Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Welcome back to House Education on February 17, continuing our discussion on the chronic absenteeism bill. We have folks here today from the Department of Children and Families to sort of give us their take and any suggestions they might have. Anyway, we look forward to your testimony and thanks for joining. And if you'd introduce yourselves, the

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: floor is yours. Hey, good morning, or I should say good afternoon. For the record, my name is Erica Radke, and I'm Deputy Commissioner of the Family Services Division of DCF. And I'm joined here today by Lenden Boudreaux, who is the Director of the Family Services Division, Adolescent Services Unit. And thank you for the opportunity to speak to you all about the pending legislation. And our plan is really to, I'll start off by discussing educational neglect and the responsibilities of DCF. And then I'll turn it over to Lendi, who will do the same regarding truancy. And then at the end, I'd like to talk a little bit about the division's perspective on the bill and answer any questions that you may have. Linda, did you want to go ahead? I know I introduced you

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: to someone, but if you want to. For the microphone, you can be Charles and Services Director for the Bank Services Division.

[Speaker 0]: Why don't you just speak up a little bit because we have a fan back here that's always running.

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: So the statutory basis for educational neglect is really Chapter 49 that focuses on child abuse and neglect, and Chapter 51, which authorizes the department to conduct assessments to determine whether a child may be in need of care or supervision, which is commonly known as CHINS. And the statute includes assessments for educational neglect. And together, these statutes both define when DCF may become involved and what the limits are of our role. So a report of educational neglect may be considered for acceptance when it is alleged that a parent or person responsible for a child's care knowingly fails to enroll a child in school or provide education in accordance with Vermont law, and through the caregiver's inaction or actions if a child then regularly fails to attend school. So educational neglect applies to children beginning at age six through the completion of sixth grade as defined in statute. The statute does not provide authority to monitor or support educational or home plans.

[Speaker 0]: Just on the first bullet, sort of written in the passive voice when it is alleged that a parent or person responsible for a child's care knowingly fails to enroll?

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: Who's making that report? That could be various people. It could be people in the neighborhood. It could be relatives. Anyone that's noticed that there's some absence on the parents' activities.

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: Lindy, do you know typically people make education on the GLED reports? Yeah, it could be the same folks that Erica just mentioned. Also, school can also be making those reports. If the student was enrolled before, and they're not coming now, they could also make those reports.

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: So when a report of educational neglect is accepted by the Family Services Division, a family services worker conducts what is known as a CHINS B assessment.

[Speaker 0]: We can ask another question. When a report of educational neglect is accepted, is that the same thing as received? No. Know, sometimes Did talk about the difference then?

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: Absolutely. Sometimes just in various reports we get to the hotline, they'll come in, but they need to be meet our statutory qualifications to be accepted and then assessed and reviewed by our staff. So sometimes we'll get a report that doesn't meet criteria and we'll tell the individual, this isn't a report we're going to take in and pursue, but there may be other things that you can do to help the family. So what I'm talking about are reports that actually meet the statutory qualifications to be accepted and then move through our system for assessment. So would I be right saying a neighbor calling in might not be something that's accepted? Depends on what they say. You know, it depends on whether it meets the statutory qualification for Ed Nicolette. This includes part So of the assessment, including contact with the child, contact with their family, household members, the person that actually made the report, possibly school staff or others involved, as well as service providers. And we do also visit the child's home and do some collateral fact gathering if necessary. Additional steps depending upon what happens with the assessment can include a coordinated service plan meeting, additional home visits, referrals to community based supports, such as barge or intensive family based services with designated agency, others really depending upon what the family needs.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: So as Erica mentioned, we have two different ways the department manages concerns around product absenteeism or truancy. So the education neglect sits in our front end, and truancy is outlined in our policy. So policy 60 talks about youth who haven't been in school for twenty days or longer. So that's the definition that we currently use for truancy. And so truancy applies per policy from grade seven up to the age of 16. If a youth turns 16 in the year that they've already been enrolled, the expectation by statute is that they complete that year. Some folks think that the magical age of 16 releases youth and their families from the obligation to attend school, and that's not accurate. Is that twenty days, twenty absences, that's not cumulative? That's per year? Or how does that work? Well, it depends on the school and the insurance policy. So currently, it can be throughout an academic year or it can be a calendar year. And so we've had folks who may have 19, and then school ends in September. Or sorry, the school might end in the summer and then they pick up in September and then might get two more absences. And so the state of train will look at that collectively and say, now we hit the threshold. And they might file for a CHINS D, which is the truancy statute. So typically, truancy, what happens is those reports sometimes, again, it depends on the school and it depends on the protocol, may or may not be called into our hotline. Typically, those truancy concerns are not accepted at the front at the, we call it, bursary by our centralized intake unit. It's referred to the local districts. And some districts will accept it based on, again, their truancy policy, and some may not. But oftentimes, they may not be accepted at that stage. But it flags that information for the local office to know that there's concerns around this family and this youth, and that at that stage it's being called in. That typically means that the state's attorney is going to be filing a petition for truancy in court. So the statutory response that we have for truancy is what we call a youth assessment. And this is outlined in 33 BSA 5,106. And the focus of the youth assessment for the department is working with the youth in the family to understand what's behind their behavior, why is the youth started not going to school, and working with them to identify the risk and needs and development of a school readiness plan with the use

[Speaker 0]: of the family. Just a question, the second bullet there. Is this supposed to be age seven?

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: Grade Grade seven. Truancy only applies for three years. So we have the educational neglect, and then we have the truancy response. So this is around the response of which side of our system is responding. And the reason that it's grade seven and up is because a truancy petition is based on the youth's behavior versus the behavior of the parents. So who's responsible? At this stage, we're saying it's more the responsibility of the youth. The youth has a part in getting themselves to school versus the parent. So a seven year old versus somebody who's 12 or 14, there's a difference in how we respond. Thank you. Next question. And then it's 20 unexcused absences, not just 20 absences. Because her vagueness in policy from place to place can complicate that.

[Speaker 0]: That's exactly it. That's the problem.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: Yeah, that is not the pain factor. And it depends. Some tools say understeep, some say any absence. So that's part of the problem. Thank you. So as I mentioned, when we conduct a youth assessment, that's typically when the court has accepted the case as a CHINS D, which is the statutory definition of filing for truancy. And so again, when we talk about the age range, it's grade seven through age 16. When we automatically open a youth assessment is when there's been an emergency care order, which means that we have sought or somewhat a party has sought custody, DCF custody of the ED, because of concerns of truancy. There's been a conditional custody order that's been issued. Again, concerns of truancy have arisen to the level where we've sought for involvement. And there's conditions that have been placed on the parent to help support getting the youth to school and or there's a post merits finding of truancy, which means it's made it through the process. The court has made a finding that, yes, this has happened. And we then are a party to the case. And we open a youth assessment. And so again, at that stage, in other circumstances, it doesn't rule out that we can't do it. We might have multiple concerns that have been reported, multiple years of the same issues with the same youth and the family. So we have the ability to open youth assessment and do some outreach and some community based referrals prior to seeking board intervention. As I mentioned, at that stage, we really want to make sure that it's a collaborative process identifying the symptoms of truancy because we often know that it's not just absence alone or something else driving the behavior. And so we want to work with youth and the family and any other service providers that they may have worked with prior or currently or who may not be at the table that should be. And so that, oh, the youth assessment helps us identify. As we just identified, you asked about the definition of excused versus unexcused. Of the programs Erica mentioned, the VARAGE program, the Balanced Restorative Justice program, that's a contract that we fund that provides truancy supports. Unfortunately, we don't have enough staff to cover truancy in all counties. But the Lemoyle program, you probably heard about that. I know that the work on this bill was focused in part on the work that we have done in Lemoyle related to the truancy protocol. And one of the things that is successful in that is that all three supervisory unions have one truancy protocol and have one definition for what it means to be true or to be chronically absent. And so that was one of the reasons that program has been so successful, is that everybody came on board and had one shared definition. Through the conversations that I've been a part of with the AOE around not only this proposal, but also for many years, we've been trying to figure out ways to work together to not solve the issue, but try to move the dial on these concerns. This has been at the core. And so this continues to be a concern and a challenge around the state is that there's not one definition. Again, with that same thinking in mind, some folks, again, talk about excused or unexcused and who provides permission for these to not come. And so we see variation in whether or not a school a trip with their parents for five days because they're going somewhere that they think, oh, this could be educational. That might be excused. Whereas somebody else may not have that same that person. Oh, so we may have also heard about letters. Oftentimes, there's letters that get issued to families. When we wrote the protocol, when I was in Lemoyle, we wrote the protocol. It started with five days as a way to flag, if there's some concern, what's going on, can we reach out? And oftentimes, we at DCF wouldn't become involved because that was successful. It interrupted the cycle. We were able to get in there and talk to the families and see how we could support the continued attendance at school. The outreach around that is not consistent, again, with the schools. So because every school district or school itself have different truancy protocols, process is different. So parents experience something very differently around the state. Some folks don't do a letter. They just simply call. So another concern that has created complications is lack of resources around this. So not all schools have a truancy officer. I use that language because that's the language in statute, which drives me crazy, truancy officer. But that's the language. So not everybody has somebody who can serve that function or can even pay that close of attention to attendance. And the last bullet is a concern. And if students are not showing up for ten consecutive days, some school districts will disenroll with that. And so then no one's watching that youth, or no one knows if they're not coming to school because they're not technically enrolled anywhere. Well Yeah. Had a very big questions around that. That actually happens. It does happen. It does happen. And it's interesting because I've been with the department almost thirty three years, and that was new to me, like two or three years ago. That's how the districts were saying, Oh, did you hear about this? And I'm like, No. So I was working with Anne Bordenero and folks, I was like, what's this? Just because I had never heard of it. And they said, yes, some schools do it. I don't have a grasp on who was doing it. I know that there were some counties that were doing it. But it does still happen. Truancy is a conversation that we have at DCF with our staff quite often, and this is still happening. Is schools unenrolling or districts unenrolling schools?

[Speaker 0]: We had a comment from, we have superintendents in talking about doing away with, for example, letter of shame. But right now, don't even have a chronic absenteeism law, which is all about truancy. It doesn't call for a letter or a phone call or anything, but are you suggesting that we consistency around the response and that a posted letter probably isn't the best approach? That's exactly it. I agree 100% with the consistency so that we can get a real good sense on

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: the balance of the problem. If everybody's doing something different, we don't really know how, who has issues and which issues can be best addressed. And in terms of the letter, I mean, sometimes, particularly if the letter is drafted in a way that sort of makes it seem like DCF involvement could be coming and sort of making our department the agency that's really the heavy involved, I don't think that gets a good response from families. And what we're looking to do, as Lindy described, is to be really collaborative with families and get to the root cause of what's going on.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: And the letter was created, again, out of the memorial protocol that's been around for a long, long time. But it really wasn't rooted in this heavy threat. It's an invitation to join them and see what was going on. Over the years, we have several variations of this letter. And they threaten court because at that stage, the next step is petition to court. And then behind that is DCF custody. That happens, kids come into custody because of concerns of truancy, and that shouldn't happen.

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: Not when there are just so many other ways and other agencies that can come in and assist to help the family get the job back into school. So I do want to turn to the bill itself. We really do like the overall direction of the bill and its focus on chronic absenteeism as a systems issue, as opposed to something that's simply a child welfare issue. Because as we talked about, there can be all kinds of reasons that a child can be not coming to school, where if there's more systems involvement, the issue can be solved. We talked about the shared definitions, we absolutely support that. Clear protocols and greater consistency across the districts, Because just really identifying those elements and concerns and addressing them early on is really the more uniform and productive way we believe to address the problem. As Lindy noted too, we have been working closely with the agency of education for more than a year. We've been collaborating with them, including discussions with their consultants, really just to better align aid, education, and child welfare responses to attendance concerns. Looking ahead, DCF anticipates that our role will be really more active in terms of collaborating with AOE as partners and as part of the stakeholders group, really supporting the development of the model policy that they're thinking of in the bill. And what we want

[Speaker 0]: to do is really

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: provide some clarity around expectations as far as CCX role in that process, which will really be important in terms of where we are in terms of what our work is and how that's really bounded by our statutory authority. And it's important to us not to exceed that authority because we do know that that's when families feel stepped on. And that's not what our role is. That's not our intent. We want to be a support to families.

[Speaker 0]: I think that's a valid point. Think often the DCF is used as the threat and bringing them in. I had a very specific question for you that has since gone out of my head, but overall supportive of where this is going. Again, we find ourselves with a list in front of us of trying to sort of categorize excused and unexcused absences. You didn't come in with any specific changes to that, which I would assume means you don't necessarily have any suggestions to that. No, just a really strong desire for some consistency, if possible.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: And as Erica mentioned, the past year, we have been working, I've been working with them on the development of those statutory changes in the model policy. So I was aware before it was submitted to committee, what those changes were, so we kind of

[Speaker 0]: had those discussions with the AOE in support where they've kind of landed as a presentation. What is the status of a model policy? Is there a draft out there? We've only sort of have our bill in front of us, which does not have a model policy.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: So there was. I'm not sure of the exact status of it right now because the AOE realized, oh my gosh, this is a bigger lift. And so then they were able to find and work with two consultants that they've hired. So the policy work, I think, has shifted a little bit to supporting the work of the consultants. But I have seen it. And it does look reflective of the truancy protocol that we developed in the wild. So it's similar to that. But what I understand to be next steps around that are related to what the consultants are finding in all of their conversations with stakeholders. And that's going to come back and form the model. But I feel like the bulk of the changes are going to sit in the policy versus the statute. And related to that, because this is

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education Committee)]: the second time someone's brought up model policy today. And reading it, this is way out of my field. But I really would love to know whether the description of what the model policy should be, the boundaries around it, have you reviewed that in the legislation, I'm saying?

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: And does that cover everything? Are you talking about the parameters that they offer? Yeah, I'm looking at it here.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education Committee)]: And it feels I just don't know. It should be vague, I think, to some degree, but I want to make sure it's capturing because so much is related to Yeah. Osmano

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: When I read that, it feels to me and not having been the person who drafted, I'm not sure what their intent was it feels like that is still allowing for room for local control around the development of the policy that meets the individual supervisory needs or school's needs versus just having one model policy, which my recognizing that that may not be possible. Your preference as well as policy. I think what we've learned from the conversations with Memorial is that, yes, having one is the strongest, but I recognize that comes with a lot of work behind it. And I don't know if that's possible.

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: Yeah, I agree with you. It's sort of like we need to be able to balance each individual district's character, but at the same time, we need the ease of having one policy so that we can have that standardization

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: across the board. Yeah. And I feel like the standardization is coming in with the same folks making the decision around whether or not it's excused or unexcused. I did notice that there's still variation in that. And also, the parameters in the bill I can't remember all of the listed But things that you it did say that they will be at least the standard of the model policy, not beneath that. So for me, it felt like if the model policy is coming in really strong, then hopefully the rest of the policy can follow suit. It says meet or exceed. So for me, I felt like that was probably a safe way to, at least as a start, try to provide that consistency around the state. So if I could just add one more thing on this.

[Unidentified Committee Member (House Education Committee)]: Again, from my perspective and everything we've been hearing about this, it really is about prevention. And I just want to make sure that the framework around this model policy is focused on that. So if there's anything that needs to be changed in the legislation, that's really important. So I hope to take a look

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: at that, just to make sure. How many

[Speaker 0]: educational neglect cases do you folks deal with each year that have to do with absences from a school? I'm sure that they exist within the sort of the homeschool structure that we sort of don't have anymore. But I just know if it's two or 200.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: It's so funny you asked that because we pulled that slide out. We originally had.

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: We lost our time.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: But I brought it just in case. We can send you these charts.

[Speaker 0]: Because we did get a request saying, we an issue with having sort of really relaxed the accountability with homeschooling and that we've provided sort of an out that allows people to say, oh, well, my child is no longer enrolled, we're doing a homeschool program now. And then sort of that shuts down the ability for you folks or others

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: to be involved. And that was the legislative change that was certainly, I wasn't aware of that happening when it happened. And it does leave a bit of a gap, so there were some concerns around that. But from my understanding of that bill was that they couldn't unenroll their child and then seek a homeschooling plan, the plan had to be approved before they could disenroll their child. So I think that was the intent of that to be the safety net. But yeah, once that happens, we have no statutory authority to monitor that or to monitor. They're no longer truant, and there's no concerns about the neglect because they're not

[Erica Radke, Deputy Commissioner, DCF Family Services Division]: That backs up what we heard previously. This was the slide we were moving this morning, and it's the number of accepted intakes for ed neglect statewide between 2018 and 2025. And you can see it's roughly, there's some dips, but there are no huge areas where I'd say we should be surprised. The numbers are relatively stable, but for 2019, which we attribute to the pandemic. And when I look at really 2021 through 2025, you're ranging between one hundred and sixty seven cases. There's a low of one hundred and twenty six. So around that's sort

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: of the span. And when we switch over and talk about neglect, now we're only talking about sixth grade and young. I was just making sure I had the words right.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, you're totally right. The words are pretty similar.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: We'll talk to Transy. Sure. So with the Transy data, this information is not these aren't reports. These are cases that have actually been opened by the court for CHINS D. So these are actually court cases. And so you can see prior to the pandemic, there was a significant drop that happened around the time of the pandemic. And then it started to rise back up. And during that time, there were some the protocols related to truancy at the local level were shifted. So some folks, was very few schools that actually continued to call in concerns of truancy from the pandemic. And as we got a year or two out, that started to change. So schools started to employ their truancy protocols again. And so that's when you see the numbers starting to kind of find that go. This also is reflection of lack of court activity during that period of time. Court cases were not happening. They were, but we had a tiered response in the family division around certainly Shin's cases. So truancy in those cases were not prioritized in the first initial year. So that's reflected on a couple of things. And so these cases will have spot on our case loads, if we will. So we will be working in cases where there is an active transimple tissue problem.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you. Yeah, thanks very much for sharing the information with us and your perspective. It's quite helpful. I think that's Oh, yeah, I'm sorry.

[Lenden “Lindy” Boudreaux, Director, Adolescent Services Unit, DCF Family Services Division]: Can we just get a follow-up in writing is fine of schools that are unenrolling students, where that's happening? I would have to get back from the panel. Don't have that. Okay, thanks.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you. Thank you. All right, let's take a very quick five minutes and we're coming back to discuss our