PRACTICE AND POLICY LECTURE SERIES - APRIL 2012.  THE OKLAHOMA PINNACLE PLAN: AN IMPROVEMENT PLAN FOR CHILD WELFARE SERVICES

Debra Smith: Good afternoon. There were two stories that she mentioned just then. Thank you, Sandra, for introducing me. The first story she mentioned was key indicators. Now you all know our former Director Howard Hendrick. So two weeks into my job, this new job, I have to go explain all of Child Welfare data to Director Howard Hendrick. Now who wouldn't be nervous about that. 

So yes, that was a very scary day and the other story is accurate and Terry and I sat around that day and talked about what we wanted to do when we grow up. And we all said, she didn't add this, I hit the table when I said that, "I want to work in Child Welfare and come up with a plan for how we can improve Child Welfare in Oklahoma." 

So I feel very fortunate to be here speaking to you today. So, good afternoon. Welcome to our presentation on the Oklahoma Pinnacle Plan. I'm glad to see so many of you made it. And the weather is certainly a challenge for the last... (inaudible). And my heart and my thoughts go out to people that have been affected by the storms in Oklahoma, especially the Woodward area. Please be with me in keeping them in your thoughts and prayers. 

But then on the front, as far as I was thinking about storms, I thought about the Pinnacle Plan and about where we are in Child Welfare. And we really have what really could be described as the perfect storm in Child Welfare. We've had a tremendous amount of oversight and people looking at the trouble of our system. 

But also a tremendous amount of support from the legislature, the Governor's Office, and so many others that we're really at a place in Oklahoma where we had the opportunity to bring it all together, in a perfect storm kind of way, to really build the kind of program that we all want for children in Oklahoma. 

So, with that, I'll begin the presentation about the Oklahoma Pinnacle Plan. As you all know, we reached a settlement agreement for the class action litigation that was filed back in 2008. We reached a settlement during the first week of January. And as part of the settlement agreement, we are required to craft a plan for how to improve Child Welfare services in Oklahoma. 

And when I first saw the first draft of the settlement agreement, the due date for that and the first time I saw a copy was probably the first, may have been the last week of December. The first copy I saw said it will be due February 15th. Well, that was scary. Fortunately, there were some revisions and eventually we had a due date of March 30th. So I felt so blessed to have an additional six weeks. 

But then when I sat down to do it, I thought, "How in the world are we going to craft a plan in 87 days," - not that I was counting but - "of how we were going to craft a plan to improve Child Welfare in Oklahoma?" So, first of all before I start, I want to say thank you to the many people who helped us along the way. There were people, of course, from our own staff, OKDHS staff, Child Welfare, that all other divisions. 

We have people from Finance. I said if there were any money question you get to ask that table right there. They said "no," so... 

(laughter) 

Debra Smith (continues): ...and we had, Office of Planning and Research and Statistics helped us with a lot of things, HRMD, there were just all the divisions in the agency. It was really an agency-wide effort to craft this plan. So, for that I'm especially thankful. And then externally we had people with the Governor's Office, the Legislature, both the Senate and the House. 

We had people from OCCY and from the Foster Care Improvement Task Force, and I know I'll leave someone out... And the Oklahoma Indian Child Welfare Association was there as well, really helping us craft the plan as we went along. So my deepest gratitude to all those groups that helped. 

And the agenda today, let's see if I can get this clicker to work. First, I'm going to just touch briefly on the 15 performance areas that were areas that we needed to improve in Child Welfare. Talk about the internal and external stakeholder input.  Our DHS commitments that we made. There are five commitments that we made about how we will treat children and families and serve children and families in Oklahoma. 

Touch on the seven Pinnacle Points and I'll go through some of those initiatives a little bit more in depth. Talk about next steps and certainly plenty of time at the end for your questions and my answers. Before I begin now I'd like to get an idea of who we have here today. 

I recognize many, many faces. And do we have any foster or adoptive parents? Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And there will be a booth out here where everyone else needs to sign up to be a foster and adoptive parent. 

(laughter)

Debra Smith (continues): So, shortly after, we are definitely recruiting today. How many, what about Tribal staff? I think I saw a few. Welcome, thank you for being here. And legislators? I didn't see the parking lot really full today, so maybe they're not in today. 

What about providers? Youth services agencies? Mental health agencies? Thank you. Thank you for being here. And what about OKDHS staff? Yay, I'm amongst friends, as with the other groups as well. What about law enforcement? Great partnership with law enforcement. All right, thank you for being here. And what about the courts - Attorneys, Judges, District Attorneys? Did I leave any groups out? Okay, thank you. 

Audience Member: Legislative staff. 

Debra Smith: Legislative staff? Oh, sorry, I didn't see you come in. Hi, Marsha! You know this as well as I know this. 

(laughter) 

Debra Smith (continues): You want to join me in the presentation? Okay. They helped so much along the way. Okay. So, let's kick off and talk about the fifteen performance areas. In this settlement agreement, we had to address these 15 performance areas and we will eventually get to the point and you'll hear a little bit more about it when I talk about next steps where we'll actually have targets and baselines and measures for how we are measuring our improvement in all 15 of these areas. 

First, child abuse and neglect in care. We are one of the states who has a higher number of abuse and neglect in care than other states, so we have to make more effort and have initiatives focused on how to reduce abuse and neglect while kids are in foster care. 

And I'll lump the next two together: the number of therapeutic and traditional foster homes. We have to increase the number that are available for our children. We want to get to a point where when children come in to custody we have choices. 

When a child comes in we're able to match that child on different demographics to make sure they're staying in their same school districts and closer to family and connected in so many other ways. So we need to increase the number of therapeutic and traditional foster homes that we have available in the state. 

Visitation by case workers and the continuity of that visitation. In Oklahoma, we actually do a good job of making sure we see every child in out-of-home care every month. We are way in the high 90s as far as our percentage of accuracy. But what we need to improve on this one is the continuity of the same worker visiting those children. 

So you'll hear some initiatives about that. The next 6 through 9 I lumped in together and it's just talking about placement stability. Our children are moving too often. We need to do a better job up front of matching children and finding the right placement for a child so that they're moving less frequently and experiencing less trauma that's associated with those moves. 

I lumped 10 through 12 together. That's addressing children in shelters. You'll hear me make a very strong statement about the practice of having young children in shelters. And all children, but especially young children. Permanency means we've got to reduce the number of children aging out of the system without a permanent connection to family. 

Adoption, I struggled a little bit when I saw the adoption as a performance area, because if you look at our adoption data, we blow other states out of the water on adoption. But we know there's always room for improvement. So what we're going to focus on in adoption is the length of time it takes to get to adoption. Once we get that termination, we need to get to that adoption much quicker. 

And then caseloads - wow. There are a lot of DHS staff here. So, I'm talking to you there. I know you know exactly why we need to work on caseloads and having a manageable workload. So those are the 15 areas. 

And what was a little bit of a struggle, we know that all these areas are so interrelated. One really impacts the other. 

You look at abuse and neglect in care, and you know that if you had more homes you could do a better match, visit the children better, that would kind of take care of itself. 

So it was a little bit of a struggle in the beginning to figure out how to match those 15 performance areas up with the initiatives. 

But you'll see through the plan that that's how we created those seven Pinnacle Points, because those Pinnacle Points address so many of those areas that are interrelated. 

So you'll see how they connect in a few minutes. Stakeholder input was a ball. It really was. When you do strategic planning the first thing that you do, of course, is assessment. But we felt like, in Oklahoma, we had been assessed to death. We had everything from the Hornby Zeller audit, to expert reports from the litigation, we had Child and Family Services reviews, we had just on and on and on as far as assessment and what the problems were in the system. 

That we felt like with a timeframe, the best use of our time was to go straight to solutions. So we went back and examined all those reports that we've accumulated over the last three to four years and identified what the consistent themes were. 

And then went forward with the external groups of saying, "What are we going to do to fix this?" We know caseload's an issue, we don't need to do another assessment, we need to figure out how we're going to fix it. So we took those questions to you, these external groups, and ask them, "What are the strategies you think will make the greatest or the biggest difference in improving all this?" 

We started with Child Welfare Summits. We did one in every area of the state. They were amazing. Probably 150 people - I don't know if that's an accurate count, I think I'm close - from across the state participated in those Child Welfare Summits. They were a whole day and we spent that day coming up with initiatives that the front line staff and supervisors were saying, "This will make a difference in the system if we just do this." 

Great ideas came out of those summits. We also have foster parent groups around the state. We did 12, all around the state of bringing foster parents together to ask them, "What are the initiatives you think will really make a difference?" Then we have 16 external stakeholder groups. 

We met with Youth Services Directors, we met with group homes, we met with every group... judges... every group that you can imagine that touches the Child Welfare system to get their recommendations for strategies. 

And we did all that in 90 days, so the support staff and the people that I mentioned as part of that work group were instrumental in actually carrying out all that stakeholder input. And all along the way we kept people informed about the results of those groups. They're all on the OKDHS website. 

It's all synthesized into one document, or several different documents, for everyone to review. We were very transparent about the results of this. So, then we get to commitments, and this is where you really get at the heart of what we're trying to say about Child Welfare in Oklahoma. 

Our commitment is to equity, where all children, youth and families have access to and receive unbiased treatment and services. This is talking about race and demographics but it's also talking about that consistency across the state. When a family or a child enters the Child Welfare System, it should be more alike than it is different as far as the service that you receive. 

It shouldn't be that different if you're in Cole County or Oklahoma County or Woodward County, the type of treatment and services that you're offered should be consistent. And then as far as race, you know, regardless of your race, when you come into care as a child, you should be achieving as positive outcomes as any other group. 

And if we're not doing that, we need to find ways to fix it. Next is keeping children safe with their families through prevention services, kinship placements, and timely reunification. We've made a lot of progress in the practice model of keeping families together. So we didn't want to lose that in the Pinnacle Plan. 

We want to keep that forefront, that our goal is to keep them together. 

Next we want to ensure every child is safe while in out-of-home care and match them with an appropriate supportive family who can provide for their safety and well-being. We want children with families, not in buildings. We want them out of shelters and we know that there are some children that will need to be served in higher levels of care. 

We have exceptional group home providers in the state of Oklahoma at all different levels. But the goal needs to be to get children out of those higher levels of care and with a family when it's safe to do so. And we need to be more aggressive about that. Recruiting, retaining and supporting the best Child Welfare staff and ensuring they have manageable caseloads and workloads. 

And key to our success is the frontline worker and the frontline supervisor, and those staff getting the support that they need to do their jobs. We've got to recruit the best. We've got to retain the best. We've got to train them. We've got to hold them accountable, and we've got to give them manageable caseloads. 

And then finally, we can't do it alone. We've got to have partners in the community who are standing with us, and ensuring the safety of children and improving Child Welfare outcomes. So from there, we'll jump into Pinnacle Points. And you all have an actually copy of the Pinnacle Plan, so move to about page maybe five, that'll be Pinnacle Point One. Yeah, page five. 

This one is really about recruiting the number of foster families that we need to care for children in our system. We set a goal: the first year, we want to have 500 additional families offering traditional foster care in Oklahoma. And we need to be able to achieve this. This is how we keep children out of shelters and how we help children move to a healthy place; is to have families that are willing to step up and be foster families in Oklahoma. 

We're super excited that the Governor has agreed to be our spokesperson for Foster Care Month in May. She's already started on some PSA's. 

And you hopefully will get to see those in the next few weeks, you'll start seeing them on TV. And her message that she said at the press briefing was we need Oklahomans to step up and take care of Oklahomans. 

So, we really have a lot that we need to accomplish in the first year as far as increasing the number of families that we have in the system. Because if the right family is made for each and every child, we know that we will eventually reach better outcomes. We'll achieve permanency more quickly, we will achieve adoption if that eventually ends up being the goal. 

And we'll have children who are safe in foster care. So, we need the right child for every family. Initiatives in this plan spread out over five years. And you'll see in the document there's kind of an introductory paragraph at the beginning of each Pinnacle Point. And as you flip over to page six you'll see the actual initiatives. They're listed by year. 

The Plan does run on a State Fiscal Year, so we are fortunate to run that with our budget cycle, which will certainly make planning easier. So under year one, you see ten initiatives for year one, all related to the recruitment and retention of foster families. I'd like you to focus on six, seven, nine and ten. 

The first few are just about data analysis and recruitment plans. When you get to six, and we're actually we're turning to the community and looking for providers who will be willing to work with us on the recruitment and retention and support of foster families. This is one part of the work that we learned through the Child Welfare Summits that we believe providers might do a better job than we do, as far as recruiting, retaining, and supporting those foster families through the process. 

Now they'll still be our foster families but the agencies will be there to support them in a better way than we have been able to up to this point. So, we'll be working on a bidding process for that. Next, we need to shorten the length of time that we actually get home studies completed. 

Right now we have a little bit longer time that we need to be able to get to a point where we're doing those more quickly than we have in the past. So that, again, we have the families available when we need them. So also do a lot to help support kinship foster families. 

When a kinship foster family is approved, children are placed in the home and they're approved for that initial placement, they don't start receiving the full reimbursement until they've gone through the entire process. So if we're able to get those foster families through the process much quicker, their reimbursement rate will start earlier in the process and I just want to say to my foster care staff out there... 

Our foster care staff, my friends - that, you know, I realize that a lot of this depends on the family. There are a lot of additional items that come that are required as part of a certification process. They're required to bring copies of marriage license and divorce decrees, pet vaccinations and things like that. 

So we're going to be depending on our families as well to start bringing those items to us more quickly than in the past, because we can't complete things without having all that information. That's going to take work on the part of families too, to shorten the length of time they're taking to get those documents back to us. 

Number nine - a really strong statement in the Plan about children under six being in shelters. We want to get to a point where we have no child under six years of age in a shelter overnight. So when a child is removed and comes into care, we want to have a system where we have foster families or emergency foster care or shelter host homes, whatever the model looks like that that child under the six years of age goes to a family instead of spending the night in shelters. 

And then finally, ten - we need an online application process for foster families. If you have talked to very many foster families or adoptive families, many of them express frustration with losing paperwork. That's a common complaint; that files get lost and they have to reapply. So, we're in 2012, we need to have the ability do an online application process for those families who are interested in that. 

I did spend some time with my IT friends the other day, so, I warned them I included them in here. No, they knew that. So, hopefully we'll get that by the end of the first year. The second year, by year two, we're really going to be focusing on our training for foster families, focusing on how to treat... how to work with children who've experienced trauma. 

You'll see a plan about the trauma care towards the end of the document in an appendix. And then performance-based contracting for our foster care agencies will be a goal the second year. And the second year we will be working towards getting children under 13 out of shelters so that no child under the age of 13 spends the night in a shelter. 

And flipping over to page eight, number twenty is an exciting IT solution. When I talk about this solution, people say, "Oh, like eHarmony." So I'm just going to say it up front. Yes, it's like eHarmony. 

(laughter)

Debra Smith (continues): We need to call it something else, "eFamily," I don't know, where we have a matching process. So we have all the foster families in the system and then we have the children who need placement in the system. 

Not sure exactly how it'll work yet, but where we have a better matching process for matching on those demographics I was taking about, about school districts and different variables, rural, metro, maybe they like dogs, maybe they like to go to sport activities, or whatever the matching variables are. 

Children's special needs, maybe a foster family has experience dealing with a certain special need of a child. So, a better matching process for children and families. And then, finally number 23, and this is actually incremental. So, it actually begins in year one but ends in year five. 

And that is a reimbursement rate for foster families. You'll see a chart broken down at the top of page nine for what that recommendation is for reimbursement rate over those five years. You do see draft on this document. It is still a draft. I'm going to talk about that in Next Steps. 

This is still in draft form and certainly is not an approved or endorsed plan yet. So that's Pinnacle Point One. Pinnacle Point Two is about reorganization. Right now, Child Welfare staff are divided into two different divisions. We have a Children Family Services Division and we have a Field Operations Division. So field staff are actually separated from program staff. 

A vertically integrated division will bring all the staff together in one division with one line of authority. Our vision for that is that by that vertically integrated system the front line staff will get the front line support that they need to actually get the work done and that we'll all be aligned together in one vision. 

So, this reorganization means redistricting the state into 27 - it says 26, so I miscounted - 27 districts that match up with District Attorneys, and then each district will have one Child Welfare District Director to be aligned with that District Attorney. I thought I had a map in there but I don't. I guess it's in the plan. I'm on page 13 by now. I jumped ahead. The new districts... well, let me back up, actually. 

There's a really important point in the restructuring, where it talks about the worker-supervisor ratio. So, when we sat down to figure out how do we reorganize and vertically integrate this division, we started with the front line worker. And we made a recommendation or decision or judgment about what's the right ratio of workers to supervisors, and then we built the organization up from that. Okay? 

So, we started with a worker and imagined what our recommendation would be for worker-supervisor ratio which will be one in five. So there'll be one supervisor for every five workers. One of those five workers will be a Child Welfare Specialist III, who will actually have a reduced caseload, because they're going to do mentoring that we'll talk about here in a minute. 

And from there we made a decision about how many supervisors the next level could supervise. So we took... we have this many supervisors, how many District Directors do we need to supervise them? And the ratio we're looking for there is one in seven. We also went to the next level, it was 1 in 8, and we also looked at different ways to divide up the state. And we went with a district attorney model. 

There are 27 districts in the state, and we will have one District Director for each of those districts. Now obviously in metro, several of the metro areas, that's not going to be enough. So, in Oklahoma County, Tulsa, Cleveland County, we'll need more District Directors than that because of the sheer numbers. 

But you will be aligned with your District Attorney Council across the state. Now from there, we will be dividing the map of Oklahoma with these districts into regions. We're going to move from six areas to five regions. And we'll have Regional Directors. 

So what's changing for the worker and supervisor would be your ratios. You will probably have, as a supervisor, fewer workers than you currently have. But all workers and supervisors will come over to the new division as they are, okay? The next level of County Directors, the way that their job is changing, is right now a County Director is responsible for Child Welfare, Family Support, Adult Protective Services, and maintenance of that location. The building. Okay? 

So a District Director will only be responsible for Child Welfare. They'll have no other program responsibilities. Okay? But they will have to, in some areas, cover a larger geographic area than they currently cover, but they will only have responsibility for Child Welfare. 

And we even narrowed it down a little bit more to only Child Protective Services, Family-centered Services, and permanency planning. So, a County Director - or District Director, I'm sorry - will only be responsible for those three program areas. 

And what we accomplish by that is really focusing that person on those three program areas and that responsibility. They no longer have to be responsible to know all the policy related to SNAP and Adult Protective Services and TANF and foster care and all those responsibilities. 

So, only be responsible for three program areas which are obviously critical program areas in Child Welfare. And the Regional Directors will be the same way. Those five Regional Directors will only be responsible for those three program areas, along with some specialty services like family team meetings, court liaisons, some of that. 

And then on the foster care side, so I know Foster Care staff are thinking, "Where did we go?" 

(laughter)

Debra Smith (continues): So, Foster Care, we need you. We need every single one of you. Foster Care staff will be aligned more like Adoptions. So, Foster Care staff will have the same worker-supervisor ratio I described. The same supervisor-District Director model or ratio that I described. 

But then you'll have your own District Director program, and then eventually Regional or Deputy Director. So it'll look more like Adoptions than it does your current structure. Now the criticism of that, the positive thing is, you know, foster care is really, really hard as far as policy. 

It's one of the hardest programs to supervise. So, we're really again really focusing those staff on just foster care. But what you could lose in that is foster care staff not being aligned with CPS, FCS and Permanency Planning. So, we obviously are going to assign those Foster Care staff to specific regions and districts and have them in the same county. 

They're not going anywhere. They'll just have a different supervision structure. They'll still be there to support the CPS, FCS and Permanency Planning staff in finding placements. Specialty functions, some will be vertically integrated under program staff like the Custody Specialists. 

While some will be included in the group with the Regional Directors, like family team meetings and some of those groups. Support staff, we have really exciting support position I want to tell you about, but I'm going to save it for a little bit later. 

And, so if you flip over to page 14, by January 1, 2013, we'll have all of Child Welfare staff integrated into one division. Now let me tell you, for those of you who don't work in DHS, how much anxiety this causes people. This is scary. Okay? This is huge to us. For us, we hear histories, I wasn't here then, but we hear histories and old stories about reorganizations that really hurt people. Okay? 

We are in a planning process doing everything we can to plan this well, to keep people informed, and to make sure that people know what's happening next. Now, the bad part of that is, all the decisions have been made. We don't have to have it completely done until January 1, 2013. 

So we are working on, right now, the regional maps, finalizing the regional map, what will that look like, we're working on Regional Director job descriptions, PMPs, District Director jobs, PMPs, a timeline of when this will actually happen. 

Do I have any HRMD friends here? TheyÆre all working on the plan. And this is a huge deal for, you know, obviously for HRMD. So we will keep you informed along the way, and that I understand there's a lot of anxiety about a reorganization. 

But we're doing everything we can to make it a smooth transition for you. But we will all be together in one large group. Some people have asked the question, "So, do I lose my job? You know, if I'm a County Director, if I'm a field liaison, where's my job?" We need all the talent that we have out there in Child Welfare. We're actually asking for more staff. So I can't imagine us sending away really talented people to go do some other program area. We need all the talented Child Welfare staff that we have in the state, and more. So I don't know exactly how that's going to work out, exactly where people's boxes are in the org chart. 

But we will get there, and we want to keep all the talents that we have. Pinnacle Point Three, Child Welfare workforce - we must increase the number of staff. You all agree with that? Reduce turnover, and continue to improve the experience level and practice competencies of staff for day-to-day work on Child Welfare cases. 

We had a lot of discussion about this - and debate - in the planning meetings that we had, about just bringing more staff on board isn't going to necessarily fix the problem. Okay? We've got to do a better job of selecting them, training them, supporting them, and holding them accountable. So all of that is combined in this plan. 

It's not just about bringing more people on board. So we're staging it, as you move over to page 16 you'll see we're starting actually the first year with trying to bring on an additional 100 Child Welfare Specialists in the state. One hundred, again, in year two. 

But the very first thing you'll see is we've got to set a standard for caseloads. What's a doable workload and what's a manageable caseload? And then build our staff needs based around those caseload ratios. For Child Protective Services workers, we're asked we will have no more than 12 open investigations; and for Family-Centered Services, no more than eight families; Permanency Planning workers, no more than 15 children; Resource workers, no more than 22 families. 

Obviously, we have to do some adjusting there if they're not doing home studies or, you know, we'll have to change that as the model grows. And then adoption workers, no more than eight families and eight children, because theirs is kind of a combined workload. Now these are standards. The first version that I had in here said "caps," and I was cautioned not to use the word "cap," because then that implies that you would never have more cases than that. Okay? 

This is the standard that we'll strive for and we'll have to show improvement over the five years of getting to that standard, but that doesn't mean that we won't have a Permanency Planning worker somewhere who has 17 children. Okay? But we will have to show improvement as we get more staff, and as we keep more staff, and as far as meeting that standard. 

That doesn't mean that on the first day of this plan, that we can't assign more workers where we need to. We've got to get the work done, but that's what our goals will be in recruiting all these additional staff and maintaining the staff that we have is to get to these standards and maintain them over the five-year period. Okay? 

This is number four: Looking at a successful completion of a performance competency evaluation. So you go to core training and you actually have to pass a test before you can be assigned a caseload. And number five is a huge one when it comes to the impact on the child. 

Beginning in January 1, 2013, we will no longer assign secondary assignments for workers to visit their children in contiguous counties. What that means is, if a case is out of Oklahoma County and the child is placed with a relatives say maybe in Cleveland County, the primary worker will go visit that child. 

There won't be another case worker assigned, if it's a county right next to the main county. And that change will impact 1,400 children. That's huge. That they will be seen by their primary worker, not a secondary worker. So that is an exciting change. We're doing updated technology. 

Hopefully, new tablets and smart phones for our Child Welfare staff. I even heard talk about, it's not in here, but I heard talk about a KIDS app like on an iPhone kind of thing, doesn't that sound exciting? Of course, I can't see that well. As I'm getting older I don't know if I could work on a KIDS app on an iPhone. But we've talked about things like that. 

We'll improve the mentoring and the field training program for staff. So after you finish core, you would go through a field training program, say 90 days or so after you finish core. Are you all familiar with some of the large police departments, Oklahoma City, Edmond, who have field training officers, who go to the field with officers and they have to sign off on their activities each day? That's what we're creating. 

A model where the worker goes out with the lead worker in that group and maybe even rotate amongst other lead workers and they're evaluated each day on their interviewing skills, their communication, their ability to answer questions from families, their use of policy, their engagement. 

All those skills that we're looking for in workers and they'll be able to get immediate feedback from someone who helps them through those critical first few months of learning how to be a Child Welfare Specialist. There's mentoring in here for supervisors. Not exactly like that model but similar. 

And number 14, this is kind of an exciting one. And we're creating an administrative support position, one for every two Child Welfare units, that's kind of like a case aide, but a full-time one, who is actually a full-time employee who has specific duties and responsibilities that they can assist you with some of the administrative tasks that you do so that you have more time to spend with children. 

The top of page 18, and we are asking for an increase in the pay for Child Welfare staff. Again, it's like the foster parent model of an increase over five years. Starting in year one, this amounts to about a 7% increase. The first year and then each year thereafter, if we're fully funded, an incremental increase over five years. 

And this would get us to what would be considered competitive salary for our region. So Pinnacle Point Four, we must use the practice model to achieve timely and appropriate permanency outcomes for all children. This has to do with our practice model and implementation of that and how that's helping us get to permanency for kids. 

Lots of data analysis, permanency roundtables and support for... this is number seven on that page nineteen, a pilot for supporting kinship families in a different way, modeled after what's called the KEEP program, which is an evidence-based program. 

Flipping over to page 20. Number 11 is our trauma work. Hopefully, you've had a chance to hear now, from someone somewhere, that we are working on becoming a trauma-informed Child Welfare system. This is huge. This is recognizing and understanding and assessing trauma and offering the right set of services to kids that really helps them get better. 

So, that's included in here as an appendix. But we definitely want to continue that work. Pinnacle Point Five is all about quality assurance. We will be creating a new quality assurance team who'll be led by a Deputy Director, I mean supervised by the Division Director who really focuses on the fidelity of the work that we do. Fidelity reviews is what they're called. 

So are we doing the components of the practice model the way that we intended to do them? The assessment of child safety, the family team meeting, the initial meeting with parents and resource parents? 

Looking at those, I call it "old school quality assurance." It's a little bit different than the CFSR model, but looking to see are things documented well? What's the quality of our data? And this will be an additional quality assurance team that I think will really give us a lot of concrete feedback about what areas we need to improve. 

We'll identify key data points that will be measured, which will probably be those 15 performance areas and make that available to the public at the county, regional and state level. That's all included. Being just more transparent about how we're doing in Child Welfare so that a county, or a legislator, or a leader in a community can look to see, or a resource parent or anyone in the community can look to see, "How is my county performing?" 

Someone who lives in Atoka county, how many foster parents does Atoka county have? How are we doing on placement stability? Just being more transparent with our outcomes. Pinnacle Point Six is about ensuring safety and worker visitation. This is about the way we investigate abuse/neglect and out-of-home care. 

And we will be working with Office of Client Advocacy to make those processes more similar than they are different. And we may be counting our data different, and I certainly make an argument that you might see in our next Federal reporting cycle, or the next one, and that our abuse/neglect and care may go up. 

And I explain that in the document about why I believe that could happen, because of how we count abuse/neglect and how we have two different processes for how we currently do that. And then, on the visitation, again, just increasing the continuity of visitation by the same worker in the contiguous counties will help. 

But then eventually the goal is that there won't be secondary workers for visiting children. Now, there's always going to be the exception. So if you're in Woodward County and you place your child in McCurtain County, we'll probably need a secondary for that. 

But based on a distance, two or three hours, or whatever we decide to be the timeframe, you'll get to go visit your own children. Of course, we can't get there until we get the caseload standard where we need it to be, but we heard consistently through the Child Welfare Summits that workers want to have their caseloads low enough so they go see their own children regardless of where they are placed. 

Pinnacle Point Seven is huge. It's all about community partners. Other state agencies, the private sector, tribes, and supporting children and families. We can't do it alone. Lots of initiatives on this one about the first one... work with Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives around recruitment. 

We have a great campaign, or a great event coming up. Next week - 8,308 Campaign for working with the faith community on recruiting foster families. And we also have in here some work with the Oklahoma Child Welfare Stakeholder Collaborations State Advisory Board for Improving Services. 

These are the community partnership boards that are in many communities. We want to look at strengthening those. Joint response protocols with law enforcement. We need to update those. We haven't done those in a few years, so we need to go back out and visit with, especially when we re-district, and all that work with law enforcement to be sure that we're responding appropriately and together as a team. Working with the Oklahoma Indian Child Welfare Association to improve outcomes for Native American children. 

And number nine, we're doing a lot of work with the domestic violence field on improving our protocols of working together with domestic violence victims so that we understand each other's expertise, and work together as a team. 

And number 12, we've got to work with Oklahoma schools of social work to increase the number of students that are interested in Child Welfare. We... right now, you just have to have a Bachelor's Degree to work in Child Welfare. In the past, we've required social work and/or related degrees. 

We're not saying here that you have to have a social work degree but we definitely want to increase the number of social work students who are attracted to this field and so that we do build our staff as far as social work skills and then encouraging the ones who are here to go back and get their Master's Degrees as well. 

Working with youth services agencies - a lot of the youth services agencies, when they look at the plan, they think about reducing the shelter population. I see Shawn back there. You know, are you doing away with shelters in Oklahoma? That's been a common question. We need all the current providers that are serving children and families. 

We may, over the five year period, have to shift some of the services for the model that they use, but there are some exceptional providers. And we want to work with them on developing a model, such as shelter host homes. And we know we will probably always have shelters, especially for older kids, but work with them on how to meet the needs in Oklahoma as we shift our model. Again, the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse that's all of our systems of care work. So, those are the seven Pinnacle Points. 

You've got a lot of appendices, we're not going to go through all those, but I especially want to call your attention to - let's see which one it is. We have a great communications plan. Thank you, Sheree and her team. So, I want to move through to page 16 of the appendices. 

This is the Oklahoma Trauma-Informed Systems Project State Implementation Plan. We are already out there in six lab sites working with those communities and becoming trauma-informed. The teams have both Child Welfare staff, mental health providers, domestic violence providers and the community helping to develop trauma-informed Child Welfare systems. 

So, that is also a five-year plan. So if you have a few minutes to read that, I would encourage you to do that. And we also have some other appendices in here. One connects the performance areas to the Pinnacle Points that's interesting. One shows a timeline for the next steps. I have a chart or a flowchart. 

And we have the fiscal impact in here. We copied it really, really small. So you have to get your magnifying glass out. It's very small, but the fiscal impact is on about page 32 of the appendix. And then towards the end, we have a Gantt chart that shows the timeframe in kind of an easy-to-view format of when these initiatives are actually going to be implemented. 

The fiscal impact. I'm going to jump right to that. In the first year, we are requesting just under 30 million state dollars the first year. The second year, we're requesting just over $30 million again. I think it's about 33. Just under the first year, just over the second year. The third year, it's just under $15 million. The fourth year, just under 10 and the fifth year just under 10. 

The way the state budget works, is that first year, if we get that $30 million into our budget, that will carry over in our baseline of our budget. I might be using the wrong words. And then the next year we'll be asking for another $33 million. And the next, we have $63 million. The next year we'll be asking for another 15, another 10, and another 10. 

So over the five year period, if we're fully funded the way the plan's laid out, that would be an additional 150 million state dollars in the Child Welfare budget by the end of the fifth year, in the baseline budget. Did I say that right, Sandra? 

And on that chart, page 32, it's matched up to show which initiative, and count each initiative as funded, so if you wanted to break it down and see where is that money going, you can find that on page 32 in the finer details of how that was costed out. 

Next steps. This is a draft plan. This was our first submission. And the plan required us to have that submitted my March 30th. The plaintiffs had an additional 15 days after that to provide written comments. I have not received those. Rick? Rick, did you ever get those? I'm kidding. I was asking Rick in legal, but he doesn't have them either. 

We have not seen, I have not seen copies of what the plaintiffs have said. I bet someone has seen them, but we haven't seen them yet. And then the co-neutrals, who are the people who will be monitoring the plan, have until May 15th to provide us comments on our plan and either to endorse or not endorse the plan. Okay? 

If they endorse the plan, we have another 75 days to work on all those targets and baselines and all that. If they don't endorse the plan, they'll send it back to us. And we'll have another 30 days to improve upon the plan and resubmit. 

They'll go back through same process, and the acceptance date is defined as the date the co-neutrals endorse the plan and the targets and baselines. So eventually you'll hear about an acceptance date that's much later than probably four or five months in the future of what is our official acceptance date. 

Our monthly reporting begins three months after acceptance, and these reports will be made public. I just wanted to end with a quote. And I began with a quote in the plan. But I really believe that this quote really sums all of it up for all of us in Oklahoma. It's going to take more than OKDHS but it's going to take all of our communities as well. 

No Audio: If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much. - Marian Wright Edelman

"If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much." I think that really illustrates or demonstrates or represents the work that we do at OKDHS Child Welfare, and really summarizes what all of us need to do to really make this the kind of program that we all want in Oklahoma.