Intersession Meeting #1 Notes

10/9/2020

From your workgroup’s perspective which issue(s) have had the greatest impact?

• Real upstream issue is chronic poverty.
  
  • Mental illness
  • Racism
  • Family structure
    • Substance abuse issues, teenage mother (high risk scenario)
    • Ruth may not have strong parenting skills
  • Community Issues
    • Without needed income, difficult to find a safe place to live with necessary community supports
    • Lack of stable housing
      • Stable housing = possible intervention that would make other interventions more effective
    • Temperance, MI
      • Across border from Toledo
      • If they did move across the border, supports would need to be rebuilt as they do not cross state lines
    • Navigating the different systems without a single source of truth.
    • How can we streamline navigation of the systems for the family? Less likely to access systems if you have to jump through hoops or if you don’t have time to figure it out.
    • Lack of interoperability between the systems they are touching.
    • System relies too much on Ruth and Sarah and not enough on the schools and systems.
    • Talking about the individual’s failures while we should be talking about the failures of the systems.

From your workgroup’s perspective, what is the root cause(s) that is maintaining the status quo or inhibiting systemic change efforts?

• We have a lag measure line of sight. We know the results, but we do not have a lead measure line of sight on people. Most of the time the lead measure is rooted not in individual people, but how systems misserve individual people.
  • Teenage African American boys who came into child welfare as toddlers, wind up staying while others do not stay. Found that people didn’t want to be caseworkers to African American males. They were given new caseworkers, not experienced ones. Used this data to put a new practice in place.
• It appears that the current interventions are reactive as opposed to leveraging data that would be more preventative.
• Interventions are reactive and uncoordinated
• Responsibility on the individual as opposed to the system to connect the services
• Lack of opportunity in the community
  • Lack of healthy food
  • Environmental problems
  • Lack of transportation
  • Quality of the services and schools
• Need for a comprehensive primary care provider
  • Such has the federally qualified health center in Temperance
  • Comprehensive care team in the school

What kinds of information do other workgroups possess that, if shared with your group could identify and help resolve systemic issues like the ones experienced by families represented in the Thomson scenario? Same question, but now focus on what kinds of information you have that could be valuable to the other workgroups?

Information from the education group:

• What is available at the school? Counselors, range of services at the school
• Oklahoma legislation that requires the school to supply DHHS with information such as attendance, grades, assessment results, as live as possible for students who are in child welfare.
• How they are preforming in the classroom
• Head start, IEP, free and reduced lunch
• If the school has information on Jameson smoking that would be useful to share with the health group

Information from other groups:

• CPS: As soon as a child is taken into foster care, referral needs to make to the local Head Start provider
• Education needs to know what services are available to the student and family. The counselor, teacher etc. could assist the parent.
• Department of Human Services needs to inform the school whether the kids are eligible for free and reduced lunch
• We are very focused on the kids, what could we do to support the adults?
• We are thinking of education at the school level, what about adult education opportunities?
• Upscaling opportunities for better economic mobility outcomes

From Neighborhood and Environment:

• Quality of the housing, air quality and water quality issues, is there better housing available for the family?

Identify 3 5 initial, achievable, actionable recommendations that, if implemented, could prevent system level problems and/or begin to address root cause issues such as those experienced by the Thomsons.

• Creating a process to identify the leading measures for prevention
• Backwards mapping populations that aren’t getting what they need and populations that do seem like they are getting what they need. What can we learn from those journeys? How are the paths different?
• Provide attendance and disciplinary information to different organizations
• No wrong door referral system. Regardless of where someone is seeking information each entity has information about the services and where to find more information.
• Make sure we don’t do anything to dissuade information sharing. Ex. truancy record to get in the hands of criminal justice system
• As the caseworker you have to go seek out information from the other systems. It requires an individual to connect them. Need to create systems that do not create additional burden on caseworkers.

Other:

• Foster care
  • For a kid to go into foster care there should technically be clear evidence of abuse or neglect as defined by the state—pretty high bar. Nothing in the case suggests abuse or neglect.