Once again, Vermont is mulling whether it needs an office to provide independent oversight of cases in which children get involved in the courts or the state’s welfare system.
The idea of establishing an Office of the Child Advocate has been on the table in Vermont for four of five years now, but has never actually made it through the Legislature, said Rep. Ann Pugh, D-South Burlington, chair of the House Committee on Human Services.
Last year, a bill calling for the Joint Legislative Child Protection Oversight Committee to look at the issue (not actually create the office) passed the House, but not the Senate.
On Thursday, the House Committee on Human Services took up a proposal to create the office once and for all. The bill, H.265, has 15 cosponsors and drew overwhelming initial support from lawmakers and state officials.
“It feels like this is really going to happen this time,” said Floyd Nease, executive director of the Lamoille Family Center in Morristown, who testified in support of the bill Thursday morning.
More than a dozen states already have such an office, including Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Emily Lawrence, associate director of the New Hampshire Office of the Child Advocate, said these agencies are the “fastest-growing sector in state government.”
In other states, offices of this type typically handle complaints related to the Department for Children and Families and juvenile justice. They recommend system-wide improvements for those functions and protect the interests of children and families involved in the system.
What exactly would the program look like in Vermont? Lawmakers said they don’t want to get too specific. Instead, they said, they’d like to establish the office and write a mission statement, rather than a set of directives, and then let it figure out how to fulfill its mission.
“The worst thing you can have is an office tasked with a lot of work that it doesn’t have the resources to address,” said Marshall Pahl, an attorney with the Office of the Defender General. “And I think that’s actually a really common problem.”
Pahl said he envisions a small office with a narrow scope that can then come back to the Legislature and say, “This is what we need.”
One key issue for lawmakers is what branch the office would fall under — executive, legislative or totally outside the governmental structure as a nonprofit. Most people testifying Thursday favored making the office part of the executive branch because it would be easy to obtain the records and information it needs.
Pahl said it’s critically important that the office be given both the authority to obtain confidential information and the responsibility to keep that information confidential. He said the executive branch is where that could happen best.
But Mike Fisher — chief health care advocate at Vermont Legal Aid — said he thinks there’s a strong case to be made on each side. Fisher does the same kind of work that the Office of the Child Advocate would do, but for health care rather than child services.
“You’re talking to a guy who’s independent, and I’m an advocate of independence, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a really strong argument for being within state government,” Fisher said. “You just get a different kind of animal. You do get less of an activist voice from within state government. It’s really a policy choice.”
Lawmakers and officials said it would be important to make sure the office is created through the lens of racial and cultural disparities, so it’s prepared to address them immediately.
In New Hampshire, Lawrence said her office receives “a lot more calls” about children of color than about other cases, and a disproportionate number of calls involve trans children. She said her organization is pushing for better data collection on those issues to inform its approach to addressing the problem.
On Thursday, Rep. Carl Rosenquist, R-Georgia, repeatedly pushed to amend the bill to form an Office of the Child and Family Advocate, rather than just an Office of the Child Advocate. He said that name better explains who the office would be helping and said a number of officials agreed with him about the broader name.
Lawmakers plan to continue discussing the bill in the coming weeks.
“I know that you’re after an entity that will help you fix the system,” Fisher said. “And I would be remiss in not saying: We’ve been here since 1998. And guess what? The health care system’s not fixed.
“Does that mean that my office is a waste of effort? No. I think you’re looking for somebody who’s going to assist in putting a shoulder to the wheel and exposing, shining a light on the challenges. It might not fix it. But it will lead to improvements.”
