Cambridge is looking forward to the arrival of its new City Manager who began working for the city this week. Thomas Carroll of Silverton, Ohio was selected for the position by the City Council on a unanimous vote.

Silverton, while a small town, is a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. From newspaper reports and comments by current city leadership, he is the right person with the right skills at the right time for the many things that are happening here or need to happen. Mr. Carroll is the third city manager for Cambridge.

In 2014 the City Council voted to change the Charter, after two and half years of research and drafting of the Charter changes by a citizens group that established a City Manager form of government. After hundreds of years of elected officials running the city, it was anticipated that the change to this new form of government and its acceptance by elected leadership would take time. It has.

After the City Council voted 4-1 to change the Charter, citizens sought a referendum to overturn that decision. That effort failed as they were not able to collect the required number of signatures of registered voters to cause the matter to be put to a vote.

The resistance to the new form of government, however, was still present as those used to the old way of doing things did not like the change. Despite that resistance, the city, under this new form of government prospered thanks to the excellent leadership of our first City Manager, Sandra Tripp-Jones, and our second one, Patrick Comiskey.

The resistance, however, continued after the election of a new City Council in late 2020. None of the new City Council members had ever been elected to be a mayor or a member of a City Council. During their campaigns all but one committed to continuing and supporting the City Manager form of government.

When the Charter was changed in 2014, there was one particular section that we intentionally included as part of our citizen effort to make this important change. That language in Charter Section 3-39 (e) reads as follows:

(e) Non-interference with appointments or removals. Except for the purpose of inquiry, the mayor and city commissioners shall deal with the administration of the city solely through the city manager and neither the mayor, nor any city commissioner, shall give orders to any subordinates of the city manager, either publicly or privately.

In plain language, that means that the elected officials need to let the City Manager do his or her job and not interfere by going behind the City Manager to the city employees “either publicly or privately”. That was not the case with our most recent City Manager and was one of the primary reasons that he declined to renew his contract to continue his service here.
When this language is mentioned, some might say that those are just words and don’t mean anything in the day-to-day operations of the city or that some elected officials can simply decide that they will not comply with that part of the Charter for whatever reason they choose.

The Charter for a city is like the Constitution for our State or the United States. It is the controlling document for how the elected officials and staff are to run the city. These words in the Charter do mean something, and it is not up to elected officials to decide that they can ignore them or interpret them differently than what is the clear language of the Charter. If they want to change the words, they have every right to do so in a public forum after due notice to the public and the opportunity for public input. If they decide to make changes, then the public has the right to seek enough signatures to have the public vote on what the City Council decided.

So with the arrival of Mr. Carroll and what appear to be the many skills that he has and that we need here, I would urge the members of City Council and any mayor that might be elected, even for just the remainder of this term, to comply with what is the clear written language of the Charter unless you are able to change that language in compliance with the law.

Do not forget to make the “inquiry” as allowed so that you know and understand what he is doing and why. That is your responsibility. In that way you, Mr. Carroll, and city staff will be able to succeed in helping the city to improve even more, and he will stay here working for many years.

Thanks for reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities. He can be reached at swrideout@aol.com

 

The other day I was talking with an old friend who works in the Court Service Unit for the Alexandria Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. She runs a great program for girls that she founded almost 20 years ago called Space of Her Own that you can find at www.spaceofherown.org. Take a look at the outcomes from the work being done there for young girls who just need a little help. We are trying to find the funding to start a similar program here.

As we talked, we began comparing notes of what is going well where each of us lives. One area where Alexandria is having the same problem as we are is in keeping police officers. While Alexandria is much larger and wealthier than Cambridge or other communities on the Eastern Shore, they were losing police officers just as we are.

One solution that a town in Virginia has found in addition to higher pay is to provide housing for some of its officers as part of their compensation. All of the jurisdictions on the Eastern Shore must have houses that have come to them because of tax sales. Which of them might be able to be fixed up at a low cost and used as another incentive to help encourage our officers to stay and be an even more important part of our communities?

The other interesting discussion we had was about the unused monies that are in the police budgets in those communities where the number of police officers has gone down. How might those monies be used in short term summer projects or even longer-term pilot projects to help the police and the community in reducing crime and supporting community.

Now this is not about “Defunding the Police”. It is about using those resources that are not being used now to help the remaining police officers by helping to reduce the considerable workload to which they are being called upon to respond. For instance could there be a summer program to engage some of the youth in doing something productive in the community? Could there be administrative work at the police department that needs to be done but has not been done because of staff shortages? Could there be an intern program for older teens to introduce them to the idea of becoming a police officer that could be run by a retired police officer as a way to recruit future community police officers? What ideas might you have for needs in your community that could be addressed through the effective use of these funds during the upcoming summer?

For Pilot programs, could a social worker be hired to be a resource in the community to help transport children from home to existing programs in the community and learn from them what their challenges are? Or to a summer school program that a young student needs to catch up on his or her education, when she misses the bus? As mentioned above, what do you see as needs in your community that might benefit, at least for the summer, from hiring a teacher or two or a retired social worker who would welcome the chance to make some extra money over the summer?

The answer is not to leave the money in the police department budget for spending sometime in the future. The need is now in communities for resources to be made available for children that will help them on their road to success.

Thanks for reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities. He can be reached at swrideout@aol.com   

I have talked before about the need for community involvement and collaboration in order to provide resources more effectively for children. Once while I was participating in a judicial training, a family court judge from California told me what the large foundations in her community had done to encourage collaboration among nonprofits that were seeking financial support for the important work that they were doing. 

Not unlike Cambridge and Dorchester County, the nonprofits in her community were not working together well. The solution for the five largest funders in her community was to tell the nonprofits that in the future they would only fund applications that were submitted together for joint projects by at least two nonprofits. The change that they and the community saw through the nonprofits working together was exactly what they had hoped for – breaking down the walls between the organizations that were doing good work but were not being as efficient and effective as they could be.

When we arrived on the Eastern Shore, I came to know that the challenge of providing fun and productive resources for children in Dorchester County had been left up to a few nonprofits and the County Government. From the point of view of government, the Dorchester Department of Recreation and Parks maintains  “eight park sites encompassing nearly 200 acres of recreational space. These unique locations feature a public swimming pool, Athletic fields and courts, a walking/running trail, fishing, picnic areas, playscapes, and open spaces for residents and visitors of all ages to enjoy.” Most of the sites are in or close to the City of Cambridge. It also provides “numerous recreational programs … available to engage a range of interests”. The sites that are used a great deal are the swimming pool in Cambridge and the recently purchased tennis club building on Leonard’s Lane in Cambridge.

One of the new nonprofits in town that is using a portion of the property on Leonard’s Lane is the Boys & Girls Club that has established itself here as a needed and growing resource for the children of this community. On March 17th at the Pine Street Elks Club, it held an event in collaboration with the Empowerment Center, Harvesting Hope, New Beginnings and Miriam Moran, an artist who moved to Cambridge from Staten Island and is the full-time Club Coordinator for the Boys & Girls Club. These groups had come to see the value of working together to benefit children as the children they are serving are the community’s children.

The event that was held was “Our Lucky Charms” and combined celebrations for St. Patrick’s Day and Women’s History Month to honor special women in Cambridge who have been parents, advocates, mentors, and inspirations to children and adults over the years. The children participated in an art project led by Ms. Moran. Last summer, she completed a mural entitled “Just a Kid from Cambridge” on the side of a store at the gateway to Cambridge’s Greenwood Avenue corridor.

Ms. Moran wanted to begin to collaborate and coordinate the work of the Boys & Girls Club with other nonprofit organizations here in the city that had been doing this work for a long time. She reached out to Dr. Theresa Stafford, Omeaka Jackson, and the leadership at the Empowerment Center to see what might be able to be done. “Our Lucky Charms” was the result.

Her aim was to celebrate some of the good things that are happening here, to have the children create art, and for everyone to have a fun time. There were over one hundred youth present at the Elks Lodge on Pine Street that day with it being 50-50 between boys and girls. They came from different elementary and middle schools in the city.

Ms. Moran set the theme for the day as a crown like one worn by a queen and let the students take that idea wherever they wanted to go. The results were wonderful and full of imagination by the students. As Ms. Moran said, “They did the art from their hearts.” Following the time for art, everyone played family unity bingo that was an enormous success.

Ms. Moran works for the Boys & Girls Club in Cambridge and will be helping with the development of clubs in Salisbury that opened March 31st, and Pocomoke. In Cambridge she supervises the Youth Development Coordinators and oversees programs at the club on Leonard’s Lane. She helps address the emotional needs of the children while also assisting the manager of the program here. 

She is a children’s advocate, leads the STEM program at the club (more is coming in April), and works with the Cambridge Police Department to develop relationships with them so that they and the children can come to know one another and develop their own positive relationships.

In addition to the above work she also leads the club’s “Power Hour” where she helps with homework and mentors some of the children. The club is intended to be a safe haven for the children as are the schools. The community and the children are faced with the efforts by some older youth who are in gangs or are trying to start gangs and are trying to recruit the younger children to join them. 

The Boys & Girls Club is one of the several programs here that need the financial and in person support of the community as volunteers to provide an alternative for all of the children in the community and especially for those who are trying to pull our younger youth in the wrong direction. It is not just about supporting those “good” children. It is also about intervening with the “bad” children who can now be redirected with the growing number of positive programs that are being developed here. Let’s do that rather than wait for them to become involved with the law and have fewer alternatives available to change their behavior.

Thanks for Reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities. He can be contacted at swrideout@aol.com.

 

 

The term “Proactive” when talking about judges often gets people into wide ranging arguments/discussions about whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. We see in the process of who will be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States that someone is too “Liberal” or too “Conservative” and whether they will be a “Proactive” justice or a “Constitutional” one. Even Chief Justice Roberts has told us that judges are just meant to “call balls and strikes”. We see too often, especially now, that it used to be bad to be a “Proactive” and “Liberal” judge but now it is ok to be a “Proactive” and “Conservative” judge.

I agree with Chief Justice Roberts that trial judges in all of the courts need to be people that call the balls and strikes. That is their first responsibility; however, it is difficult to put into practice in every case. When there are lawyers on both sides of the case that are knowledgeable and skilled, that clearly is what the judge can and should do. I remember a lawyer friend of mine who told a long serving Federal Judge in Alexandria that he did not mind the judge interfering with his case so long as the judge did not lose it for him. The judge did not take the comment very well, but a good lawyer will do what he or she needs to do as a skilled advocate to represent his or her client, and an unskilled one may well not be able to do it as well.

I had the pleasure to appear before the Honorable Albert V. Bryan, Jr in different cases. He was a Circuit Court Judge in Fairfax, Virginia and then a U.S. District Court Judge in Alexandria. He was excellent and called the balls and strikes as the Chief Justice suggested. He also helped train me through my experiences before him to be a better, though certainly not perfect, lawyer. He was a no-nonsense judge and conservative in his manner, mannerisms, and rulings.

He also asked one question and made one observation in a case that I was litigating as young lawyer in Federal Court that I should have done. I didn’t because I was inexperienced and was not very observant. It saved my client from years of incarceration. Was Judge Bryant being proactive when he interrupted me in presenting my case to ask the most important question? The Assistant U.S. Attorney thought so. I certainly did not.

I was trying a petition in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria to set aside a state court conviction of my client for a robbery that had taken place in the Norfolk area. My client was African American and had been convicted primarily on eyewitness testimony. He had the brightest and greenest eyes that I did not notice prior to trial. I did not meet him until shortly before trial, as he was incarcerated and not brought to Alexandria until just before our hearing. As I put on the evidence of why his conviction should be set aside, which did not include any evidence about his eye color, Judge Bryan stopped me and asked about my client’s eye color. I not only had not noticed it but had not noticed from the state court records and the trial transcript that none of the “eye” witnesses had mentioned anything about the unique eye color of the person that had perpetrated the robbery. Judge Bryan commented that he could not stop looking at my client because of his unique eye color and that the failure of any witness at the original trial to testify about the perpetrator’s eye color or to comment about it to the police made him believe that my client was unfairly and unlawfully convicted. He overturned the conviction and gave the Commonwealth of Virginia 60 days to refile the criminal case or dismiss it. It was dismissed.

Most of the litigation in the United States does not involve one skilled lawyer against another. It may be lawyers of unequal skills, such as in my situation, or one lawyer against a pro se party that has no lawyer, or two people neither of whom have lawyers. In the juvenile and family law courts, it can be people that are arguing over the custody and support of children while having no knowledge of the law or what facts are important for the judge to hear. It can be a case where a decision has to be made about the best interests of a child who may not be represented at all or not old enough or mature enough to tell the judge what he or she wants. Judges in those cases have to develop what information they can in order to make the best decision possible. Litigants often have different views of how the judge hears and decides those cases.

In the juvenile and family law area, there are multiple times where the judge can be and should be proactive. If it involves a case in front of her and she sees that agencies are not doing their job in educating or providing services to children, they need to know it. If it involves “Off the Bench” matters such as the need to have more collaboration and cooperation amongst the child serving agencies, he needs to work with them, lawyers representing groups, and groups such as CASA that appear before the court and do so in an open process that is permitted by most, if not all, state Canons of Judicial Conduct.

Under the Federal Law with regard to the abuse and neglect of children, judges are required to make decisions about whether the child welfare agency made “Reasonable Efforts” to prevent the removal of the child from the custody of the parent or provide services to a youth in care and its parents otherwise the state has to pay for the costs of the child while he or she is in the custody of the state. The judge has to explain his or her reasoning in the court order.

In Virginia when I was asked to find that a child was truant, before doing so, I needed to be sure that the school system had done everything it needed to do to provide appropriate services to benefit the child and prevent truancy. If they hadn’t, I was not about to let them off the hook. Now some might say in that kind of an instance that I was being “Proactive” and not just calling the “Balls and Strikes”. But if the law requires the school system to provide services first to help address the truancy problem and if they fail to do that, it is the job of the judge to hold them accountable just as an older child or a parent of a younger child should be held accountable if the school system has done what it is supposed to do first and the child still fails to attend school.

The other reason for a judge to be proactive is that he sees cases coming to court for decisions that could have been diverted into programming that would help the child or family sooner and without the delay of court involvement and would probably have obtained better results than would a trial and decision by the judge. Where the judge makes a decision, unless it is to dismiss a case, services are going to be ordered in most cases. In the delinquency area, the benefits in doing this proactive work are numerous.

Courts have fewer cases to hear, which means they can spend more time to make better decisions on the ones that they have to hear. Services can be provided to the youth that reduce the number delinquent offenses coming to court . That means there were fewer victims of criminal or delinquent behavior, which has collateral consequences on the victims.

With fewer cases to hear, more time can be spent off the bench helping the community to understand the benefits of effective prevention and early intervention services. With that, more children and families benefit from those services, and that helps them have a greater opportunity to be successful. It allows parents to work to build a better life for themselves and their families and their communities.

Thanks for reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities. He can be reached at swrideout@aol.com.

 

 

In a prior article about Drug Courts, I stated that “without the timely cooperation and collaboration of service providers whether they are governmental, private, or nonprofit, there are potential and substantial financial consequences to a state.”

Without that cooperation and collaboration, there are also consequences for the courts, the people who appear before them, and other people, including children, who are the subjects of litigation. Those involved in those court cases are impacted by the ability of courts to run efficiently, to be effective, and to make their decisions on the best available evidence.

On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, there are hundreds if not thousands of nonprofits many of which engage in human services such as mental health, feeding adults and children, housing, providing clothing such as warm coats in the winter, and the list goes on. There also those nonprofits that do great work in so many other areas such as our environment, arts, animals, historical preservation, and that list goes on. All of them need our support.

It is in the human services area, especially with regard to child and family issues where the courts are involved, where there is a particular need for funding that is too often not met. While nonprofits serving people in this arena will not necessarily go out of business if their funding is inadequate, they will not be able to provide the services that are needed in a community and, in many cases, by the court as it makes its decision in that difficult case.

These services are not only needed to help with cases in court. They are needed to help keep cases out of court or reduce court matters from becoming more complicated and thus needing more judicial time for hearing and decision-making.

Some examples come from organizations where I am a board member or volunteer. The Mid Shore Community Mediation Center (MSCMC) provides services for the Dorchester County Public Schools for mediating disputes in some of the county schools. The school system pays for those services, but the need, especially now, is greater than it has ever been. MSCMC also provides mediation services for the courts in custody cases. So there is a need not only for volunteer mediators who need to be trained, there is a need for more staff to help with the caseload that exists. When they are successful in having the students solve a dispute between themselves, that avoids a potential delinquency case coming to court if those two students or group of students had been in one or more fights. If MSCMC helps parents to resolve a custody dispute, that avoids a contested custody case in court that can cost thousands of dollars for lawyers or have parents trying to present their case without help.

The Court Appointed Advocates of the Mid Shore (CASA) advocates for children involved in the child welfare system. It also provides volunteers for the Dorchester truancy court project that can only take 40-45 children. I have been advised that the number of children eligible for that project is much greater than the capacity of the court to hear them all. There is a need for volunteers to be trained for the work of CASA but also the need for funding to provide sufficient staff to train and safely monitor the work of the volunteers.

While much of the funding for these and other nonprofits come from grants, those grants often have restrictions or requirements that limit how the money can be used. Without funding from the community or from grants such as those provided by the Mid Shore Community Foundation, nonprofits are not able to provide all of the services needed in the most efficient and effective way.

From the court perspective hearing custody cases is not easy. In most cases they take lots of time. Judges have to make complex decisions when often the parents are not represented by a lawyer, don’t know how to present their evidence, and are angry with whatever decision the judge makes. During my time on the bench, I wound up typing my own orders because the parents often were so angry with one another my custody and visitation orders had to be very tight and clear about times for pick up and return, locations for the transfer, separation distances between parents, etc. That was intended to prevent them from having to come back to court. I had one father so angry with a decision that he went from the courtroom to the clerk’s office to file a new motion for a hearing to change the decision that I had just made.

As part of the hearing process, I found it important to make sure that both parties and their witnesses and supporters understood what I had heard and what the legal requirement was for making my determination. One parent only had to “win” by 51%. I always encouraged settlement or mediation as the results were always better than my decisions, and the time that it took me to wade through what “he said” and “she said” was significant after which in the Virginia system either parent had the right to appeal to our Circuit Court for a brand-new trial.

With our truancy caseload, after years of few cases each year, a new superintendent and I agreed to a process that brought three hundred and then four hundred cases a year to our court. I was told that there could have been 700-800 but that the school system and our court intake process did not have enough staff to manage the caseload. If that caseload is not in court, it is somewhere being overseen by someone in another system who is overwhelmed with what has been given to him or her to address.

For the betterment of all of our communities, it is critical to find those nonprofits that are doing good work and to support them and to volunteer in the work they are doing. If you do not know who is doing what in your community, ask a friend, a neighbor, someone you know and trust. As part of your consideration on where your money or time might go, think about the programs run in the minority communities by African Americans and Latinos. They will be known and trusted in their communities and from my observations are not being supported enough by the larger communities in which they provide their services.

Thanks for reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities. He can reached at swrideout@aol.com

 

 

With a Court’s Child Welfare caseload, the need for services that are effective, timely, and collaborative is essential. The reason for that is that federal and state laws required that when children are removed from their parents or legal custodians and placed in state custody, certain timelines for court action must be met. If a court fails to meet those timelines, the state or in some cases the local child welfare agency can lose federal funding to support their work.

How we got to where we are with regard to the above is a story too long to tell here; but without the timely cooperation and collaboration of service providers whether they are governmental, private, or nonprofit, there are potential and substantial financial consequences to a state. Early in my time on the bench, I was faced with this problem because the director of our mental health and substance abuse services program did not see why our cases required priority.

He had a full caseload of people who were coming voluntarily to get services, he said, and the cases I sent were people that were there involuntarily and often did not want services. After several meetings and opportunities to help him understand the legal requirements that our court and the city’s child welfare agency faced that could impact funding, he came to understand both my situation and his. As a result, we were able to work out a plan that helped to expedite screenings, evaluations, and services for parents in our child welfare caseload.

I saw in these first few years on the bench that ordering the drug screenings, evaluations, and treatment was the easy part. Implementing them successfully was not. While our agreement allowed for the timely screening, evaluations, and court reports for us to make our decisions, I then began to see child welfare cases returning to court for termination of parental rights because the parents had failed to attend the drug treatment that had been ordered. 

We would have contested Termination of Parental Rights hearings that would be appealed by the parents when they lost for another trial in our Circuit Court. These were difficult cases to present, defend, and hear in a docket that was crowded with many other case types. There had to be another solution to this problem.

There are a variety of Drug Courts that exist around the country. They are efforts by court systems to therapeutically address the challenges of and consequences of people’s behavior that are related to the excessive use of alcohol and/or illegal substances. In many situations the drug court is in a criminal court and is run for the purposes of addressing illegal behavior by an individual with the court’s significant potential sanction of incarceration for those that fail to engage in treatment. The Drug Court concept and its implementation in most communities has been a success much of the time.

My experience with Drug Courts started with a judicial conference where I learned about them. As one of my challenges was the addicted parent in our child welfare caseload, I brought the idea of a Family Treatment Drug Court to our Model Court Team for consideration, but the idea was not met with enthusiasm. As I knew that I had to have the buy in of the team members, I waited. 

About six months later, our team member from mental health and substance abuse services reported on a drug court training that she attended and suggested that we take a look at possibilities. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of the idea.

As we had no easily available data from our child welfare agency that gave us an information on drugs and alcohol as a contributing factor in the removal of children from their custody, I knew that we only assigned a CASA volunteer (Court Appointed Special Advocate) to our most difficult cases. So, we asked our CASA program to bring us their data on alcohol and drug involvement as a percentage of their caseload. They did, and we learned that it was in the 85-90% area.

Our drug court was one of the first in the country addressing child welfare cases and was a success because of the collaboration and cooperation among the service agencies in our community that worked with these cases. We decided as part of our effort that we would be a civil drug court and not a criminal one so that incarceration was not to be a part of our process except in the most extreme circumstance. It was reserved for those parents who had failed to participate in the program and were about to have the state move to terminate their parental rights.

The punishment was for a weekend in jail to give them the opportunity to think about what was next for them and their children and to give them the opportunity to write a good-by letter to their children in anticipation that our Department of Social Services would move forward with the Termination of their Parental Rights. While that ability to incarcerate was available to the judge who ran our Drug Court, he never had to use it.

The Family Treatment Drug Court turned a negative into a positive. We began seeing more parents engage in drug treatment as more effective and responsive services were provided to them. We saw parents engage sooner and more fully in treatment. During the court hearings, the judge hearing these cases learned from the other drug court clients who they believed was trying. We were able to tell what parents had a chance at having their children returned to them and what parents would allow the drugs to win. We knew that at least six months earlier than before. We were able to get children to permanency with their parents, relatives, or through adoptions much sooner. We were able to have more uncontested Termination of Parental Rights trials because the parents knew that they had been given every opportunity with many available services to turn their lives around.

Key to these kinds of successes and the potential success of any court program is the willingness to the local agencies and private or non-profit service providers to work together effectively and collaboratively with the clients, with one another, and with the judge. When that happens, the clients have a better chance for rehabilitation. The children have a better chance to return to their parents. The service providers will have a much greater pride in their work because they are seeing more of their clients change their lives. How can your community improve outcomes for those involved in your court system?

Thanks for Reading. If you would like to talk about what you are doing or would like to do to solve a problem in your community, please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities. He can be reached at swrideout@aol.com 

About a year ago, I was approached by others in the community with an idea for a project to bring our community together to help improve outcomes for families here. That idea has come to be called Moving Dorchester Forward (MDF).

As our small group met and talked this past year, we gained momentum, focus, and people who were interested in joining and contributing to the effort. The data that we collected about children and families in our community and the challenges that they face made it clear that the need was here but the resources were not or were so limited that the people and non-profits trying to help were having limited impact.

We were fortunate during this time to have the J2W Foundation begin to help start the change here that needed to take place. Through its investment in developing collaborative efforts for after-school programs and funding a local Campaign for Grade Level Reading, more people in our community began to take notice.

The focus of MDF is not to provide the numerous services that are needed here but to connect those resources, find funding for service providers to implement needed services, and support existing programs through writing grants and collecting data to show their value. Another way to say it is that our aim is to turn resources into assets. With several work streams in the mission of MDF, the area of focus that I am leading as a volunteer is Advocacy, Parent/Family Engagement, and Court Involved Children. One program that we recently started is called the Coalition 4 Court Kids (C4CK).

This effort is based on a program created by the Children’s Defense Fund called “Beat the Odds.” I learned about it years ago from a judicial colleague in a neighboring community who invited me to a local awards dinner for their Beat the Odds program. The hotel room was packed with well over two hundred people from business, government, the faith community, nonprofits, youth, and family members. The purpose was both to raise money for the program and to award scholarships and grants to youth that had been involved in the juvenile court in that community and to recognize them for changing their lives with the help of programs and work with agency staff, volunteers, and engaged parents and family members.

I brought the idea back to our local bar association that took the lead and began raising money. On average they raise in the area of $30,000 each year for court involved youth college scholarships or grants to help with more education or jobs.

With a small grant this past year from the Todd Fund here in Dorchester County, MDF created the Coalition 4 Court Kids. We put together a brochure that will be printed and an application form to submit requests by youth for funding that is supported by letters from the person, nonprofit, and/or agency that works with the youth to help him or her turn their life around.

The funding is available not only for scholarships but also for purchasing computers, helping repair cars or bikes used for transportation to a job, providing money to a nonprofit that wants to hire a youth for a summer job, or whatever need the youth has that will acknowledge his or her success in changing the direction of their life and help them continue in the right direction.

If you have an interest in talking about this program or have an idea to support court involved youth or any youth for that matter, please give me a call at 703-655-6149 or email me.

Thanks for Reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities.

Steve can be reached at swrideout@aol.com

 

In the mid 1990’s when our court was part of a Model Court Project for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), I was asked to make a presentation at a conference held at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria about what we were doing. The Plenary Speaker that day was Jim Wallis of the Sojourner’s Ministry. His talk was on his Twelve Rules of Mission. 

As I listened to him, I heard his twelve rules as the twelve rules on how to make systems work better together. Since hearing that presentation, I adopted those twelve rules as the guidepost for how I worked to improve outcomes for children and families involved with our court. After my retirement I used them in the work that I did around the country with courts, child welfare agencies, and the agencies and nonprofits with which they worked to help them obtain better outcomes for the children and families with whom they worked.

While I was not successful in every instance, I found these rules to be helpful in maintaining my focus on what I needed to do off the bench to achieve positive outcomes in the work that I was doing. To have some straightforward hints on how to overcome the challenges that one might face in whatever the effort that is undertaken, these are rules that will help with any volunteer effort or social change effort that one might undertake.

As you think about what you might like to see happen in your community to make a difference for those who will benefit from a new idea or working together differently, perhaps these might be helpful:

Rule 1 – Get out of the house (or the office)

Rule 2 – Start by doing something as that leads to something else

Rule 3 – Throw away old labels – its values that matter

Rule 4 – Change the culture

Rule 5 – Listen to those closest to the problem

Rule 6 – Find new allies and search for common ground

Rule 7 – You can’t do it alone

Rule 8 – Get to the heart of the problem

Rule 9 – It’s not easy but worth it

Rule 10 – You can do it

Rule 11 – Changing the world should be fun

Rule 12 – Changing the world is a spiritual task

Thanks for reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities. He can be reached at swrideout@aol.com.

 

 

For courts that hear juvenile matters, the cases that are the most difficult are truancy cases. They are not hard because of the facts on whether a child has missed school or not. They are hard because of what judges are then asked to do about the behavior. Without the cooperation of the school system and the service providers in a community working together, the court has limited chances of changing the behavior. Punishing a child is not the answer.

When I first went on the bench, I heard few truancy cases as few were brought by our school system. The cases arrived in court usually in April or May when school would soon be out for the summer. I saw the damage of truancy in the delinquency disposition reports of convicted youth where I learned that he or she had missed too many days at school over several years, often had been passed on administratively to the next grade, and our school system had made ineffective efforts to address the problem.

I learned early on that many teachers and administrators were happy that some children were not in school, as they disrupted their classes. I also learned from one Superintendent that I would have to go to battle with him to make any changes in how “his” schools managed those cases. It took me nine years to be able to collaborate with a new Superintendent who understood how to address the challenges that these children and the school system faced.

Thanks to our Court Service Unit (CSU) and its leader, we were able to successfully address the multiple challenges that brought these children to court. The CSU manages intake and diversion of cases and provides some services including probation and parole. With the new Superintendent, we went from ten cases a year to three hundred cases the next year and four hundred cased the following year. We were told that there could have been even more but that the school system and our CSU did not have the staff to process and manage them all.

Truancy is the outward manifestation of what the student is struggling with in his or her life. We found in our work that about 75% of the cases that came to court involved mental health issues and/or substance abuse issues. Back in the 1990’s the internet and social media were not the kind of issue that they are today, so I suspect that it is more of a contributing factor to what is happening now.

What we found was that services were the answer for many of these children. After the CSU and our city agencies got their programming up and running and coordinated, as was required in Virginia by what was then called the Comprehensive Services Act, we found a reduction in our delinquency caseload of close to 50% and an increase in truancy filings where effective services could be put in place.

The services in Alexandria were coordinated as they were provided by City Government and the city was only fifteen square miles that is dwarfed by the size of the counties on the Eastern Shore. Every child in the city that became involved with the CSU or the court changed from being a school child or court child or mental health child, etc. to being the child of all of the child serving agencies that worked together to find solutions for him or her and the family. 

Collaboration and cooperation amongst the child serving agencies is critical in improving outcomes for children and families. Without them, communities will continue to struggle to address these social challenges and will continue to point fingers at one another for the inability to help improve the lives of children and their families.

For the Masters, Magistrates, and Judges that hear these cases, the best thing that you can do is bring the agencies together for discussions on how to make the system in your community work better. Each community should have similar challenges but often different solutions, as each community has its own strengths and challenges in its systems and the people who lead and work in them.

Among the many positive things that happened in our community as a result of this collaborative work was how agency staff became excited about what they were doing. They were no longer doing this work because it was a job that they needed to support themselves and their family. They were doing it and loving it because they were once again doing the kind of work they felt called to do and were seeing the positive results that they had not seen earlier in their careers.

Looking at each case that you have with what I call “new eyes” can be one place to start. I will leave you with my favorite story from my work where “new eyes” found the solution. 

I had a teenage girl in court on a truancy case. She had missed many classes, and the school system had worked with her for years. At the disposition of the case there was no solution offered for her. I learned at the disposition hearing for the first time that she was the mother of a 6-month-old baby. 

As I knew from my community volunteer work for the Alexandria Tutoring Consortium (www.alexandriatutors.org) that daily reading to young children was critically important in their being ready for school, my disposition for her case was that she had to read to her baby every day for at least 30 minutes.

I also order that she keep a record of the books that she read to her child and return in 90 days to talk with me about how her baby reacted and what books she had read to her. When the young mother was first in court, she was sullen and spoke in one-word sentences. When she returned 90 days later, I could not shut her up. 

From that sullen disposition came a happy and excited young lady who was back in school and loving it. She had come to understand the value of education in a way that connected to her. If you have a teen mom or dad who is not attending school, give that idea a try. Who knows what might happen?

Thanks for reading. Please be in touch.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities.

 

 

One of the challenges that I see with community efforts to address the many social issues that are present in any community and need resolution is a reluctance by some to collaborate with one another. I found over my time on the bench and in consulting around the country on child welfare issues that bringing people and their ideas together and listening to one another can develop a common vision and plan of action. That effort almost always brings better results than the good work that individuals or an individual group are doing on their own.

I saw a prime example of this the other day in Queenstown. Krista Pettit, the Executive Director of the Haven Ministries, invited me to come to see what they have been doing there for over 20 years. As she and her husband, Chris, are also here in Cambridge where I had recently met them, I decided to take the trip up the Eastern Shore to see what she and her organization were doing. Her husband is the new pastor at St. Paul’s UMC and Grace UMC here in Cambridge where they with other interested churches in the community have started ONE MISSION CAMBRIDGE, which is a cooperative ministry to address and help those in our community living in need.

What I found at my meeting with Krista and thought about on my drive home was how open she was to listen and learn from me. It was clear from our talk that she wanted me to know what had been accomplished in Queenstown through the Haven Ministries. It was also clear that what she wanted to do in Cambridge was to listen to the community and the Cambridge Faith Community to learn how we all felt that we could make things work better and achieve better outcomes for children and families here.

I learned from Krista that the Haven Ministries has services for the following:

Shelter – an emergency, winter homeless shelter open to men, women, and children where they are provided services such as food, clothing, case management services, and other life necessities

Food Pantry and Resource Center – a daytime place to request financial assistance, attend classes, and choose food from the food pantry

Street Outreach – meeting with individuals wherever they are to connect them to services caused by the housing crisis

Thrift Store – providing clothing and household goods at deeply discounted prices
HOPE Warehouse – selling used furniture, appliances, and building supplies along with job training in customer services

Art for your home – partnering with local artists to provide artwork to beautify homes of clients transitioning to housing.

With ONE MISSION CAMBRIDGE, she is not planning to bring the Haven Ministries here. She and I both know from our experience, that each community has its own personality, different leaders with different skills, and a pride in its community that needs to be heard. It is not unlike the well-known expression that “All politics is local.” So are the ways that communities work together or struggle together. Krista plans to listen and help our community develop its own best way of addressing the challenges here.

While I know that some, if not all, of the services that the Haven Ministries provide are also provided here by good people doing good work, most are done individually at different times and locations that make it difficult for those needing the services to easily utilize them. For an example, I have seen that in the numerous food backpack programs that have provided needed after school, weekend, and holiday food for children to take home with them.

Krista meets regularly at St. Paul’s UMC on Monday evenings in person and by zoom at 6:00 p.m. and wants everyone to know that All Christian Churches are invited to attend. This is the kind of visioning and listening that when shared with everyone can find its way into helping more people in need with more resources that are effectively implemented. Anyone interested in attending One Mission Cambridge meetings or discussing it should contact Krista at 410-739-4363.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities.