concern and so they were really feeling reluctant about making those referrals, afraid of being of putting that kid into a certain status that they didn't feel qualified to identify. By addressing that concern, we made sure to tell the school staff, “If you see these kind of behaviors make sure to make a referral and let the responder make the determination as to whether it's mental health or not.” I think in addressing those concerns in an open discussion with all of the stakeholders, you can come to some agreement as far as how the concerns of the various stakeholders can best be met and how they can all of them work together to create a more positive result for youth.

[00:38:00] Again, identify program goals so that everyone is on the same page, what resources will be necessary in order to achieve those goals and what resources are already available in the in the community for those youth. In identifying schools, I think this is probably the most important thing that can occur especially early on as you're piloting the program. We chose to start off with middle schools because that is the stage where we would first start to see referrals being made to the court directly from the school but in your community you may decide that it would be at a different grade level. You might decide to identify the schools by a zip code as Jeana mentioned earlier, looking for certain areas where there's a higher referral rate.

[00:39:00]You might want to focus on alternative schools where we know that children are already experiencing behavioral issues to be sure that their needs are being met. We decided to identify our schools by providing the schools with the opportunity to supply us with an application for free responder program services within their school.


We did that by application because we wanted to make sure that the building principal was committed to the process and felt that it would be a meaningful way of dealing with behavioral problems and truancy. We found that if we allowed the superintendent who is very committed to be the sole source of referrals as far as schools go and if we didn't have the buy in of the building principal, the program was not as successful as it was where the building principal was heavily committed and heavily involved. I think you want to look at a time frame.

[00:40:00]

What is the best time to begin the program? Should it begin with the beginning of the school year? Should begin later on in the school year once the teachers get to know the youth for a period of time? What works best for your particular community and your schools? Finally, training is very important and I'm going to get to that in a moment but certainly we want to provide training for anyone who is having contact with in the school building with those youth, to let them know what the red flags are that they should be looking at as far as a possible referral. I know this flow chart is impossible to see on a PowerPoint but at the end of my slides there is a reference to the responder manual which you can download that goes through the step by step process as well as the flow chart, but I think it's important to recognize from this flow chart that there are many times where a child can be directed back to court if they are not cooperating with the services but also that there are many opportunities for a child to opt into the responder program or change the way the services are being provided if the child and the family find that the initial means of providing services was not to their liking or to their satisfaction.

[00:41:00]

[00:42:00]

Training I think is very important. We provide training to schools once a year, recognizing that there is a lot of turnover with school staff and that training is provided by our Family Resource Center staff here at the court that serves at the responder and actually acts as a case manager, are bringing all of the service providers, the school personnel, school resource officer, child, parent, a parent advocate together to develop a plan for the child. They explain the process, how a referral can be made, what circumstances a referral should be made, what they could expect from the school responder. In addition, we provide some mental health one on one if you will for the school staff by way of a licensed mental health provider here, that would be one of the options for youth who are referred to the responder program that basically goes to the teachers which goes through some of the red flags behavioral issues, school attendance issues that the school personnel might be seeing that might warrant a referral to the responder program.

[00:43:00]

One thing that we found was very important to that the teachers and school staff know at this training, is that the responder was not going to leave them high and dry. If the responder did a screen with you and determined that in fact mental health was not the primary focus that they would not stop there, that they would try to identify what the issue is for example if the families homeless. The child is not attending school not because of a mental health disorder but because the parent doesn't have child care and is using the oldest sibling as a babysitter for the younger kids. We assured the school that if we identified some of these other issues that we would do our best to refer them to appropriate agencies as well. While primarily the responder is a mental health responder, there is also someone that has knowledge of other


resources that are available in the community and that can provide the family with other ideas as to what they can do and what the school can do to make sure that child will have academic success.

There's a responder video that I would like to play I think probably just a portion of today due to where we are time wise, but the entire video is available for you to view at your leisure. I think what we can do is maybe play with a small portion of the video and I would invite you to check out the entire video later. This video was developed to give the parents a clear idea of what the responder can do for them and their family and really encourage parents to be the most active advocate for their child and participating in the responder case management process.

Jacqui:[00:44:00]

All right judge, we are just getting that video cued up right now and as you said, we'll just play a couple minutes because we are running short on time and we do want to make sure that there is some time for questions and answers. So here we go.

Jeana:

[00:45:00]

You were watching this video because your child has been referred to your community responder program. Before we go any further, I want to say that your child has been refereed to this program because the school has recognized some behavior from your child that could ultimately require your child to appear at juvenile court. Both the school and the court want to avoid that and I'm certain that you do as well. The responder program is designed to bring all parties together for the benefit of your child. Your participation is vital to assure that we get positive results that the program offers. The reason your child was referred by the school the responder program is because your child has either missed too much school or your child has behaved in a destructive manner while attending school.

[00:46:00]

Either way, this could point to some issues that the responder can address. Though not always the case, research has shown that there are possibly some mental health issues that can cause this behavior. It could also be other reasons why your child reacts in such a manner that perhaps counselling could help. The most important thing to remember is that the responder program evaluates each referral individually and case management is shaped to specifically meet your child’s needs. The responder is a professional who is trained in screening for mental health and other behavior issues in you. The responder may work for a court a school or a mental health agency in your community.

Lisa: I'm Lisa Karas, the program coordinator for the Family Resource Center here in Summit County. The responder uses a screening tool that will ask questions of your child and hopes to pinpointing why your child is acting in such a way that the school made the referral to the program. After the evaluation, the responder will put together a decision making team to develop treatment options for your child. The responder will work with you and your family to find a treatment provider that you're comfortable with. Some important things to remember; the school is not trying to create a problem for your family, the school is not trying to say that you haven’t done a good job. On the contrary, the school made the referral because they want to see your child succeed.


Linda:[00:47:00]

[00:48:00]

That gives you a little bit of the sample of our video. Some of the other individuals that speak throughout the course of the video include the superintendent of schools, then it talks about the school's commitment to this program as well as a parent that participated in the program. The video was developed through our work through the Mental Health Juvenile Justice Action Network and we tried to keep it generic so that regardless of where your responder program is going, you might be able to use it as an informational tool for your parents. I think the main thing is just letting the parents know that they are part of the team, that the responder recognizes that they know their child better than anyone and that their participation is really crucial if the child is going to be successful. In addition, I did want to make everyone aware that in our manual, the a reference to the video, a reference to the brochure that you see there on the screen now that explains the program to parents, a letter that we send to the parents of each of the participants schools at the beginning of the school year to introduce them to the program, as well as many of the forms that we asked the school and the referring to fill out are contained and are certainly available for use if you feel they would provide you with a good starting point for your own program.

[00:49:00]

I think when you think about family engagement, it's got to be more than inviting the family to the table at the first . We try to make sure that the responder follows up with the family frequently to make sure that they're experiencing the benefits of the program, that they feel that their child's behavior has improved that they feel that their child has a good therapeutic relationship with whomever the responder referred the child to and that if a parent is experiencing difficulties due to the mental health of their child, that they have the ability to be assigned a parent, mentor or advocate that can help them through the process. We make sure that our families are followed up with periodic times throughout the school year while they're in the program to make sure that that the success is sustained.

[00:50:00]

Our responders will follow up with the family during the summer just to make sure things are going well and if a child was involved in the responder program in the second half of the school year, we usually check in with that family and with that student at the beginning of the following school year just to make sure that everything is going well. One thing I should mention as well, that the responder does meet with the parent prior to meeting with the child. I think that's something very important and this is a voluntary program that the parents can choose to have their child go through as opposed to going through a formal court process and the parents are asked to sign releases so that those conversations can take place. We certainly respect the confidentiality of information and of the right of the parent to dictate who their child does or does not have contact with and many of those forms if they're not available in the manual we do have here at our court and if you email me I can certainly forward those to you. We gave you some of the results that we've seen.

We've had youth that have successfully completed, as a result of that we have seen an increase in school performance and school attendance and in following use at a twelve month period after a referral to the program. The majority of the youth that were served by the school responder program had no new charges or adjudications for delinquency. I think anytime you have a program that sees the majority of youth not ending up with a court referral, that's always a good sign for the youth, for their


families, for the schools and I think it does do a lot to interrupt the school to prison pipeline that we've seen so often. We're very pleased with the results that we've seen.

[00:51:00] I would suggest if you're looking at doing this kind of program that you be very consistent in collecting data, identifying what you're going to consider to be a successful conclusion of the program and monitor those goals very carefully and tweak it as you go forward. We have changed things throughout this program at several times to meet the needs of the schools and students and I think by growing the program in that manner, it has really contributed to the success we've gone through. Those are some of the resources that I'm happy to share and certainly if you want to get ahold of me by phone or e-mail I'm happy to provide individual answers or additional documentations. One of the last things I want to mention before we turn it over so that your questions can be addressed, is that we did do some outcome postcards that we sent to the school, teacher and to the parent to assess how we've done. It's a four question, very short survey.

[00:52:00] It takes a moment, only a few minutes to do. We provide it to them so they can return it by mail anonymously on a postcard with pre-paid postage so they can get it back to us very quickly so we have the ability to gauge not only the parents but also the school satisfaction with the process without them having to go through a long survey which may sit on their desk at opposed to ever getting turned back in. Those are just some of the things we've done with our school responder program and I'm going to turn the microphone back over to Jacqui.

Jacqui:

[00:53:00]

Fantastic, thank you so much Judge. We do have several questions that have come in during the course of the conversation today. The first came in kind of early Jeana during your presentation and I think you somewhat addressed it but can you just speak to whether those law enforcement MOAs that you talked about also apply to school resource officers or are there any specific MOAs for school resource officers that are aligned to this work? Well then, there you go. Try again Jeana.

Jeana: Okay. Yes, the memorandum of agreement that we presented does cover school resource officers though generally the majority of schools that we've worked with have school resource officers as the primary law enforcement responder. We have worked with some technical high schools or regional high schools that have a state trooper as well. We’ve done some of the process of adopting that memorandum of agreement for that relationship as well but yes. We're able to cover sort of all relationships with that.

Jacqui: Great. Judge Teodosio we have a quick one for you. Somebody is wanting to know which screening tool is used by the responder program.

Linda:

[00:54:00]

We do use the [inaudible 00:53:50] as the initial screening tool. If there is an indication on the [inaudible 00:53:54] that there could be a mental health disorder and there's a more complete social history taken and the screening tools that the responder uses are part of the manual that you can download and that has the more complete social history that's taken that they used to determine whether a further


full assessment by the youth is necessary by mental health professional.

Jacqui: Thank you. For both of you I think the next one might apply. Somebody wants to know about how you handle parent permission and parent notification and do that before making a referral?

Jeana:

[00:55:00]

I can start with that this is Jeana. When we use the EMPS mobile crisis service, generally best practice is of course to engage the parent and making that decision and whether they want EMPS to respond or not. As the [inaudible 00:54:52] parent is being called as well and the parent is often involved in the actual assessment or the actual meeting with the EMPS provider response. If the parent is not willing for any EMPS to come out or does not provide consent, the EMPS can still respond to the school if the incident is happening during school and the school feels it's necessary. They can respond without parent permission and then if ongoing services are needed beyond that initial crisis response and crisis stabilization, then the parent permission is needed once again and generally that's handled through a release of information as well when you're talking about sharing information at the individual student level.

Linda:

[00:56:00]

[00:57:00]

In Summit County Ohio, I love their mobile response unit. I wish that we had something like that. It sounds like a wonderful option for schools. We do have a psychiatric intake response center at our local children's hospital which is basically an emergency room for kids that are experiencing a significant mental health disorders and they have a good relationship with our school. When the event of an extreme emergency the child would be taken there as opposed to the responder being called. In those instances where the school is going to maybe be making a responder referral, we actually have found that we have been better able to engage the parent. If someone from school makes the initial call to the parent, explains that the referrals being made as an alternative to formal court involvement and explains the model to the family, refers them to either the video or the brochure and gets the family's agreement to at least come in and have one session with the responder that pulls everyone together. Obviously to engage and the team decision making to engage in the starting’s and the planning releases are assigned so that the parent is comfortable with everyone at the table, discussing their use particular activity depending on the age of the child they may be at the table as well thanks.

Jeana: We have a follow up on the screening question, wondering what the initial screening or intake form it is to determine that the behavior is a mental versus a social issue. I think this person is trying to get at, how do you in the first instance decide to rally a student to either SBDI or the responder program before any kind of screening instrument? How do you make that decision to route them to the responder program in the first instance?

Linda:

[00:58:00]

The responder or the court does not make the decision to send them to the responder program. The referral comes directly from the school and the school would identify certain behaviors that we have laid out through the training that they believe could be an indication of mental health. The responder, with the permission of the parent goes out and administers [inaudible 00:58:04] and if there's no indication of a mental health disorder, the responder's official involvement with the child would end


at that point although they might refer them to other services if they identify other needs that the child would have. If there is indication that there could possibly be mental health, then the responder gathers additional information and might make a referral to a local mental health service provider for a complete mental health assessment where a diagnosis would be made and the determination would be made, whether further services would be needed. I hope that answers the question.

Jacqui:

[00:59:00]

Yeah I think I got that, thank you. I know we're really up against our time but there was one more question that I feel like it’s really important. Somebody wants to know if substitute issues are addressed in the same way or are you guys only working with mental health issues in this way.

Jeana:

[01:00:00]

This is Jeana, I'm from Connecticut. Thank you for asking that question. We did sort of gloss over that and didn't clarify. Yes, we do just that and what she says as well and in a very similar way. One of the things we're also implementing or sort of integrating and expanding in Connecticut is the expert model of the screening brief intervention or referral to treatment model, really doing a very similar process but specifically around substance use and then sort of diverting to that to that treatment route rather than sort of general behavioral health services. We've also piloted a peer support network in high schools along with SBDI. Where students are having specific substance abuse issues that they're able to be put into a network with other students. It's sort of experiencing the same thing or who have recovered from substance abuse issues and incorporated that as other supportive piece of this is well. There's also some work with probation and court to the police that is happening currently in our state to actually review the policies regarding zero tolerance around drug related offenses so that there is more opportunities for alternatives and for diversions for those types of offences that have not been there previously. That's a quick and [inaudible 01:00:30] answer and then in our time.

Linda: [Crosstalk 01:00:36].

Jacqui:

[01:01:00]

Great, great and there was one last question that was about whether this work has been done on American Indian reservations. I would just encourage that participant, our contact information for and NCMHJJ is up right now. We have not done school diversion on American Indian reservations but we have done general juvenile justice diversion on American Indian reservations. I would be happy to share information about that. If you have more details, questions please feel free to contact us here at NCMHJJ. I just want to really want to thank Judge Teodosio and Dr. Bracey for joining us today and encourage you all to go to those links and download those resources. You don't have to recreate the wheel, the wheel is there and you can just tailor it to your own locality. Thanks so much for everyone's participation. Have a great day.

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€¦ · Web viewIs it a truancy problem that is really driving that school to prison pipeline? ... but at the end of my slides there is a reference to the responder manual