Working with Your GAL

0:00 all right

1:22 okay it is 10 30 right now i'm not sure if folks have had a chance to come over from the other session yet um yeah i was thinking there might have to be a few minutes of turnover yeah let's see so i know we should we do need to spend just about or start wrapping up about five minutes early or before the end of the session tracy so if you want i can just give you kind of a oh there's joe i see him in the comments it would be perfect yes that would be great wonderful wow and remember i can't see comments so still do it make sure you do it verbally okay okay so joe did just say lisa's just

2:08 wrapping up um so we'll just wait just a couple more minutes and then get started sounds good i'm looking at the hummingbirds outside my window oh i love it i'm actually going to get a feeder i think this weekend because i just want to sit and watch them yeah [Music] that's one thing i miss from working from home is my my office at home i have my little bird stuff all out in front of my window yeah that's awesome oh joe just said i'm already live but i does that mean okay yeah so i think people are starting to come in so okay great i think we should go ahead and get started so um we are very excited to have tracy brennaman

2:54 here she is a board member of the foster family alliance of north carolina and the guardian ad litem in north carolina among many other things and she's going to talk with us today about working with guardian ad litems all right so good morning everyone i am thrilled to be here with you all um as kate said i am part of the guardian ad litem program i'm the actually the district administrator for judicial district 3b which includes carteret craven and pamlico counties but the most important thing i've ever done is i am an adoptive parent of a child from the foster care system so in my book foster and resource families um and adoptive parents are heroes um you guys are awesome i had actually been training people how to be

3:40 foster pa and adoptive parents for many years before i adopted my child who was 14 when i adopted her and boy howdy i've never i thought i knew what i was talking about but i didn't have a clue until i actually had her in my home and was parenting her um and i'm so grateful for the experience but like i said i know how hard it is to do the boots on the ground 24 7 um of fostering and adopting so i'm just honored to be here with you all so i'm going to start out with just a little bit of a history lesson but i promise you guys i'm going to try to make sure it's not boring history because most people don't like history so just so you know there is a reason for there being a guardian headline program but what is that reason well in the 60s

4:25 there was a national movement to make sure that children in foster care actually had a voice in this whole process because basically kids would go into the foster care system and just disappear i know some of you guys are probably thinking well that still kind of happens today and certainly kids do stay in care longer than we want them to in many situations but back then it literally was um almost like a life sentence for kids so people started to talk about how we need somebody who can be a voice for these kids so in response to um the federal child abuse prevention and treatment act which you guys have probably heard about before capta um one of the things that this required was for legal representation for juveniles

5:12 to be appointed in child welfare proceedings so in 1977 there was the first guardian ad litem statute in the state of north carolina that gave judges the ability to appoint a guardian ad litem attorney actually as a guardian adult item in cases but it wasn't mandatory so when the program first started out on the only people that were guardians ad litem were actually attorneys and if you've ever lived in another state you might have uh seen that in many states across the country that's still the model that they use that they're only using attorneys but we're going to talk about why um ours is a little bit different um in uh in 79 because of attorneys were doing a

6:00 you know a thorough job as gal and the judges really liked the fact that they were getting this extra valuable information from these uh attorney gals that helped them make the best decisions in the best interest of children and they really liked that so in 1979 they amended the statute to require the appointment of gals in all abuse and neglect cases so then in 1983 the us the office of the guardian adele item was created in north carolina as a point of law and the purpose was to implement that volunteer and attorney co-appointment model of representing children in juvenile court so by 94 there was a local gao

6:47 program established in all north carolina judicial districts so wherever you are there should be an office of the guardian ad litem um in your judicial district many of the judicial districts cover several counties some only one but most of them have several counties so when does the guardian adeline get involved is a question that we get a lot so whenever dss has decided you know that a child's not safe for whatever reason they're going to file a petition with the court um spelling out what those allegations are what those concerns are let me make sure i'm doing this right what those concerns are

7:34 and when that petition is filed that's when the law says that a guardian ad litem shall be appointed now they are appointed always if the allegations are involving abuse or neglect or both and if a juvenile is alleged to be dependent the court may appoint a guardian adult item so it's not required if the only thing alleged on the petition is dependency and dependency is a very specific definition under the law in north carolina it basically means that there is no parent guardian or custodian responsible for the juveniles care or supervision or it could be that

8:19 the juvenile's parent guardian or custodian is unable to provide for their care for example someone who you know has maybe severe medical issues or severe mental health issues and they are just not able to take care of their kids so if the allegation is strictly dependency because of a situation like that the judge may may or may not to be honest a lot of the districts across the state just don't have enough guardian ad litem volunteers to cover the required abuse and neglect cases so you may often have um see situations where children who are only alleged to be dependent don't have a guardian ad litem which

9:05 which we don't like and which is why we work very hard to recruit volunteers because we would like for all children in the foster care system regardless of the reason to have a guardian ad litem volunteer and i'm going to give you guys some ideas later on about how you can help us with that and kate and joe if there's any questions feel free to to stop me as i'm going so so what is the role of the guardian ad litem advocate well they are going to dig for details in the case and i'm going to talk a little bit later more about what that actually looks like but they really do their own independent investigation

9:50 separate from dss we are not the department of social services and we're not affiliated with the department of social services doesn't mean we don't work in partnership with them because we do but we literally are even in two totally separate branches of the government the department of social services falls under north carolina dhhs the office of the guardian adult item is on the judicial branch of the government under the administrative office of the court so those of us who are gal staff are actually court employees and then of course our volunteers work under our supervision they're going to collaborate with others involved in the case

10:37 that would of course include social workers since you guys certainly know that every child comes with at least one of those maybe more depending on where the case is they talk with the teachers involved for the child day care workers doctors therapists and of course they should also be talking with you all as the caretakers for the children and again i'll talk a little bit more why that's so important that they have that collaboration with the resource parents involved on the cases they're going to recommend what they think is best for the child best interest of the child is our core tenant all of our guardian adult items are supposed to be child focused and

11:24 their ultimate goal in everything that they do is to recommend to the court what they think should be the best outcome for the children that we represent so they are the voice of the child as i had talked about earlier in the 60s and for many many years there really was no one to speak for the kids so they're supposed to spend time getting to know the child and what that child wants to see happen that's so important that the guardian spends time doing that they're going to monitor the case to completion and as you guys know you know sometimes these cases

12:10 well let me say rephrase that rarely these cases are a few months often they're a year or more um or many years unfortunately still in some cases and our guardian ad litem volunteers um are you know we ask them when they sign up to be guardians if they're willing to commit to being a part of this child's life and be their voice for the duration of these cases so until that child reaches permanency whatever that might look like the expectation is that the guardian ad litem would continue to be their advocate so when you have placements that you know may have come from um another home and they've been in care

12:55 a while hopefully they're going to have a consistent person in their life and that will be the guardian adult item and a lot of times as we all know unfortunately because of the turnover with social workers um especially now it seems like um social worker turnover is at a an all-time high at least from what i've seen um it's it's really important that they have someone consistent in their life and often that one person is going to be their guardian adult item they also are required by law to keep all records confidential and i'm going to talk about that a little bit more later as well okay joe and kate just checking in to

13:41 make sure i'm still coming through okay i hope that's a yes i can't see anybody so i'm hoping you all can still hear me okay okay well i'm going to keep it moving so so one of the other questions we get is why do you use volunteers because in some states it's attorneys that have to be the guardian adult item for the child nothing against attorneys they're great but attorneys definitely have a legal focus so there's a lot of reasons why volunteers are important

14:26 after the attorney gals began to represent children the state did some evaluation of the cost and effectiveness of attorney representation and they decided that citizen volunteers could actually be trained to perform the non-legal aspects so this allowed the attorney to focus on the legal part and the procedural aspects of the case while the guardian ad litem focuses on the child so some reasons why we so value our volunteers and see them as um you know as essential to our program one is because they have the time our volunteers come to us from all walks of life but we do make sure that they understand that being a guardian adult

15:12 item is not your average volunteer experience i always say it's not like going down to the soup kitchen although that's a great thing but this is much much more involved so we try to make sure that they get that um and that they're going to have that time tracy yes ma'am hi honey um we have a question for you okay if you if that's what you want to do right absolutely so um robin reece is asking what do you do if you're assigned a gal that either isn't that involved with the child or does not act in the child's best interests we literally had one tell us

15:58 custody shouldn't have been taken but it should have been buried under the rug okay that's interesting well the guardian ad litem program in every uh district does have guardian ad litem staff so if that will probably be a guardian ad litem supervisor or the the highest rank i guess or highest management would be the district administrator so for example in my area i have two guardian ad litem supervisors that cover the three counties and they are the ones that the volunteers directly report to it their job as supervisors is to make sure that the guardian ad litem is having that time with the child

16:44 that the recommendations they're making make sense they literally review every court report that the guardian ad litem uh completes before it's even seen in court to make sure that you know that what they're recommending you know does have a basis in the evidence that they found so if you have concerns that maybe the guardian ad litem is not spending enough time or is not um you know making what you believe to be sound recommendations you could certainly call and talk with their guardian adeline supervisor um you you could talk with the child social worker who also would you know reach out to either the guardian ad litem or the guardian ad litem supervisor but it's kind of like anywhere there's a i guess chain of

17:30 command if you will and if you feel like they're just not really listening or doing what is truly in the best interest of that child i'm sure that the program there would want to hear about that keep in mind you know a lot of times guardians ad litem will have information that you might not um and we're gonna again we're gonna talk about that a little bit later uh because they do have access to a lot of things that not everyone does but that you know that could also be part of the reason why their recommendations might not seem um in the best interest of the child to you i hope that helps a little bit but that would be my recommendation to reach out to the social worker and or the guardian adeline program we have one more question okay

18:17 um valerie thomas asked i had a gal that said she was an attorney does that mean she was still a volunteer um it's very possible because uh as i said our volunteers do come from all walks of life generally uh we probably well i wouldn't say probably if they are an attorney that's currently practicing um they shouldn't be practicing as a guardian ad item for children um in a county that they might have any other representation going on for example if they're representing parents in dss court it would probably be a conflict of interest for them to be the

19:03 guardian adult item for a child in dss court but we do have sometimes we have retired attorneys in fact i have some um in my county uh in my uh district that uh make great guardians because they kind of understand the legal process and all um so it's highly possible and the other thing is in some um situations it's possible that the judge will appoint an attorney as a guardian ad litem for a child who might have some um mental capacity issues uh and that would be kind of like a different kind of guardian ad litem uh so that's possible that that attorney is acting in that position but all of our

19:49 guardian adult items for dss children are generally generally going to be volunteers so but it's possible that they could have been or may still be an attorney anything else right now joe okay nothing right now okay thank you the other thing that's really valuable about our volunteers is that they're not part of the system um they don't have the mandates the policies the rules and regs that dss and others have they are here solely to advocate for what they believe to be is in the best interest of the child um for

20:36 example you know dss has to do diligent efforts with parents it's federal law you know that they work and give parents every opportunity which i know that you guys as foster i'm gonna i'll just say as resource parents because i don't want to miss anybody as resource parents can get really frustrated about because it's like wait a minute you know these folks really aren't doing anything why are we still you know focusing on reunification um and the guardian ad litem uh while we certainly support and believe that reunification is the best plan for kids when it's you know when it's the best plan when it's safe um they they can decide you know sooner than dss sometimes that it's time to change the focus and they may decide to

21:21 go to a plan of custody or guardianship or even adoption um you know sooner than dss would because they're not bound by those same federal mandates they are here solely to ask themselves what do i think is the best thing for this child in terms of their permanency and in terms of their well-being and that's what i'm going to recommend to the judge i mean of course it should be based on the evidence they found not just on feelings um but they can advocate for whatever they think is best because they're not part of the system and don't have that system focus another thing is they can focus on one case now sometimes our guardians have more than one case because they have the time and

22:08 that's fine our best practice though is to have one guardian for one child or one family of children at a time unfortunately you guys have seen how overwhelmed social workers are i was a dss with the dss system for the first 29 years of my career before i moved to guardian adele item so i've been there i've been a cps social worker a foster care social worker i've been a supervisor in those arenas as well as a program manager also worked at the state and federal level it's hard what they do they have way too much to do and not enough time so even when they really really care and are doing the best that they can they still can't give 100 percent of their time and

22:56 focus to the one child that you guys care about that you're caring for our guardians ad litem can do that so that you know they're never going to have that case or shouldn't have that caseload of 15 kids like a social worker does sometimes they see things that we don't always see again because they are all unique individuals and they have that fresh perspective because they're not system folks sometimes they can really provide some valuable insight and they also bring their own life experience to the table most of the guardian adult item volunteers that you'll see have lived in their community for some time and they know their communities

23:42 they know the resources they know the challenges of the communities that the children come from so that can be very helpful particularly resources because they know what's out there they bring integrity to our program and we say that because when you have someone who is voluntarily giving their time and energy away to a cause that just automatically shows you that that program is worth something um and even more for vulnerable children to see that there's someone out there that's advocating for them who's not a paid employee it can really reinforce their value and show them that someone cares

24:27 and here's a big one we use our volunteers because they're effective the model that we use of co-appointing a volunteer with an attorney advocate to speak for the children in court provides that strong competent advocacy to the children who need it so even though most of our volunteers are not attorneys in each district we're going to you're going to see at least one attorney advocate um and maybe more depending on how big your district is who is actually in court representing the children okay they they are the attorney for the children but they stand up in court with the guardian ad litem volunteer to be sure that all of the child's um best interest concerns

25:14 are represented to the judge and then we use volunteers because they care our volunteers go through a rigorous screening process it's actually not unlike what you guys went through when you became licensed those of you who are licensed they have to go through 30 hours of pre-service training they have to do court observation they have to do the full background checks and all the ril check all of those things that you guys had to go through as well and all of that happens before they're sworn in before a judge and they know that the expectation is that they're going to advocate for a child from beginning to end and then it can

26:01 take years and they do all of that because they want to make a difference in the life of a child so who is qualified to be a gal well you have to be at least 18 years of age although again because life experience is important we may or may not take somebody that's 19. it would just really depend on the person i do have some younger uh guardian adult item advocates who do an exceptional job because they've had some life experience that's really put them at a place to to represent you have to be willing to complete that extensive screening and that initial pre-service training

26:46 you have to have that sincere concern for the well-being of children see doesn't it sound like like you guys have that commitment to advocate for a child until that safe and permanent home is established and the court involvement is no longer required they definitely need the ability to be objective non-judgmental and culturally competent and we do spend a lot of time in our training trying to um you know help them to become that way we also do very much you guys probably hopefully have heard the term mutual assessment um when you became licensed uh part of the process of going through the tips map or whatever training process you

27:31 went through that was so that you that your agency could decide if you guys were right for the job and for you to decide if that agency was right for you and we kind of do the same thing with our guardians we go through that mutual training process to make sure that they can do this that they can be objective and non-judgmental and that they are open to supporting people from all kinds of backgrounds we want them to be able to act respectfully with all of these folks and also keeping in mind that most of the families that we're working with are going through crisis because of what's happened certainly we know our children have experienced trauma just by the by the virtue of the fact that they're in

28:18 care and they have to have good verbal and written skills because our guardians you know they need to know how to talk to folks they need to know how to ask questions um they need to know how to engage with kids and they have to write a court report that becomes part of the legal record so you know being able to um you know take all of the information that they gather and put it into a well-written court report is extremely important i don't know how many of you guys have had the opportunity to be in court um but if you if you have you know you've seen how important it is that that anyone who's testifying is able to make it very clear to the judge what

29:04 they think needs to happen and why so the guardian ad litem needs to make sure that all of that information is in their court report and that they have the ability to explain that if questioned by anybody the parents attorneys or the dss attorney or the judge so what happens when the gal is appointed well hopefully lots of things uh one of the first things that we often tell the gal to do is to read the dss records and talk to the social worker you know you guys have probably seen that in in most counties uh we don't have that knee-jerk reaction where we just drag kids into foster care without trying to help families first

29:49 back when i first started practicing in the 90s we were real bad about just you know asking a few questions and then filing a petition and putting kids in foster care and we realized we were harming children and families by doing that so most of the time dss will probably have already done quite a bit of work with that family and will have a lot of records and information that's important for the guardian adult item to know about so they're going to probably start or at least get a lot of their information on the front end so that they know who to talk to next okay they're going to contact you as the the person that's caring for that child to arrange for a time to meet and talk to the child they'll they'll do that you know um as

30:36 often as they think it's necessary and certainly they will respect or should respect your time and your schedule um and in setting up the time to do that but it is really important for the guardian adult item to have that time to get to know the child so that they feel comfortable telling them you know what they think is important part of the guardian ad litem's responsibility is to make sure that children are safe and that their needs are being met so they will need to see your home they're not there to um you know to do the whole white glove test uh to you know to pass judgment on you guys on your housekeeping skills or anything like that but they are there just to be sure that the child's comfortable that

31:22 their needs are being met and that there are no safety concerns um and i i hope that the experiences that you've had with guardians ad litem were were positive and that they were respectful when in your home because that's something that we do talk with them about they're also going to talk to the birth parents and anyone else they deem relevant to the case so as they go through those records as they talk to the child as they talk to you guys you know that's going to give them clues about who they need to talk to they're also going to review other records related to the child so school records mental health records for the child

32:08 medical records because by law they are allowed to obtain any records that they deem relevant to the case even if they are confidential so when a guardian is appointed they actually get an appointment order signed by the judge that explains that law allowing them to get the information that they need of course there are some federal laws that trump that which we all know so they you know can't get mental health or substance abuse records for the birth parents unless the birth parents sign releases for them to do that a lot of times they will which is the other cool thing about guardians when families realize that they're not the social worker sometimes they actually will talk to the

32:54 guardian ad litem even more than the social worker or be willing to allow them to see records so so that can be very helpful as well to be sure that the judge has everything that they need they will take all of this information that they gather as they go and they will write a court report that will be presented in court and they will testify to that as well so any questions so far i wanted to take a quick few minutes to allow for questions if you guys have any i'm not seeing any questions so far tracy okay i hope that means i'm doing a good job then

33:40 you are rocking it okay all right there's just been a few comments about some gals who have not uh seen the child since they've been in care okay so um maybe you could address how foster parents could deal with that if sure they have a gal but the gil hasn't seen the child yet okay so one thing i will say guys is that during the time of covid uh basically the state put all of the guardians adele litem on lockdown in other words they were not allowed to have any face-to-face contact with

34:25 their child clients they weren't allowed to go to meetings face-to-face they really couldn't do anything face-to-face now they should have though however still attempted to make contact through virtual means so a lot of our guardians have been doing zoom meetings with the kids zoom meetings with the foster adoptive and kinship parents um you know attending cfts and all via zoom or phone contact was okay as well um so hope so it's possible that maybe some of the not seeing them as as much was due to covet however that there has been some relaxing of that and the volunteers now are allowed um to see

35:11 their child clients again as long as everybody is comfortable with it particularly you guys that you're comfortable with them coming to your home and that everyone follows any guidelines of the cdc which i think recently got relaxed even more so as long as everybody's healthy and um and you know being safe the volunteers are again allowed to see their child clients so hopefully you'll begin to see that things kind of return to quote unquote normal since those things have been relaxed now if they just haven't made contact at all um again i would um you know encourage you to mention that to the social worker and or contact the gal office and asked for the

35:59 supervisor because again that is part of what our expectation is it's kind of hard to write a court report and express a child's wishes if you haven't seen them um so i definitely would encourage you guys um to mention that to the local program office because that needs to be happening uh and again you know you'll want to also make sure that a gal was appointed because if you have one of those cases that's dependency only it might be that there is not a gal appointed the other thing that i didn't mention earlier is that in in some districts where they don't have enough volunteers the gal staff is the one who will have to

36:44 make the contact with the children and write the court reports and as you can imagine that can be challenging if they have a lot of cases that are not covered by a volunteer fortunately in our district all of our all of our children have a volunteer and we are actively recruiting more because unfortunately due to the stresses of coven we're beginning to see an uptick in the number of cases so so it is really important but it also is law that if a child is alleged to be abused or neglected that they do have representation from gal so i definitely would encourage you to reach out to the gal office if you have

37:30 not seen or heard from anyone on your child's case so here's the fun part okay what can you guys do to help the gals and in a minute i would love to hear from you guys anything that you think guardians can do to help you guys um one of the most important things that you guys can do for the guardian adult item is to communicate all of the gals in the state now actually are supposed to have their own professional ncgal volunteer email account it's a secure email process where you guys can send information to them about your your kids that you think it's important for them to know and they can

38:15 respond in a way that's secure so some of the things you would want to share with them are just some updates about the child's progress you could send some pictures you could send information about school if they're involved in some kind of you know sports or awards things just anything that you think is important for the guardian to know that also helps them know how the child is doing which is something they have to report to the court um you can communicate with them to let them know when it's a good time to contact you or to come to see the child i have had guardians say to me

39:02 that the foster parents sometimes won't call them back i think part of that is because sometimes foster parents may not understand what the gal's role is and you guys are just trying to protect protect the confidentiality of the child which is exactly what you're supposed to do um but if a guardian ad litem does reach out to you you can certainly verify them with the local gl office or social services if you if you would feel more comfortable doing that before you reach back out to them but it is important you know to get in touch with them as soon as you hear from them so they can start their job of getting to know the child um and and working on that relationship with the child definitely let the gal know if the child

39:48 has needs again part of the guardian's role is to be checking on the well-being needs of kids that they represent so if the child has needs particularly ones that are not being met let that guardian ad litem know for example you know i know that um you know sometimes most of the time you guys know if there's a need for therapy or for some other therapeutic intervention or maybe there's a medical need or um a connection need that's a big one you know where a child hasn't seen their siblings or their you know they want to call and talk with one of their birth parents and that's not happening um you know those kinds of things are

40:33 important for that child's well-being and if it's not happening you can let the guardian ad litem know about that and they can assist in advocating to make sure those needs are met in some districts they also have um i don't know if you guys ever heard the term 501c3 but that's the the federal approval for a group to be a non-profit organization and in some districts there are non-profit organizations that are dedicated to supporting the gal program and all the children that are represented for example in my district we have friends of 3b um they're not affiliated with us in terms of they're not part of the government you know i i don't run it um

41:19 it's it's handled strictly by some of our volunteers who started it and what they do is they raise money to pay for things for child clients that dss is unable to pay for for example um there we had a child in a group home who uh because of covid you know the kids were doing school via computer well in this group home for six boys they had one computer so this kid wasn't doing that great in school anyway and he was having to wait to have his turn to use the computer so his guardian ad litem contacted our friends of 3b and said hey can we buy this kid a laptop because he really needs to have that educational time and

42:06 they approved it and we're able to purchase that for him sometimes it can be other medical equipment or things that medicaid doesn't cover and dss doesn't have funds for so you might want to check with your district gal office to see if they have something like that in case any of your any of the children in your home might have needs uh that are going unmet so make sure that your guardian adeline is aware of that because the big thing let's see and i forgot to do my thing here is that the more information they have about the child the more sound their recommendations will be and that's the important thing if they don't know you know you don't know what you don't know right so we

42:52 want to make sure they that you guys communicate with them what you think is important too so they can always be looking into that we hope that you'll encourage your foster child's relationship with the gal you can help them understand that the gal's role is to get to know them find out what their wishes are and tell the judge what they think is best for the child and that's pretty much it you know let them know no they're not a social worker um they're just a volunteer that wants to make sure that you're okay and they're going to come and talk with you and it's okay to tell them you know what you want and any concerns that you might have and that can really help a lot and the other thing is kind of like um

43:37 what you see when when people separate or maybe even with social workers talk positively about the gal in the child's presence even if you don't necessarily feel that way about the gao because we do know that you know gals are people and not all of us like all of us it could be a personality conflict it could be that the gao is recommending something and you don't particularly agree with that but in order for them to figure things out and do the best job that they can um it's important that the child feel comfortable talking with them so you know that's helpful for us is if you help the child to feel comfortable when the gal comes to visit

44:24 involve the gal you know let them know about appointments that the child has doctors appointments school meetings those iep meetings are really important to have them there treatment team meetings if your child's involved in a therapeutic process the positives too those sports events those award ceremonies you know let them know when these things are happening doesn't necessarily mean they'll be able to come to all of them because you know some of our volunteers also work full-time as well so they may not be able to be at all of them but again it gives them that valuable information about what's important to the child and how they're doing if they're it's important that our kids you know you guys all know i'm sure the

45:09 reasonable and prudent parent standard you know we want our kids to feel normal we want them to be involved in normal things so it's important for the gl to know you know that that's happening for those kids and here's a big one guys we really need you to remember what the guardian adult items role is they aren't the social worker so things like transporting they are absolutely not allowed to transport children so they should never do that or anyone else for that matter they also are not allowed to personally buy things for the child that's one of the hardest things for our volunteers because they want to they want to they're good you know they're helping people they would like to be able to do those

45:54 things but the reason they can't is because we never want to create any um sense that children are telling a guardian something strictly because they're trying to please the guardian you know if if a child knows that every time the guardian comes they're going to get a present they may think well i want to tell the guardian what i think they want to hear and we don't want that we want kids to tell us the truth um and to tell us you know what they really want so guardians should not be buying things for the kids the other thing is that the gal is not a lawyer okay some of them might be okay but even if they are in this process they are not attorneys please don't ask them for

46:40 legal advice and don't ask them to explain court proceedings to you they might try and i hope they'll i hope they won't i hope they'll say no but my concern would be that because they're not attorneys in these matters they might give you information or interpret the information in a way that's not 100 accurate or could even be misleading and that's just not their role um to be there as an attorney so always make sure you get that information from the social worker and not the guardian adult item tracy done [Applause] i have some interesting comments in the chat okay that i think can contribute to this conversation great one of the one of the

47:26 um folks wrote it's actually karen louder i was a gal for about two years unfortunately i never witnessed the data from the geneal to be viewed important enough to change dss's recommendations which is interesting and then it was followed up by rebecca and jamie mazingo they said karen i have seen one of our gals express this same frustration in one of our cases luckily i've seen several others be highly respected and their input was crucial to the outcome

48:13 or the of the child's care so that was they're seeing both sides of that and i think one of the things you're bringing up here kind of ties to that is what can foster parents do to help the gals in that process do you have any ideas on that i do absolutely and i'm really glad you guys brought that up so one of uh one of the biggest or most important part of my role as a district administrator is to make sure that our program is seen with the utmost respect and that our guardians you know are considered uh knowledgeable and that

49:00 their integrity is never called into question um not only myself but also my staff when we when we have new guardians come in you know that's part of our training process is to make sure that they understand their role um and that they are never misrepresenting um the guardian ad litem program or you know or doing anything that could call um the integrity of our program into question uh so and i'm not saying that you know wherever you guys are don't don't tell me you know has ever had anything happen but you know we also have to keep in mind that we do have volunteers and sometimes volunteers um can make choices or say things that could call the entire program you know

49:47 into question for example you guys know you've had us probably had a social worker that you were like what the heck you know why is this person even a social worker and that unfortunately can have an impact on that whole agency and how people feel about the whole agency i mean that's true of any business right so that could happen in a guardian adeline program um so our job and part of my role is to have that relationship with our district court judges so that you know that they understand what kind of training we're doing and we do lots of training in our district not only do they get pre-service but they're required to have at least 12 hours annually of additional training and we actually offer them even more than that um to be sure again that they're making

50:32 sound recommendations that the judge is going to respect um so it's you know it may be that where you guys are there was a you know a faux pas or something with another guardian i i really couldn't say um but that is something that the district administrator and the guardian adeline staff try to work on and you know that's also something too again i don't know what your relationship is with your social workers or your gals um but the district administrator where you are um might want to know that if the if there is a guardian ad litem that you feel like might be adding to that concern they may want that information so that they can address that i know i would want to know um because it might be that the guardian asylum

51:18 you know doesn't even realize what they're doing is not okay so i hope that kind of answered that question but i'm glad you guys brought that up because that is definitely key that our program integrity is always intact and here's another one that i think is in line with it tracy my dear and that is from alan brown is there a requirement that dss is aware of all foster parent communication with the gal if there's not on our side now your agency you know if you're licensed by an agency they might put that requirement on you guys i don't think i've ever heard of

52:03 one doing that but certainly on our side our guardian ad litem volunteers they can talk to anyone at any time that they deem relevant and they do not have to let dss know that they're doing it now again you know we try to be good partners with dss and everyone involved and would certainly share information with dss that we thought was important for them to know uh for the benefit of the child but we certainly don't have to ask their permission to talk to a foster parent or to talk with the child i mean we legally represent the child in court um so you know so so again i i'm you might want to check with your agency i guess to see if that's a requirement because it's not on our side

52:49 well the uh in line with that question tracy yes uh angela canada asked is there a requirement of the frequency of visits or video visits between gal and the child we ask them to do at least monthly contact again because they're volunteers um you know we we don't put any more than that on the parameter however uh we also try to make sure you know that they understand it's important to see the child as much as they need to so for example especially in the beginning when they're trying to get to know the child i think many of our volunteers try to see them more than that but the i guess

53:35 the requirement piece would be at least monthly and one of the gals there's a woman in here who who is a gal yes saying sometimes that there's a such a distance travel wise between where the guardian ad litem is and where the child is sometimes it's impossible to to make those trips so and that's another that's another concern that um that was brought up yeah and she's well and this uh mrs missy franklin and she's also a foster parent so well she's seen both sides of it so i just want to let

54:21 you know about that comment absolutely man thank you missy for that and thank you for your service on both arenas as well so yeah the um unfortunately you know most of the counties are not always able to place their children in their county we used to have a process prior to covid where one district could request a courtesy visit from another district so a guardian ad litem say if i have you know i'm at the coast say if there was a child moved to asheville for some reason we could request a guardian ad litem in asheville to go see that child on our behalf however i i've heard and this isn't 100 sure guys so don't pin me down on it but i've heard that they may not go back to that because we've been able to do a lot

55:06 of communication virtually and that if the child is you know if they're able to effectively advocate for the child through virtual means when they're placed far away they may continue to do that so missy maybe talk with your gal supervisor and see what you know what plan they're they're having or um you know like i said i don't think that's a hard and fast thing just yet i've just heard that that might be happening so great comments guys thank you all for that um so back to our uh thing that you as far as the gals roll just a couple of other things i wanted to throw out there um and this is a big one too guys the gal is not your coffee and chat buddy now we hope that you're comfortable enough with

55:51 them for them to have coffee and chat with you guys but please don't ask them for information about the case or the birth parents or you know anything going on in that case because it is a breach of confidentiality for them to share any information with you and that's the law now i know sometimes guardians fall into that trap because it's easy to do um but it you know they really are not supposed to be relaying information to you about you know a birth parent's progress or you know if they heard they didn't pass their drug screen the other day or you know all of those little things that really should not be coming from your guardian ad litem you know if you have questions about that and you feel like you need to know i would always steer

56:38 you to the social worker so just keep that in mind that you know they they you really shouldn't be going to them for case information um at all now you know they can certainly um you know if you guys for example if you guys feel like there's a therapeutic need for a child and they have some insight about that and want to talk with you about what they think might be good for the child that's perfectly fine but they just are not supposed to be sharing any confidential case information um with you guys okay and that's true whether you're a non-relative or a relative i think that sometimes when relatives are the caregivers it's even harder for them to remember that they shouldn't be sharing

57:23 information because i think sometimes they think you guys probably already know um so that's one thing we're working with because we don't want them to get into any trouble because it would be a violation of law for them to share that kind of information with you and here's another big one and i hope this doesn't sound i hope this doesn't sound painful to you guys but it's important to remember that the gal is not your advocate they cannot and should not be advocating for what you guys want for what your best interest is that doesn't mean you know that at some point they may not that they might not advocate for you to be a permanent placement uh for your child if that's something that you want but that advocacy should always be centered on the child and why that

58:10 placement would be in the child's best interest so again you know when you meet with the guardian it's perfectly fine for you to say to them you know hey if this child's case plan changes i'd love to be considered you know as their guardian custodian adoptive parent whatever it might be because that's important for them to know but just keep in mind that if they do choose to advocate for that it will be because it's in the child's best interest not because you know you guys have become close and they you know and that they're your friend and their your pal again i hope you guys have that comfortable relationship but their advocacy always has to be focused on the child so i just wanted to remind everybody of

58:56 that so one more thing that you guys can do i think i have just a couple of minutes left is volunteer so if you get full you adopt all those kiddos and you can't be a foster parent anymore i got a great place for you to go um or even if you are still fostering my missy um and you would like to help out in another way being a guardian adult item would be awesome i mean you guys know the system you know the kids you know the challenges and the rewards and i know that any district would be happy to have you aboard if you're currently fostering of course you know you it's you probably wouldn't be a guardian adult item in the same county that you're taking kids from because again that could be a conflict of

59:41 interest um but after after you're done i've had several foster parents who just you know love these kids and and really want to continue to make a difference but they're full now have decided you know what guardian ad litem is a way for me to continue to be involved and to make a difference so we hope you'll remember that and the other thing is is if you're a member of any organization anything you know faith community rotary club dog painting club i don't care what kind of club it is i know that your district administrator would love to come and speak to them about the guardian ad litem program there's just a lot of people i can't tell you all the time i ask people you know are you guys familiar with guardian ad litem and i i get no so you know our goal is to make

1:00:26 sure that everybody knows about our program and our need for volunteers and what it is that we do to try to help make a difference for kids in foster care so that is everything i have and i think i'm right on my time so what questions we got a few minutes for questions i think am i right joe or comments yes you have you have um we do have time for questions in fact i think we have about uh 10 15 minutes for questions and comments okay so um so um just ignore my magic wand i feel like a fairy

1:01:16 my great niece loves that okay all right so we do have um a comment here from from uh missy franklin she also said thanks for your feedback the virtual option has made it much easier to have monthly contact awesome and you also said that sometimes a volunteer seeks to serve as gal because they have seen the need for volunteers um i.e foster parents former social workers teachers etc in many cases they may not be retired or otherwise in a position to devote as many hours as some may think they should attending meetings preparing reports

1:02:03 and staying informed takes many hours each month in my case i have a house full of kids with lots of needs so just trying to keep that in perspective is helpful and she says great section yeah well thank you missy yeah and i'm glad that you said that too because on the website it it actually says on the guardian which i'm going to give you guys in just a minute um that that it's like 8 to 10 hours a month and we are really trying to get that eight to ten hours thrown out the window some cases it might only be eight to ten hours a month some it may be more and sometimes with our long-term kids it may be less so it's we really can't pin a time frame on it it just really depends on the case and the child's needs so i appreciate

1:02:49 really appreciate all those comments missy um tracy i wanted to just uh have you bring out what drew you to the to going to the guardian ad litem program because you've been a a parent you've been a social worker you really some of you who know tracy know she's a a woman of many talents thank you dad so i'm i just wonder what drew you to the program that you could share with the group uh yeah you know it's funny because uh

1:03:34 in all my career as a social worker um and in being in child welfare it was always interesting to me how when the guardian ad litem specifically the district administrator but also the guardian item in the counties where i served when they would come in the room there was this automatic kind of um okay the guardian ad litem is here and you know they're they're probably going to have something to say and you know most of the time it was positive sometimes it was like oh no the guardians led them's here and they're going to have something to say but most of the time that it was an element of respect and i always thought wow how cool is that and then when i really learned about how the focus of guardian ad litem is just you know we are just here to um

1:04:21 express the child's wishes and and tell the judge what we believe is in the best interest of the child period and not have to worry about mandates and uh and all of that it really made me want to be um a part of this program and i also thought because i do understand the challenges that folks on the social work side have um that i could be a good partner and help my volunteers uh be a good partner because that's the thing is when people are working in silos or when things are adversarial you just don't get stuff done you know so when we can have a good partnership even if we don't agree you can still have a good partnership and that's when you can do things that make a difference for kids no i really really like about what you said about that partnership piece is

1:05:08 that you're not always going to agree but your common denominator is what's best for that child absolutely rebecca and jamie i love what they say here i've never understood why the gal wouldn't receive a stipend of some kind through the state their role is in depth and maybe that would help retain recruit and decrease burnout turnover um another person i thought that's that was kind of nice well and actually let me comment on that real quick joe uh before you go to the next one so so yeah one of the other things i didn't mention about the benefits of our volunteers as that they saved the state a ton of money because of their volunteerism and in

1:05:54 fact in fiscal year 2019-20 the time that volunteers put in that would have had to be paid to an attorney uh was over 12 million dollars of taxpayer money that they saved so um yeah so which which makes my job harder because i do you know want to retain um and all district administrators you know we want to retain these wonderful volunteers and we try to do what we can to show appreciation with no money because we don't have any money for that um but you know hopefully they get the support and all that they do feel appreciated and almost all my volunteers you know they're here for the kids they they do it for the kids and they stick around for the kids just like you guys because y'all sure don't get what you're worth

1:06:40 you know in terms of any kind of stipend or reimbursement so it's it's um one person asked if they will have access to the presentation and i'm pretty sure we are recording this and that will be able to that you will have access to through the to that i'm happy to do this presentation for anybody anytime anywhere so if it's not recorded or whatever just just in fact here i'm gonna go ahead and put up my contact information so you can see um this is uh the the state website is volunteer for gao.org everything that you want to know about guardians is there as well as a place to

1:07:25 apply so if you know anybody that has some time on their hands that you think would be good you know given this website for us and then also here is my contact information if um if when we're done you guys think of something later on or have a question uh you're more than welcome to reach out to me it might be best to reach out to your own district if it's something you know you think would be specific to your district but you're still welcome to reach out to me and i can also always put you in touch with other folks if needed uh tracy can you can you um just um as we're ending up our questions here could you share a story about a uh a guardian ad litem who made a real difference in the life of a child that's just

1:08:13 okay i know that you know a lot of stories and i know that we need to be confidential but yeah yeah just would you mind sharing one because i think it's really important for foster families to see how guardian adult items can make such a difference absolutely so one one thing that happened recently um and this is that whole dilemma you know between the dss mandates and us not having those mandates there was a situation where a child had been with a foster care placement for some time i believe it was almost a year and um a relative was found

1:08:58 and the department of social services said well okay you know we've got a relative now and the law says we have to place you know this child with this relative now and of course you know we certainly uh would support continuing um contact you know in my opinion and this is one of my soapbox things we should do our best to continue connections for children even when we adopt them you know but in this particular case we strongly believe that this child's best interest was going to be served by by being placed permanently with the resource parent that was the only family they had ever known they did not know the relative did not have a previous relationship with them and we were like no this the best thing for this child is

1:09:45 to stay where they are why would we move them to place with strangers just because there's this you know relationship supposedly a relative um and the judge listened to the guardian adult item and the child was allowed to remain now again that that foster parent fortunately was willing and realized the importance of that child still having a relationship with that relative but they did not uproot that child from um from the family and they were allowed to maintain placement there so that's the kind of thing that the guardian ad litem you know one one of the things that guardians ad litem are sometimes able to advocate for yes yes and um i just wanted to mention do tracy

1:10:31 guardian natal items have such an in with the judges and some of them have really effective relationships with the judges that no one else on the team may have so that's another that's another really powerful role of guardian ad litem i think is that a lot of people don't have as much time with the judges yeah by them would have yeah and that's true and they they you know and that's why we work so hard um as a program to make sure that you know that their their court reports are thorough and have all the information and that they're you know comfortable testifying uh in court because that goes

1:11:19 to our integrity you know like we were talking about earlier and you're absolutely right the because the judges do get to see many of our volunteers you know several times as they continue to advocate for either that one child client or others um they get that reputation of being someone that that judge wants to listen to so you're absolutely right joe yes and we keep getting requests make sure that your presentation will be available okay and it will be okay so i would just want to thank tracy for her wonderful presentation are there any we have a couple of minutes left for any other questions you might have

1:12:09 now i usually throw in my side gig but it's um but we didn't even talk about music for once joe so that's a good thing i know people always ask me about my music yeah just send me an email and i'll tell you about that part so teresa thank you so much thank you and thank you for being here and your wonderful comments and questions we really appreciate it and hope you have a wonderful afternoon tracy thanks again thank you

1:12:55 thank you all thank you for what you do you're the best bye bye