New law helps Vt. help its children
Toolbox
By SUSAN ALLEN Times Argus Editor - Published: January 5, 2009
MONTPELIER — The year was 1990.
As chairwoman of the House Judiciary Committee, then-Rep. Amy Davenport, D-Montpelier, had to table controversial legislation overhauling the state's judicial process for dealing with the children of abuse and neglect, as well as those deemed delinquent.
It wasn't that the committee didn't think the issues were important. They were important. But Davenport and members of her committee were too busy creating Vermont's Family Court system.
Fast forward to Jan. 1, 2009.
The Vermont Juvenile Judicial Proceedings Act, the first comprehensive overhaul of the judicial process for dealing with children in crisis in more than 40 years, finally became law — with Davenport's help.
With a high-powered panel that included the commissioner of Children and Families, the defender general, prosecutors, law enforcement and others, now-Administrative Judge Amy Davenport watched as those overdue changes became law on Jan. 1, 2009 — changes she and the new panel spent two years crafting and guiding through the Legislature to improve the lives of children in crisis.
Among the changes: the early identification of absent fathers; the early identification of kin willing to take custody of children; a custody preference for noncustodial parents and kin early in the process; protective orders with teeth; a presumption in favor of parent-child contact and authorization for the court to order sibling contact; and more (see below).
The new protections are timely, with the current economic recession driving abuse and neglect, putting more pressure on parents and their children alike, she said.
"When times get tough and people lose their jobs, and there's a lot of stress on families, things heat up all over the place in Family Court," Davenport said Friday. "There are more requests for protective orders, more divorces — it's all the way across the board.
"Finances and poverty has a huge impact on that," she said.
The new changes are designed to help children and parents alike. Among the important changes:
"I point out to folks when I'm teaching about this that when you've got a baby who is 6 months old, and you get a 30-day hearing, that's a month — that's a sixth of that child's life you've just added on," Davenport said of the old system.
She said studies on brain development show that there are "critical milestones that kids have to reach, and taking them out of one home and putting them into a different home delays those milestones, and sometimes the delays are irreparable."
Davenport stressed that child safety is paramount, however.
"It really establishes at an early stage that the decisions about custody are based first looking at parents to see if the child could go back to the parents, and if the child can't, focusing on noncustodial parents, then relatives," she said. "We're just making sure we've looked at all of the options before we go to state custody because that's the easiest."
She said there are negative implications in taking a child away from parents when that's not the only option.
"When you have to do things quickly, you sometimes just say 'state custody.' But you're not really measuring the long-term impact on the child of being separated from family," she added. And, she said, "It's hard to get them back once they've been separated."
"Current law says nothing about parent-child contact. The new law has a whole section on parent-child contact: there is a presumption in favor of contact, it makes it clear that the court can … set up schedules, determine frequency, and it's routinely done at every hearing," Davenport said.
For the child, this also sets the standard for when contact is terminated, which again did not exist before Jan. 1. Davenport said children can become agitated, even acting out, before and after parental visits.
"It can take a toll on kids," she said. "That's a good reason to stop the visitation."
"That's contrary to what is important, that consequences and issues are addressed quickly," Davenport said.
She credited the House and Senate Judiciary Committees with devoting much of the past two sessions to the comprehensive rewrite and passing it in the final hours of the 2008 session. Gov. James Douglas signed the measure into law last summer.
Davenport said the state has spent the past months training everyone from court clerks to social workers on the new law. The first case was heard in Rutland Family Court on Friday morning, she noted.
"It's going to have its bumps," Judge Davenport predicted.
But, she and others involved in the enormous undertaking agree, the change is an enormous improvement in how Vermont helps its children — and their families — through some of the toughest times in their lives.