Joint Children and Youth: Feb. 11, 2026

Senate Committee on Children and Youth 

House Committee on Aging, Children and Youth, and Legislative Affairs Meeting Jointly

February 11, 2026

Senator Ben Gilmore All right, members, I’m going to ask you to go ahead and find your seat and we are going to get started right on the dot. It is 1:30. So welcome. And I’ll call the Senate and House Joint Committee on Children and Youth to order. With that, I will entertain a motion to approve the December 10th minutes. I have a motion. Do I have a second? I have a second. Any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor say aye. Any opposed? Ayes have it. 

Before we move on to Item C, I’ll ask if my co-chair, if she has any comments. Great, perfect. All right, we’re going to move on to Item C, which is the appointment to the Child Maltreatment Investigations Oversight Committee. And I’m going to ask for a motion to confirm Representative Mary Bentley to the Child Maltreatment Oversight Committee. She’s one of two members of the General Assembly who are members of the House Committee on Children and Youth and the Senate Interim Committee on Children and Youth. 

So with that, I’ll entertain a motion. I have a motion. Do I have a second? I have the second. Any discussion? This would be the time now to tell all the things you think about Representative Bentley. Okay, I’m going to keep it open for a little bit longer. All right, seeing none, what’s the will of the committee? All in favor, say aye. Any opposed? Ayes have it. Congratulations, Representative Bentley. You don’t have as many detractors as I thought. No, I’m joking, of course. 

All right, moving on to Item D, Arkansas infant and children death review. If those presenting that would go ahead and make their way to the table, that would be great. And once you come to the table, if you would introduce yourself for the record and then you may proceed at your will.

Laura Taylor Hello, Laura Taylor. 

Kevin Cleghorn Good afternoon, Kevin Cleghorn. 

Sherry Williamson Sherry Williamson. 

Senator Ben Gilmore OK, and you may proceed. 

Arkansas Infant and Children Death Review report

Kevin Cleghorn Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. The mission of the Arkansas Infant and Child Death Review, the ICDR as it’s labeled, is to review all unexpected infant and child deaths in the state of Arkansas. The ICDR consists of 11 regional teams, volunteers that cover 75 counties in the State. 

The team reviews unexpected deaths of Arkansas children ages 0 to 17 years as required by Act 1818 of 2005. The annual report was completed in December of 25 and includes deaths that occurred in 2023. 

There were 170 total non-natural deaths. However, 22 of those deaths were either under criminal investigation or being prosecuted at the time of the review or the team could not obtain sufficient records. Therefore those 22 could not be reviewed. 

So of the 170 non-natural deaths, the ICDR teams statewide reviewed 148, as reflected in the annual report. Of the 148 deaths, 69 accidents that include motor vehicle related injuries, accidental drownings, poisonings or overdoses, asphyxia, fires, or other injuries, which can be found on page 10 and 11 of your report; 14 suicides and 18 homicides, which is on page 12; and 47 undetermined causes that included sudden unexpected infant death, which is pages 13 and 14 of your report. 

The teams are required or suggested to make recommendations to the state panel from their jurisdictions and their regions. On page 33 and 34 of the report, you’ll find a list of recommendations from the ICDR state panels and the regional teams. 

This report is meant to serve as a resource for organizations and agencies working to reduce the number of injury-related deaths across the state, and it’s the hopes of everyone involved in the infant and child death review process that this report will help guide that work. Thank you very much for your time and we can open for questions at this time if you would like. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Okay, thank you for that overview. Any questions from the committee at this time? Okay, there we go. Representative Gonzales Worthen, you’re recognized.

Representative Diana Gonzales Worthen Yes. I really appreciate the recommendations from the report, and I was just curious as to how do you see these recommendations being moved forward? And how can we help move this forward? 

Laura Taylor Hi, thank you. As Kevin mentioned, it really is a tool for any organization, agency, nonprofit, anyone who’s interested in trying to put in place some prevention activities or programs. These are very broad recommendations. 

So it was really helpful for the teams in the panel to kind of summarize the findings and be able to put, really in like a bulleted format of some basic recommendations that would help inform any of the groups that are interested in this work. 

So it really could be a variety of ways that this information could be used. What we don’t want is for this report to sit on a shelf. So we really would love to see all groups of people who are interested in prevention activities using it as a guide. 

Sherry Williamson Excuse me. The agency that I work for has a small amount of funds available for child abuse prevention grants. And we’ve actually used the recommendation from the report this year that came from the local teams to guide our request for proposal. So we’ve given, in the request for proposal, five specific recommendations for people to make applications for grants if they’re willing to develop a program that would help assist with one of these recommendations.

Representative Diana Gonzales Worthen So, how might an organization find these particular types of grants? Is this open to any organization in Arkansas?  

Sherry Williamson That’s a great question. The grants are open to state agencies, higher education, nonprofits. And we actually just sent out the RFP this last week and we’ve sent it out to all of our contacts, asked them to share it with their contacts. We would be happy to share with staff so that you all could pass it along to anybody who might be interested in it. 

Representative Diana Gonzales Worthen Yes, I would definitely like to help forward that information. 

Sherry Williamson Sure, absolutely. Thank you. 

Senator Ben Gilmore And if you would just send that to staff and they’ll distribute it to the committee. Thank you. Representative Richardson, you’re recognized. 

Representative Jay Richardson Thank you, Mr. Chair. On the suicide, homicide information on page 12, do you have that broken down by ages of those children? 

Laura Taylor So with guidance from the Arkansas Department of Health, we’re really careful about how we display the data because a lot of these numbers are very small. We wouldn’t want to make any of the information identifiable by individual cases. So on page, let’s see, starting on page 16, it’s broken down by all of the ages. 

So you’ll see, you can find some of that information by age group. I can tell you that if you jump to the 15 to 17-year-olds on page 20, that’s where you’re going to see the majority of the suicides and homicides. 

Representative Jay Richardson Okay, thank you. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Seeing no other questions, I’ll give one last opportunity. All right, seeing none. Thank you all for your presentation. Look forward to getting the information. Thank you very much. 

Kevin Cleghorn Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, committee. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Committee, we will move on to Item E. And that’s a discussion of HCR 1010 by Representative Shephard. I’m going to go ahead and ask Representative Shephard if she would go to the table unless she would prefer to do it from her chair. I’ll let you do it from the chair. At this point, you’re recognized. 

Juvenile Justice discussion

Representative Tara Shephard Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you all for being here today. My opening comments are simple statements that will be made, basically that I’m asking this committee to not look away at the data that would be presented to us today and to actually confront what will be revealed. The individuals that was asked to be here today to present, it’s not about blame. 

But it’s about responsibility, the responsibility to build a system that protects the public as well as a responsibility to protect the future of Arkansas children. About six months before I filed the resolution, there was a delinquency plan submitted. What the key statement that stood out to me that really knew that I was going to move forward with filing it, the statement reads– and Mr. Chair, I can give this to Blake or BLR to put on the state’s website if need be– but the statement reads, Arkansas still locks up more children than most states when accounting for population, according to recent data. 

The trend is costly with expenses running around $127,750 per child. State records show roughly $350 a day. And because the state’s court system is not standardized, the way children are punished for similar types of crimes depends on where they live and which judge they appear before. So that information there led to me filing the resolution. 

And I know what I’m attempting to do here today will not be resolved. But I simply wanted to give my colleagues an overview of what’s happening with juvenile justice in Arkansas, Mr. Chair. 

Senator Ben Gilmore All right. Thank you, representative. So with that, I think we’re going to continue this discussion. And so I will move on to Item F, and I would ask those that are in attendance, if you would, a part of that discussion. And, Senator Irvin, you’re able to be there or go to the table. All right, with that, I will ask those to introduce themselves when they get to the table and go from there. I didn’t know we were going to have walk-up music. All right, Senator Irvin, we’ll start with you. And you’re recognized to proceed and introduce yourself. 

Senator Missy Irvin Thank you. I can think of some other walkout songs some people might play for me that might be a little bit different. I’m Senator Missy Irvin. I represent Senate District 24. And this is an issue I’ve been working on since 2013, 2012, something like that. 

Troy Braswell Good afternoon. Thank you. I’m Troy Braswell. I have the honor of being a circuit judge in the 20th Judicial District that covers Faulkner, Van Buren and Searcy County. I also have a message from Justice Wood, who informs that she regrets that she cannot join us today, that the court has some important issues that they are handling. But she sends her gratitude for you taking the time to focus on juvenile justice. 

Brooke Steen Good afternoon, I’m Brooke Steen. I’m the juvenile division director at the Administrative Office of the Courts. 

Kathie Hess Good afternoon, I’m Kathie Hess, Circuit Judge for the 1st Judicial District. That’s Cross, Lee, Woodruff, St. Francis, Monroe, and Phillips. 

Senator Missy Irvin Okay, thank y’all, thank you. And it’s really an honor to be able to address my colleagues sitting here and talking about an issue that we have been working on for a very, very, very long time. This is actually a very big success story that we came together and collaborated with each other on. 

And this was the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch all working together. And it was really generated through the need of what we saw at the time, which was a high level of incarceration of our youth without really meaningful community engagement, services that we knew they needed, and the ability to try to get those services outside of an incarceration system in their communities.

 In 2013, unfortunately, I was in the minority at that time of the legislature. But I ran a bill called the Close to Home Act, which we were not able to get passed. And I invite you to look at the history of that piece of legislation and what happened with it. But that did not deter myself, Judge Rhonda Wood, at the time who was a juvenile judge before she made her way to the Supreme Court. That did not detour our work. We continued to meet together, work together, and develop a policy that we knew that the state of Arkansas needed to put in place in order to right the wrongs and correct and create real reforms as it relates to juvenile justice. 

So in 2014, we have made the deliberate decision to adopt the core principles of reducing juvenile recidivism. There was a lot of work that was done with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, with the juvenile judges. And I credit Judge Hannah. At the time, he was our chief justice of the Supreme Court. And Judge Hannah created the Commission on Children, Youth and Families. 

And at that time, he appointed me to that commission. And, thankfully, it’s just honestly been one of the biggest honors of my life to serve on the Commission on Children, Youth and Families now for more than a decade. And that commission is not just a commission that just meets and talks. We put in a lot of hard work and time and effort. 

And it is a commission that is just a beautiful orchestration of the judicial branch, the executive branch, and the legislative branch and stakeholders all coming together to really focus hard on juvenile crime, juveniles, juvenile children, juvenile offenders, the entire system, how the system is being efficient or non-efficient, how we can continue to develop what we’ve put in place. 

We’ve obtained multi-million dollar grants to study, assess, procure, and pilot the use of validated assessments. We passed legislation to require that juvenile judges utilize a validated risk assessment. And so these validated risk assessments is known as our SAVRY tool. And these assessments, they don’t only apply for just the child. It applies to the entire family and the entire situation that has led that juvenile into the behaviors that are occurring. 

And it’s really an amazing tool that our juvenile judges have to have and our courts have to have to be effective. And you’ll hear more about that from our judges. And so this is statewide, and we have incredible engagement from juvenile judges across the entire state working with us to really fine tune this policy, these tools, and see what more we can do and how we need to move about creating that. 

We began with SAVRY, which is a structured assessment of violence, risk, and use, and expanded to include assessments for different stages as well as identifying special needs, such as mental health and substance abuse. The process has been in place now for over a decade, and we’ve made considerable improvements. And, again, change is difficult, but I think you’ll hear from the juvenile judges that system-wide improvements have really been exceptional.

 And I want to say, too, if you paid attention to some of the things that were happening in other states in this country, it was unbelievable. And Pennsylvania and Florida are two states that come to mind as to what was happening with juveniles and why they were incarcerated. 

And that did not happen in the state of Arkansas, but what happened in some of these cases– I think it was Pennsylvania– you had a juvenile judge that was being paid under the table to incarcerate youth. And these were first-time offender kids. And one kid ended up committing suicide because of what happened to him. 

And it is out there, and I invite you as legislators to look at that, because it’s so sad how quickly things could just go so wrong and the dramatic effects that juvenile justice will have on a kid’s life. And so we have gone to extraordinary lengths with this commission and with all the stakeholders to put in this system and to make these changes because we want to make sure that these kids get what they need at home in their communities, not incarcerated. 

And we’re working around the clock to really make that happen. We went to a retreat this past summer. Incredible work. We are working with incredible people nationwide that are giving us excellent advice. But we dug in and put in the work and I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of this commission and the great work that these folks have done. So I’m going to turn it over to them. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you for being here. Thanks for all your work on this. You’re recognized. 

Judge Troy Braswell: No cookie cutter approach

Troy Braswell Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you, Senator Irvin, for that overview of the hard work that we certainly have put in over the years. What I also hope to do today is give you some additional background information on kind of how we got to where we are today. I’m not very good at PowerPoint, so– that would be awesome. That would be great. You’d think clicking would be easy, but sometimes I struggle. 

In 2015, the Juvenile Justice Reform Board was created and implemented. And the main goal was, how do we identify areas in the system where we need additional support and modifications. I had the honor of eventually being named the chair of the Juvenile Justice Reform Board, Justice Wood chairing the Supreme Court Commission on Youth and Families. We decided, why are we meeting separately? Let’s meet together. Let’s pool our resources. 

And so we’ve been doing that as long as the reform board was in action. And by statute, it has gone away. Through that, we selected pilot courts to learn, be trained on the use of validated risk assessment tools. I volunteered for my court in Conway, Clinton, and Marshall to participate as a pilot court program. 

And I can remember very vividly being in a meeting room at the Supreme Court and the creator of the risk assessment was going through everything. And it’s very detailed. It requires families to come in and sit in long interviews. And they’re asked very specific questions aimed at violence in the home, substance abuse. They take a mental health assessment, a substance abuse assessment. What is going on in this kid or this family’s life that increases the risk that they’re going to continue to be in the court system or risk of violence? 

And so it’s one thing to know what risk factors a kid may have in their life. But to me, the bigger question is, once you know those things, what are you going to do about it? What programs and services do you have that are specifically aimed at helping that individual kid or family? 

And I remember the question back to us was, how many families do you think are really going to come and sit down with a judge’s staff, probation officers, whatever that may be, and just open up and tell you all the awful things that they have going on in their life? It’s a good question. My answer was, what if it’s only 10%? What if only 10% of the kids and families come into court and let it all hang out? Is that not worth it? Is that 10% not worth the hours of work that it takes to complete these assessments? 

Well, for me and my community, absolutely it’s worth it. And what I can tell you is, it’s not 10%. There are times that my staff has to tell families and kids like, you know what, I think we’re good. Like we can move on to the next thing, right? This is a lot of information you’re giving us. But it’s important that we meet each kid and family where they are in that moment. 

We cannot have a cookie-cutter approach to juvenile justice in the state of Arkansas. We have individualized education plans at schools because we understand that every kid learns differently, that there may be certain modifications or help or support that that kid or family needs to be successful. The same thing is true through the court system. The same is true in life. 

And we’re doing a disservice if we just throw everybody into one basket and say, do community service, do your probation, good luck. We have to be intentional about identifying the services and support that can help. And so we’ve seen the impact of that, not only in the 20th Judicial District, but across the state. 

You can see there on the slide, different legislation that was passed in 2019. Mandatory use of a risk assessment, that is specific to prior to a commitment to DYS. So I know part of the resolution is related to kids that are committed to the Department of Youth Services, right? And so before a judge can commit a juvenile to DYS, they are required by state law to conduct the risk assessment.

 And basically what that does, just for some that may be unfamiliar, based on the assessment and the results of that, a child is determined to be low, moderate, or high risk of reoffending or violence in the future. There are no questions asked about what the current offense is. So if you have a kid that’s in court for breaking into cars, nobody’s asking them questions about, what were you thinking, what’d you do, what was going on. We’re looking at, what does this kid have going on in their life, what have they been through. 

And the judges get to review that prior to making a, in juvenile court, disposition, sentencing decision. And I’ll tell you how valuable it is, and some have heard this story, but I had a young lady that was about 13 or 14 years old that came into court. And she was in court for a battery. She’d gotten into a fight at school. And I’ll tell ya, I take fights at school very serious. It interrupts the learning. It creates a security issue. 

It’s an important deal, why are we fighting at school? And so she came in and she was with her grandmother and she ended up pleading true, which in juvenile court, true or not true versus guilty or not guilty. And I took that plea, I heard what happened, and I read through her risk assessment. 

And what I learned was that years prior to this fight, she had been in a car with her mother and two siblings and there was a wreck. This young lady and her siblings were able to get out of the car but had to watch their mom burn to death. What was the fight about? There were girls in her class that knew what had happened and they were making fun of her about that and she had had enough. 

They got into a fight. Why does that matter? Because it should change the way that I talk to that young lady. Without that information, it would be very easy for me to right off the bat come down heavy and let her know what the expectations of her behavior would be at school. And she would leave that courtroom without being seen or without being heard. And I would just be another step in the process of somebody that’s ignoring such pain in her life. 

And I was able to tell her, listen, I wish that I could make it where 14, 15, and 16-year-old kids didn’t say mean things to each other. That’s a part of life. In fact, as adults, we even experience those things. So I’m not minimizing what happened. I understand how you got to that boiling point. What our job is to do with you, young lady, is to help you get through this because it might happen again. 

We want to give you the tools that you need, whether that be coping skills, counseling, whatever that looks like, so that the next time somebody wants to be mean to you or say something bad about your deceased mother, that you have a safety plan, you have an idea of what you’re going to be able to do to avoid being back in court. That matters for every kid that comes in court. 

Regardless of what they’re accused of, they have a story. And if we ignore that, we’re missing the mark. And I say this a lot, and I want to be very clear, and you can ask the people that come in front of me, this is not about being soft on kids and ignoring what’s going on in our communities. That’s the wrong way. 

But it’s a smart way to handle the kids and adverse childhood experiences that they’ve had and the trauma that they have experienced and try to get them on the right path. It’s in all of our best interest. Senator Irvin pointed out, let kids be at home in the community and have the support that they need. Unfortunately, there are times that that’s not possible because of safety risks or concerns. But that’s how we’re using these risk assessments. 

And it’s important for all courts across the state to partner with people in the community to be able to come in and provide that level of support for that youth. You’ll see the statistical impact that that’s had across the state since 2015. You can see these are delinquency cases filed statewide, a 55% reduction in the number of kids that are coming through court on a delinquency case. 

So delinquency, anytime that a juvenile commits an offense that would be a crime if they were an adult, right, that’s a delinquency. DYS commitments since that time, down 24%. The Ohio Youth Screening Tool that we use for diversions that we divert kids out of court, an increase of 836%. That’s massive. 

That means that people are using these tools to work with kids. You can tell by 2015 all the way to 2025, the number of risk assessments that have been completed with data inputted that we know that there are this many kids and families that sat through that process and were given an opportunity for that individualized court plan and plan for rehabilitation. Diversions, you know, data is only good as the input.

 We’re always working on our data. I serve on a data subcommittee, I think two different data subcommittees. And so you can see that diversions have increased greatly. And that was part of a legislative package a session or two ago that really opened the door for more diversion programs to keep kids out of court. And that’s the Ohio Youth Assessment Tool. That’s what we use early on for diversion, the SAVRY. 

The MAISY is the mental health assessment I discussed earlier, as well as the substance abuse through the Craft. You’ll see what needs each kid has. So based on these risk assessments we’re able to identify the specific areas in their life where they may be struggling. 

We also point out what positive factors do they have going on in their lives. What’s something they have going on in the community that gives us hope that we can make an impact? So these are all the things that we look at to come up with that probation plan that’s tailored specifically to that kid. Total delinquency cases, we looked at that, 38% reduction there on felonies, 60% reduction on misdemeanors, 48 reduction in revocations. This is statewide.

 And my numbers are a little bit different, but you can see that it’s drastically made a huge impact on the kids and families in our communities. I just wanted to point out here on DYS commitment data the breakdown between felonies and misdemeanors. In Arkansas, you can’t commit a low risk misdemeanor to DYS.

And there’s two schools of thought that if you go out and do a bunch of research across the country, there’s a group of people that believe that you should be offense based. So the first guiding principle is, what is the offense for which they’re in court for, and that your sentencing options, disposition options should be limited based on that. 

To me, using the risk assessment and the results contained in that is a better guiding principle because it gives us a greater in-depth look of what areas of risk that a kid might have. And so the last one is just probation revocation or aftercare violations. So a kid is committed to DYS and gets out on aftercare, let’s say a period of six months, they commit a violation that ends up sending them back to DYS, that’s the third row there on the right. And I believe Miss Steen is going to go through the remainder of this slide. 

Brooke Steen Yes, I’ll be brief on this slide. And Representative Shephard did ask us to bring some school data. So we do have a data point in our case management system on school related incidents. But as you can see there, we only have 10 counties that are currently using that data point. I’m hopeful that with our data projects that we’re working on that we can improve that because I think that is one area that really needs a lot of attention. 

And I think that’s very important to Representative Shephard. So I do want to provide the data we have, even though it’s only 10 out of our 75 counties that were record there. Now the FINS data is accurate. For those that are not familiar with FINS, it’s family in need of services. The truancy would be the ones that are filed by the schools because they are not able to get these kids come to school. 

So they actually file an action in the court to say, hey judge, help us. We need to get these kids back in school. And FINS take up a lot of our juvenile judges’ times and I’m sure they could tell you all about it. But the FINS, they’re able to provide services to these families without having a delinquency case. So sometimes it is a child that’s been involved with criminal activity. 

They probably have committed some offenses, but it’s not gotten to that point yet. They haven’t been arrested. Because usually when a kid’s skipping school, something’s going on in the home. Something’s either going on with that child or something’s gone on with the family not to get that child to school. So this is the FINS data. 

You can see it’s really not changed that much over the last five years. And we, of course, had a little bit of a difference around Covid, but we are not really seeing a slowdown in FINS. That’s still occurring statewide and, again, do take up most of our of a judge’s time. That is actually all of the slides that we have. And so I’m happy to answer– I know we are all happy to answer any questions that y’all may have. 

Senator Missy Irvin If I can add one last thing, I think that’s really important as it relates to this slide. We have talked about and discussed the idea of trying to really layer in the schools. There’s some barriers potentially there because of FERPA laws or federal laws. But if you look at this, these kids are in these, they’re at the school and they’re also in the court system. 

There’s got to be a little bit more shared data or collaboration or something happening. That’s something that we as a commission talked a lot about and have talked a lot about. Because especially with truancy and FINS and things like that, it can cut both ways. You’ve got some schools that kind of just, the juvenile courts kind of become a dumping ground. And that’s not good, and it’s not appropriate. 

And those kids should not be there. I’ve seen those, we’ve seen those cases where they should not be in a juvenile court system, that they’re not being dealt with at the school effectively and efficiently. There’s data that could be so helpful for the schools that the courts now have because of this validated risk assessment tool that they are utilizing here but could be so helpful for the school people, school officials, teachers, whatever, to also have that information because they need to know why that child’s acting up in the classroom or skipping third period. 

I go back to the dashboard system that the state of Arkansas paid for for the schools all to have a school safety dashboard. At one time all schools had it because the state of Arkansas paid for it. Now it’s only by choice if the schools want it or not. It’s a system that was created by a man in Mountain Home, Arkansas, that’s brilliant, who worked for Walmart. And I will tell you, it’s so critical. The schools that use that information really have a better thumb on the pulse of what’s happening with their kids than schools that are not using it. 

It’s not mandated that they use it. In my opinion, we give them a lot of money at the schools and I think they should spend the money to utilize this system. Because if you’re going to have a system that tracks their grades, why not also have a system to track how they’re doing as a person? To me, that’s just as important as your grade that you’re getting in algebra or whatever is. And we’ve got all this information. All this information is sitting in file cabinets. It’s just not centralized. And that’s what the technology and the data dashboard, the dashboard provides. 

And so for some schools, it is an incredibly effective tool that they use to flag those kids that are at-risk kids that are having issues. It could be that they had a gang-related offense. Well, the kids and the administrators and the teachers, they need to know that information. Probably helpful if they’re getting into fights or something at school, that they have that information. 

So there’s a lot of work, in my opinion, that needs to be made there at the school because it’s a huge component and piece of them feeding the system that needs be really looked at and we have. I will say that we have really, really, really worked really hard on that piece of this at our retreat last year. So I wanted to say that. And we also need to know if a kid is skipping school, what’s happening at home. So that’s why it cuts both ways and it’s a really delicate policy to figure out. But we’re happy to answer questions. They are. Thank you. 

Senator Ben Gilmore All right. Thank you all. So we’ve got several in the queue. Really quick, I have a question. So first on this slide under school related incidents, you see a fairly sizable decrease from 24 to 25. Is there anything that attributes to that or attributed to that? 

Brooke Steen I’m not really sure. I noticed it was specific in a few counties that have maybe new judges. So I don’t know if maybe their court isn’t tracking this because this would have to be entered into context. As of right now in our current system, it’s like an optional checkbox. 

One thing we have discussed is that in our new system, it needs to be a mandatory box. You have to click yes or no. Because if it’s just a checkbox, then sometimes when you have turnover in clerk’s offices or juvenile officers and they just skip over it, again, as the judge said, your data is only as good as what’s inputted into it.

Senator Ben Gilmore If you would, go back to a couple of the slides related to the diversion. And then also– right, right there. So I see that you– so here, go back to where it has the felonies. This number corresponds with the diversion rate, correct, the 55%?

Brooke Steen Well, let me get back to it. There was a different version. Let me get to that one. 

Senator Ben Gilmore So the diversion rate of total cases corresponds with the actual crimes committed? So as we see a decrease in cases, we’re seeing a decrease in crimes committed? Is that the way I read that or no? 

Brooke Steen We are having an increase in diversions. Yes. So there are some counties that divert after cases are filed. And there are certain areas that divert cases before they’re filed. But yes, you definitely can see an increase in the diversions and the case numbers going down. And I think that’s– while we haven’t had a big decrease in felonies, there’s a big decrease in misdemeanors, which makes me assume that– 

Senator Ben Gilmore That’s what I was trying to get at. 

Brooke Steen Yes, sir. 

Senator Ben Gilmore I was just trying to make sure that we’re seeing that corresponding data point. 

Brooke Steen And to me, that makes sense. Because you’re diverting misdemeanors usually, right? It’s not usually going to be a felony.

Senator Ben Gilmore So if you go to the felony slide overall, so do y’all break this down? Do you track the specific felonies? 

Brooke Steen Yes, sir. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Okay. But you just don’t show it here, but you have that data. 

Brooke Steen I do. I probably have a lot of it in here as well. And I tried to bring a lot, but didn’t want to overwhelm y’all with the PowerPoint. But any kind of data points you want on the level of the offense, whether it was offense of property, person. And I know that when Michael presents all of his data as to commitments are, okay, these were all felonies, violent crimes against a person or these were all–. And so we both break our data down there and can pretty much answer any question for you. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Perfect. It’d be interesting to see that. OK, we’re going to questions now. First in the queue, we have Representative Barnes. You’re recognized. 

Representative Glenn Barnes Thank you, Mr. Chair. Right here. With the increase in mental health, and it has decreased some in 2025, what are we doing to create greater access for mental health? For instance, in Pine Bluff, one of our largest mental health facilities is at risk of closing because of funding, Southeast Behavior. And so they are very active in the juvenile court under Judge Brown. I’m wondering what are we doing? Are we cutting funding while those numbers are somewhat still high? 

Brooke Steen Representative, I mean, this is a problem across our state. There are facilities closing on a regular basis. We are losing services around the state, and we are doing our best to keep up. I mean, there are certain parts of our state that are doing just fine. But in the south, we definitely have several judicial districts that are at a place where I’m concerned about them having the services they need. 

The AOC has several federal grants that we are currently working on contracting with some service providers to come into areas. So we’ve been working pretty diligently on that. Now Michael Crump can talk about, I mean, there are community-based providers across the state. So there are always somebody, but as Judge Braswell said, it’s not a cookie cutter approach. And there are some needs for some of our juveniles that we are hoping we can address with some of our funds. 

I talked to Judge Brown this week about it. And so it is something that we are always looking at. And we always tell judges, if there’s a lack of something, number one, call our office and see if we can help, see what we can do. The AOC actually created a position called the Statewide Behavioral Health Administrator, and she serves as a liaison between the judiciary and service providers. And she is a therapist by trade. 

So while she’s worked in the court system, she worked with CASA for several years. She is a therapist, and so she understands this world and is really trying to help connect some resources that are out there that maybe sometimes judges don’t even know about. 

Senator Ben Gilmore All right. Representative Shephard, you’re recognized. 

Representative Tara Shephard Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you all for being here today. I absolutely enjoyed your presentation. And Senator, you and I, of course, share some of the same passion as it relates to juvenile justice in Arkansas. I want to take you back to, I guess, page three on the slide. For me, and if I’m wrong, please correct me. Again, this is not that I’m on some witch hunt, but I’m simply trying to gather information here. 

On page three on the slide, this shows the implementation of the SAVRY assessment, correct, from 2015 until 2025. If we look at the total number of cases that have been filed, there’s been a significant decrease. We agree with that. But could you argue that the number of commitments to DYS is not keeping up proportionally with the number and the decrease in cases? That’s one question I have. 

And then the other thing that is, what’s interesting about this slide is we see a big jump once it became mandatory. I think the understanding is in 2015, the legislation was written to complete an assessment. But then in 2025– well, earlier, in 2020 was the mandatory era in which it came. So this does not necessarily show that we are complying with statute from what you all have provided. 

The specific question that was given in the email, and I think Brooke would be in a better position to answer these questions since she and I communicated the most, how are we able to show that the assessments are being tied directly to the commitments? The cases are decreasing, but the commitment to DYS is not keeping up with that. And then the last one, and I’ll be done. I know it’s a loaded question. 

When we look at the diversion, the data is simply not there. And it’s actually missing. And I think that has already been addressed in the beginning in regards to data. So we’ll come back to that, Senator, and what we plan to do about it in the future. And I’m sorry, thank you, Brooke. 

Brooke Steen Yes, ma’am. If we miss anything, just please remind us. To start, I actually think that data does show a reduction, a little reduction in commitments. Now we all have to remember Covid. So 2019 and you see that real low jump. And I think Michael Crump would agree with this. We’ve talked about this, a lot of times 2020 and 2021 are pretty much going to be Covid years because he has a lag of when he gets kids. 

So like the commitment would be for the offense that maybe occurred maybe the prior year, maybe eight months before. I mean, depending on the case, obviously. I think 2020 and 2021, you kind of have to, 2019 through 2021, you kind of have to take out. We knew there was going to be a big jump after Covid. I don’t think Michael was surprised by that. I mean, I obviously know he wishes they were lower, but I don’t think that that rise after Covid was that shocking. 

We are going in the right direction. 404– and this also doesn’t show how high the numbers were before 2015. I mean, we were having 600, 700 kids committed. So the numbers really are pretty good. And while total cases are going down, and Senator Gilmore pointed this out, it’s the misdemeanor cases that are going down. The felony cases have not gone down all that much. And obviously, while we’re not just looking at offense. 

The more serious crimes, of course, are going to be the more kids that are going to DYS. So there has been a huge reduction in misdemeanor cases, but not felonies. I mean, a little bit. Actually, 2025 numbers look incredible. We didn’t know what they’d look at until you asked us to pull the data. And we looked at it and we’re like, wow. And Michael said, well, hopefully this shows for my 2026 data is going to be a lot better. 

Because his commitments are going to have a lag in time, right? And so I think the data actually does show an improvement there. As for the diversions, we have a third of our counties that are using Context. I’ll just talk about our case management system. It’s not the most user-friendly case management system and everybody’s probably laughing around me because they know. 

But many of our courts have been committed to putting their data in there. There are other courts that are using their own diversion data, like they have their own program that they’re using for diversions. For us being a non unified state to have one case management system with the data we have is pretty awesome. I’m bragging on our CIS division, but they do a really good job. 

And I do think in our new case management system, though, it’s going to be much more user friendly and I think our data will continue to improve. But the diversions show, I mean, even though it’s only a third of our counties, how many we are doing. I mean for almost 1,500 to 2,000 diversions in a third of our state, that probably means there’s close to 5,000 diversions a year, which is I think pretty incredible compared. 

And that does, to Senator Gilmore’s point, kind of compare to the number of misdemeanor cases that have gone down. So those are likely the cases that been diverted. And judge, I don’t know if I missed anything. 

Representative Tara Shephard Quick follow-up, Mr. Chair. Brooke, it was asking in the email, the data in regards to the assessment being tied to the commitment. Can you all provide that to us? 

Brooke Steen You mean like how many that are committed have an assessment? 

Representative Tara Shephard Yes, so if the assessment shows that low-risk offenders are not to be committed in Arkansas, is that accurate? They shouldn’t be committed. 

Brooke Steen Correct. 

Troy Braswell I’m sorry. If you don’t mind, let me– this is a big, this is a big deal. 

Representative Tara Shephard Absolutely. 

Troy Braswell Earlier, what I mentioned was, the statute says that you cannot commit a low risk misdemeanor. A lot of the time, you will have a juvenile that is found delinquent of a rape, sexual assault. An overwhelming majority of juveniles are going to come out to be low risk of reoffending for sex offenses. 

I believe the percentage is somewhere between 81 and 85 percent of juveniles that commit a sex offense do not commit another sex offense while they are a juvenile. So that’s part of the data and the research where a lot of kids with sex offenses are going to come out low risk. That doesn’t mean that in certain situations, a DYS commitment is not appropriate based on the seriousness of the offense that occurred. 

So that’s the big distinction in the low risk is there could be some very violent, specifically sex cases where a juvenile would grade out as low risk of reoffending. 

Representative Tara Shephard Mr. Chair, this is my last question and I’ll get back in the queue.

Senator Ben Gilmore You’re recognized.

Representative Tara Shephard My question is going to be directed towards you, Judge Braswell. I have the utmost respect for you. I think you are one of the most compassionate juvenile judges in Arkansas that I’ve encountered, and I respect you fully. Once I presented this resolution in committee, after I presented it, you stated on record, Ms. Shephard is correct. We have to do something in Arkansas. I’m going to ask you, Judge Braswell, to explain further what you meant. 

Troy Braswell Thank you, Representative Shephard, for that question. I always like it as a judge to hear somebody say what I said on the record back to me, right? Yes, every day I have someone that repeats everything that I say. I’m glad my court reporter doesn’t go home with me. That’s for sure. 

Representative Shephard, we’re at a place where we’ve done a lot of hard work and we’ve made a lot changes and we continue to do that. And it’s going to be a fight that we fight for the rest of our careers because we know that things change and circumstances change. Representative Barnes, I mean, he hit on it. Some of the biggest issues that we have that are coming at us as a system is, what are we doing for mental health? 

And I’ll tag onto that substance abuse for juveniles in the state of Arkansas. I had a young man in front of me a couple weeks ago, real big. I mean, 6’4, 250. Mom and dad that love him and that are doing everything that they can for him. Has a diagnosis of autism, and they’ve come to me in a FINS case because they need services. They need help. And they have done everything that they’re supposed to do. 

They’ve taken the kid to counseling. They’ve done everything they can. The young man continues to have moments and periods of violence in the home. Now the family has a relatively young child at home that’s new to the family. It’s creating a dangerous situation at home. The parents are at a loss. And so when the kid finally does something, I hate to say bad enough, they were able to get him accepted into a mental health treatment facility. The kid, no shocker, becomes violent while he’s in mental health treatment. 

Based on what happened in the facility, they sent him to the juvenile detention center in that area and said, we’re done. He was violent. That prosecutor got that and said, we’re not filing delinquency case on this young man. They also know that he has an open FINS case in front of me. So they were like, we’re going to let Judge Braswell figure it out. And I say that a little bit joking, but what they’re saying is, we trust Judge Braswell to handle this. 

And we don’t want to further put this kid deeper into the system. So my question is, what do I do with a kid who is a danger in the home. Not all the time, but enough time that mom and dad are legitimately scared. And now because he’s had a violent act in a mental health facility, their provider has just dropped them– we’re done, there’s nothing else we can do. And what I’ve seen happen in the past, and I’m not attacking providers, I’m just telling you what happens. 

Once that happens for a kid, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for the parents to get that kid admitted into a different residential treatment in the state of Arkansas. And so now they’re in front of me crying, basically begging me to hold their son in contempt of court and give them a couple days of safety in their home. Those are real kids and real families that are desperate for help. 

And so the closures that you’re talking about, Representative Barnes, Representative Shephard, what do we need to do? It’s a big task. And listen, the AOC, and there are a lot of people that have been working on trying to identify providers to come into the state and provide these services. 

And I don’t want to speak for them, but what it seems a reality to be so often is it’s like, hmm, I don’t know. I don’t know that it’s worth it. And so we see that especially on the substance abuse side of things, where we have drug courts across the state, we’re working with these kids, and there are kids that are crying out for more intensive help. And we have zero inpatient drug beds in the state of Arkansas. Zero. 

And I know that when I’m talking about these issues that there are dollar signs all around both of those. That’s not lost on me. I understand the hurdle that that creates. But Representative Shephard, to your question, mental health and substance abuse for our kids and families in our state is the things that we’ve got to tackle going forward if we’re going to continue to see the change and the impact that we had. Because it’s one thing to know that a kid needs help, but if you don’t have the tools to give it to him, what’s the point? 

Representative Tara Shephard So would it be an accurate statement that we rely on incarceration in some instances because of lack of community-based services, specifically mental health and substance abuse? 

Troy Braswell I would say that there would be situations where a kid is detained for their safety and the safety of the community or those around him for a short time period to ensure that they have a safe home and safe place to go home to. So it’s a very good loaded question about that. I don’t mean any disrespect by that, but that’s a difficult one to answer. It’s a good question. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you, Representative Shephard. Moving on to Representative Ennitt. You’re recognized. If you’ll hit your button again, representative. Now you’re recognized. 

Representative Denise Ennitt Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’d like to thank everybody for this presentation on this very important subject. I’d like to touch on Judge Braswell. So I have a son with autism, and so my question is, with all this data that you all have, how do you, for students with disabilities, how do you track that? Or do you even track that? Because I’m interested in knowing how many of our children who have special needs are in this system? 

Troy Braswell Representative, that’s a great question. My chief of staff has a son with autism, and so that’s something that’s near and dear to my heart and to hers as well. I know for our court, I don’t have, I’m not currently tracking specific diagnoses or disabilities that come through the court system. I use those because, if we know them, those are identified in our risk assessments, and I 100% take those things into consideration when developing that plan. But currently right now, that’s not a data point that we’ve been collecting. 

Representative Denise Ennitt Follow up? So how difficult would it be to do that moving forward? 

Brooke Steen So it’s actually funny you ask that question because yesterday I was talking with our person who’s taking the statewide behavioral health administrator position. And she’s been talking with the national centers who help state courts around the country and that they are developing data points– for the first time ever, they are developing data points to track behavioral health in cases. And that involves, of course, criminal justice cases. This isn’t just juvenile cases. 

And they expect to roll that out later this year. And she had literally just had a meeting with them a couple of days ago about it. And we chatted about it, because I said, what do we track? Is it if somebody brings it up, because are we asking people to identify this? Is it things that come up in SAVRY or does defense counsel have to bring it up? So I don’t know what that’s going to look like, but it is something that the national center is exploring and is going to roll out to state courts, hopefully, very soon. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you. Representative Gonzales Worthen, you’re recognized. 

Representative Diana Gonzales Worthen Thank you for your presentation. You mentioned the school safety dashboard– yes, Senator– you mentioned the school safety dash board, how that possibly could be a major tool for identifying some of the challenges that our students may have early on. What would that look like in terms of ensuring that we are using that tool or if that’s one of the best ways since we have it to move forward, to identify early. 

Senator Missy Irvin Yeah, thank you. I’m familiar with it because I’ve spent a lot of time with the developers of that program and schools around the state, some that really utilize that as an effective tool. I think there’s room there for schools to use it. And if a school comes to me, especially, one of the things that whenever I met with superintendents or with schools, their top concern was mental health issues with their students. That is a top concern. 

And I asked, well, then how are you tracking that information? Because if you’re not tracking it or you’re not– I’m going to use a word that Judge Braswell used in his presentation. If you’re not intentional, then what are you doing? So you all have children. You probably all have stories just like I do about when my kids were in school and what was going on with my kids. 

And it took a lot of deciphering for me to go, oh, okay, my daughter’s getting bullied in this class period. That’s why she’s not doing well. Or she’s coming to me crying, or she’s crying, or the teacher’s saying she’s crying. Well, okay something’s happening. Are you digging down into it to figure out what’s happening? Who’s saying what to her and why? We need to now redo her entire schedule to get her away from that kid, which is what I had to do. 

So to me, it’s a tool that should be utilized. And for me, their grades are very important. I’m not minimizing their grades that they’re getting in algebra or whatever, but what’s happening in their lives is just as important, if not more important, because that is what’s happened and affecting what is happening when they’re coming to the judges in the juvenile justice court system. Let’s figure out a way to figure it out in the classroom before it gets to the courtroom. That’s my point. 

I think that it could be a tool that could be utilized to divert even before we get into the system. And we need to continue to, what’s important to me is total cases filed from 2015 down to 2025, a clear reduction of that. We want kids to be in juvenile court that it’s an appropriate place for them to be. 

There’s a lot of kids, in my opinion, that probably might get there, or that I know for a fact got there, and did not need to be there. It should have been handled at the school level, should have been in the classroom, should have be handled with the family there. And I’m not beating up on the schools. They’ve got their hands full. They’ve got to be teachers. 

They weren’t trained to do this work, but guess what? It’s landed on their shore and they’re tired of seeing another student commit suicide or seeing another kid act out violently against another child, because, guess what, we found out what’s happening in their home life, just what Judge Braswell talked about with a 13-year-old little girl. Guess what? If I were that 13-year-old girl, I’d probably get into a fight too if I saw my mom burned to death in a car and you’re making fun of my mom. Not okay. 

So why did that end up to that level? Why can’t we deal with it in the classroom as best we can? But again, you have to have the community providers out there. And as you know, in rural Arkansas, that is almost nonexistent. And it is nonexistent when it comes to substance abuse. And if you’ve had a child that struggled with any kind of issues, whether it be, if you struggle with substance abuse, I’m not minimizing that, drugs, alcohol. 

But let me tell you folks, social media and the amount of junk and garbage that is getting put into these kids is just as dangerous as any drug or alcohol to their self-esteem, to their confidence, to them comparing themselves to unattainable, unrealistic situations. You are crazy or you’ve got your head in the sand if you think that social media is not as harmful as a high-powered fentanyl drug, cocaine. It is even more so, and it has affected numbers more than we could have ever imagined. 

So, to me, it is a smart and wise investment. And if a school comes to me and says, oh, we’ve got issues with DCFS, DYS, and these kids, and blah, blah, blah– what are you doing as a school board? What are you doing as a school to engage at that level with these kids and their families? 

Or are you just putting them in the bleachers and say, Go get on your phone, instead of being– PE, go sit in the bleachers and play on your phone. No. I mean, it gets me really, really fired up and frustrated. So thank you for the question. But I think it’s a huge continuum and it’s a policy issue that we really should tackle. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you, Representative. Representative Barnes, you’re recognized. All right, if you’ll hit that button again. All right. Don’t touch it. There you go. 

Representative Glenn Barnes Thank you, Chair. One for the judge. Wouldn’t you be able to say that a lot of numbers could be worse if it wasn’t for judges having some degree of subjectivism? I know the SAVRY is designed to try to bring symmetry to everybody, but we’re doing it the same. But when it comes to some particular, say a juvenile delinquent issue, some judges choose a program instead of DYS. 

And that kid, in reality, really, on another judge would be in DYS. So, somewhat, these numbers that we see, they’re a reality maybe of what’s going on, but they could be a lot worse if every judge just said, okay, you robbed somebody, DYS. You did this, DYS. But instead, we have programs in places that try to work with those kids. And a lot of those kids end up doing better as a result of the program. Wouldn’t you say that those numbers could be worse if it wasn’t for some judges? 

Troy Braswell Yes, sir. I mean, Representative Barnes, I think you can see just in the data, even before risk assessments, that that bears true. I mean, look, it’s real easy for people to sit back just in the public or even people that are in the court and say, well, if I was the judge, I’d lock that kid up. 

Or if I was the Judge, I’m sending that kid to DYS. I was a prosecutor for about eight years. I never imagined the weight that comes with making a decision to hold a kid in a detention center or send a kid to DYS. We have to take all those things into consideration, but we also have to balance public safety. And so those should be difficult decisions that we make. And I don’t think it’s appropriate to have a policy that says every time a kid does X, it equals Y. 

I think that’s why we have to know more about what’s going on in a kid’s family, not to use as a sword against them, but really as a shield to help protect them, to go through life and growing up and maturing. I mean, I get blue in the face talking to kids about all the research that shows the impact of brain development for prolonged use of marijuana. From when you’re 12 years old to you’re 18 years old, and you’ve been smoking non-stop every day, your brain’s in full development. 

Well, you’re smoking because you’ve got some traumatic situations going on, you’re depressed, you have anxiety, whatever that may be. All the literature that’s coming out is the prolonged use of marijuana significantly increases those symptoms related to depression and anxiety. And so, Representative Barnes, I mean, you are right, we have to take those into consideration.

 And it shouldn’t be, you’re going to DYS because I’m mad at you. Now, I’ve told kids I’m disappointed. But it shouldn’t be because we’re mad. It should be some very serious concerns. And the other thing, too, is, and Mr. Crump knows this, I do have kids that have been committed to DYS for misdemeanors out of my court. And I would say an overwhelming majority are kids who have been given multiple opportunities not to be back in the court system. 

I mean, a kid the other day that I sent, it was his ninth revocation. I’m embarrassed to say that out loud. I mean, but the situation is so, it’s problematic stuff going on. He’s never really hurt anyone, had an incident with his dad a year ago, severe mental health issues in the home, poverty, lack of resources. But at some point, there has to be some credibility to what we’re doing. And so you have to have graduated sanctions in court. You can’t just throw everybody out of the boat. And so, yeah, I mean, that’s a great point, Representative Barnes. I hadn’t really thought of it the way you mentioned.

Brooke Steen And Representative Barnes, just to address one part of your question, you talked about some judges are sending to certain programs. Michael runs an excellent program called C-STEP, which I’m sure he’d be happy to share more information about. But he’s been able to get more beds. We aren’t able to get girls there yet, but I mean, he knows the judges are like, give us as many beds as we can at C-Step and we’ll send them to you. Judges love it. 

Youth Challenge was a huge hit across our state. And it closing was pretty devastating for a lot of our judges. And so some of these, we talk about behavioral health services and programs that aren’t available, but also these programs, instead of sending a child to DYS, they could send them to Youth Challenge or C-STEP. 

And for a while, we had very few C-Step beds, but Michael has worked very hard over the last few sessions to get more and more beds. But definitely that has made a big impact, I think, also on judges options. If they can’t send the child home, what are the options to keep the family and that juvenile safe? 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you. All right. Going to Representative Johnny Rye. You’re recognized. 

Representative Johnny Rye Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, we know that dyslexia is a sickness. And that’s probably going to have to be dealt with one way. And then you’ve got kids that are disturbing, biting, it’s going to be something different there. And I think that what we are looking at, I mean, I may be wrong, but I think through the years, mom and dad has really had to buckle down to make a living. 

And they’re not around the children as much as they should be. So it doesn’t make such a good role model. And you hate to say that. And I don’t think there’s a cure for that because they surely don’t do it on purpose. But I think that we do need to look at seeing what we can do maybe for after-school programs, things like that, that would actually help out on that end instead of the sickness in with the dyslexia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you, Representative Johnny. Going to Representative McGruder. You’re recognized. 

Representative Jessie McGruder Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to say thank you to you all for the presentation. The judge and I have had conversations about this, and I love the passion that he displays on this issue. I do want to make sure I point out to Senator Irvin that I, as a PE teacher, do not send students to the bleachers to play on their phones. Just wanted to make sure that I pointed that out.

Troy Braswell Probably make them run the bleachers though. 

Representative Jessie McGruder But seriously though, this is an issue I appreciate y’all shining a light on this. And I will continue to work towards making things better. 

Senator Ben Gilmore All right, thank you for that comment. Seeing no further questions, I’ll give everyone one last chance. I see none. Thank you all for being here. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your passion. Thanks for your work. You’re dismissed. All right, we’re going to move to Item G. We’ll ask director Crump to come to the table. And then director, introduce yourself for the record when you have a seat and you may proceed at will. 

Michael Crump Sorry, my skills are even worse than Judge Braswell’s, I think, when it comes to this stuff. My name’s Michael Crump. I’m the director of the Division of Youth Services. And I appreciate the opportunity to come here today and give you some of the data that we have around the kids that are in DYS custody and maybe a little bit of information about how things work to sort of fill out some of the other conversations. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you. And really, really quick before you begin, I’d point out the– it may be hard to read on the screen. You do have this as a part of the packet under exhibit G. So, sorry, you may proceed. 

Michael Crump So I started off, Representative Shephard had sent some questions in around data and some things, some questions she had about DYS and our population. So I tried to answer as many of those questions as I could with the data that we have in our system. So you’re going to see the first several pages are just various graphs and data tables to give you an idea of what our population looks like. 

And then at the end I have some pages that are more of a narrative focus or some descriptions of how some things work, our education system, how things work on clinical side, and some other things that are going on, which I don’t know if you want me to read those verbatim. But when I get through to those, I’ll try to go through them just kind of highlight some things. 

Senator Ben Gilmore I think just highlight those and then the members can read at their leisure. 

Michael Crump Perfect, thank you. So this first graphic you’ll see, there was some discussion about this before. It just shows our commitments by calendar year, 2020 through 2025. And you can see it was mentioned that they were even higher prior to 2020. Things did kind of bottom out in 2020, 2021 especially. When the pandemic started, we really, things slowed down when the schools stopped and the courts stopped for a little while. 

Our numbers just really dropped to probably the lowest they’d ever been in the history of DYS. So you could see they started to rise in 2022. We could see it coming in spring of 2022. A lot of these things are cyclical. We see in the springtime and in early fall our numbers tend to be a little bit higher when the kids are back in school, when it’s getting warm outside. 

There’s just things you can see that where we start to see, at least that’s why I think it happens during those times. But we have those cyclical times. But you can see the numbers. They did hit a peak of 466 commitments in 2023. Slowly, they’ve started to decline since then on the commitment side. But the next graph, if you see, that is our Rite of Passage secure residential. Rite of Passage is our contractor that operates five secure facilities around the state for DYS. 

It was seven at one point. We had actually closed three in 2019 or so. 2020, we were down to four facilities. We had to add one back because of the rising numbers, reopen one that we had that was in really good condition, able to do that. But you can see in that second graph that our numbers– that’s the residential numbers in those five secure facilities. They have been climbing ever since 2021. 

As of today, it is around 320 youth in those secure facilities. I’m hoping, I think, as Brooke Steen said, that there’s a little bit of a lag, that if we start to see filings that have dropped off, then you start to see maybe commitments drop off. But there is a lag between the time that cases are filed and youth are committed to our custody. 

So we’re really hoping and we need for our commitments to drop back to close to where they were in 2020 for us to be able to have what we think is a really good, healthy system to be able to do everything we want to do. The next slide I have shows the numbers for our community-based residential. We have group home contracts with a couple of places. Vera Lloyd, Consolidated Youth Services are the primary two that we have. We also have a community reintegration program that just started back in June. 

So those are more community-based. They’re not secure settings, more of our low-risk offenders or some offenders who have done well in their treatment on the secure side and they’re getting closer to going home. We might step them down to one of these more community-based, a little bit less secure to give them a chance to kind of prove themselves with a little more freedom before they just go back to the community they were in before and back to their home situation. 

So you can see those numbers have actually gone up, an average of 34 in 2025 beds on that community-based side. And some of that was deliberate to be able to move more kids into a step-down program that I did highlight later on in this presentation. The next slide or graph here is the juvenile detention center numbers. A little bit of background. Juvenile detention centers are county operated. Those are not facilities run by DYS. There are ten of those left in the state. 

There were 14 when I first came to DYS in 2018. Four have closed or closed within a couple of years after that. So we’ve gone from 14 to 10. We try not to utilize juvenile detention centers to the best of our ability. We don’t typically like to put a youth in a detention center for behavior reasons, because it disrupts their progress in treatment and our provider should be able to handle those behaviors. They have experience doing that. So it would have to be really bad for us to put the kid there for those reasons. And if you look at 2020 and 2021, our numbers were really low. 

We had times where there were zero kids in a juvenile detention center. But what you see is a result of the rising number of commitments required us to use those juvenile detention center beds to hold youth until we had a bed and intake. We have a 24-bed intake unit in Bryant, Arkansas, the Alexander Facility as most people refer to it. We have a 24-bed facility. And so sometimes when the commitments were coming in too quickly, 40-something, 50 kids in a month, it takes about three weeks to get youth assessed before we decide what facility they’re going to, when they’re going to start their treatment, what their needs are, and what that’s going to look like. 

So sometimes when we don’t have enough room in intake, youth will go to a juvenile detention center, sometimes held in the community they are already in until a bed opens up. We bring them in as quickly as we can and we go ahead and start the assessment process. Those numbers at one point did reach probably 60 youth in the juvenile detention center at one point. And the time period that they were spending before a bed opened up was really high. It was months sometimes. 

Now it’s gotten much better. We have about 20 to 22 kids typically right now in a juvenile detention center bed waiting. And the wait period is much, much less than it was before. It’s typically a month or less before we’re able to get those youth back into our facility to be assessed. The next slide or graph table you’ll see here, we broke this down by county rather than just juvenile court jurisdiction. 

We broke this down by county for all six of those calendar years. So if you want to, at your leisure, you can go through these and look at each county and see the number of commitments per year for those six years just to give you an idea of where the kids are coming from. It’s alphabetical. It’s not the number of youth here. And it’s two pages all the way down. You see Yell County there at the end of the slide, the second page there. This one, we just wanted to give everyone an idea of how many youth there are in these counties because that does matter. 

You can see this is from the census data we pulled from 2020 to 2024 for ages 10 to 19 is the way it was broken down in the census. So just to give you a perspective of how many kids we have in each one of these counties that we’re getting those commitments from, you can look at this and kind of look at the commitments and kind to get an idea off of what it’s looking like in those counties. 

And I don’t remember who mentioned it specifically, but we do have certain parts of the state where we tend to get more kids than other parts. I think it is probably a matter of resources. Largely, when I mentioned those juvenile detention centers, the 10 that are left, eight of those are in the larger cities in Arkansas. The only two that we have that are not in a larger city, at least by Arkansas standards, would be in Yell County and we have Arkansas County in DeWitt. 

So the other eight are all in places like Bentonville. You have Washington County, you have Faulkner County, Pulaski County, Jefferson County, Craighead, Crittenden. They’re all in the much larger parts of Arkansas. We lost juvenile detention centers in Miller County and Texarkana. There was one in Batesville, White River Juvenile Detention Center. There was a Mississippi County, and then we also had Garland County, Hot Springs. So those were the four that we lost over the last– I don’t remember the exact dates, but five, six, seven years. Those have all closed. 

So it took some of the beds out of rotation. Juvenile detention centers are used by courts to hold youth, sometimes more serious offenders, prior to adjudication. They’re also an alternative where a court can send a youth for a short period, maybe to just get them out of the home for some of those safety reasons that were discussed, or for whatever reason, maybe when someone is revoked or to get consequences for that young man or young woman. They might send them to a juvenile detention center for a short period of time. But I believe 90 days is the longest they stay in a juvenile detention center unless it’s being held like prior to education. 

There are experts in the room that know a little bit more about how that works, but I just thought it was worthwhile to tell you all kind of how juvenile detention centers work. It’s not just DYS youth in those beds. We do pay for those beds. So if we have to use a juvenile detention center bed, we either have a contract if we use that that detention center frequently or we pay them whatever their rate is if it’s a lower amount if we use it infrequently. 

Let’s see, the next one, I was asked to collect or bring some demographic data around the DYS population. So we went into our system and pulled this out. We just aggregated it for all six years. Rather than have a 50 page or 60 page presentation, we just aggregating this data to show you the whole six years. 

So if you look in the first table, it’s broken down by race and ethnicity. You’ll see that it’s 45.5% African American, black, 42% white. And then you’ve got a few other groups that are in that four to five percent range but it usually runs pretty much 50-50 between white and black as far as the population inside the DYS. Age-wise, you’ll see that over half of our youth, it shows the 16 to 17 and up. 

And I would say that when I look at it, they’re mostly 17 and up, about half of the kids. So they kind of have a little different needs and we have a little different goals for those older youth than we do the younger ones. The other half are, obviously, we’ve got quite a few 14 to 15 year olds. 

Thankfully we don’t have a lot of 12, 13 year olds and not very many that are– you have to be 10 years old to be adjudicated delinquent in the state of Arkansas. So you’d have to be at least 10 years old before you could be sent to DYS. It’s pretty rare for us to get someone 10 years. Going back to the pandemic years again, I will tell you that we at one point had so many elementary school kids that we did kind of open a second group home at Vera Lloyd just for those, just to get them out of the facility with the older kids. 

We felt like it was better to put those boys together because it was a really young group. Now we might have, we might not have any. We might have one elementary school age youth. So it’s kind of difficult to get the resources even for those kids when it comes to education because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep a lot of elementary school-age teachers when you don’t get those kids. 

But thankfully it’s very rare for us to get an elementary school age. They usually are middle school and up. The next one you’ll see, our population almost always runs 80% male and about 20% female. So we have two, we have one female only facility in Harrisburg, Arkansas. That’s for our lower level risk girls and the ones that are less of a flight risk. It’s not quite as hardware secure. There’s not a fence around that facility. 

And then our more, the girls with higher needs, the girls that might be more prone to aggression, those girls are at Alexander. So Alexander is the only facility where we have both boys and girls. Obviously, they’re kept in separate dorms. Their education is separate. We don’t put them in the same classrooms. But it typically runs 80% boys with the population every year. DYS commitments by offense level, someone mentioned this earlier. 

You can see here, if you look at the table, Y should actually be at the top. But sometimes when I’m dealing with my IT team, they’re great at grabbing data, but they don’t necessarily, as a former prosecutor myself, it’s weird that Y is the top and then it goes A, B, C, D. But you see the number of Y felonies that we get. It’s not a large number of Y felonies, 156 over that. And this is the highest charged offense. 

So you might have a youth come into our custody who has multiple offenses. They might have a mixture of felonies and misdemeanors. They might have all felonies, all misdemeanors. But what we did for this data point is we took whatever their highest charged offense was just to give you an idea of offense level data. Otherwise it would have been kind of overwhelming and somebody might have 10 offenses and someone’s got one. So it’s really, it’s hard to tell a story if you just throw them all into one bucket and do an average. 

So this gives you what the highest level of each offense. And you can see the no felonies is about 855. I will say that I believe the no felonies data point is capturing some of those cases that Judge Braswell talked about where it’s a probation or aftercare revocation are also captured in there. So they might have had a felony offense before and then they were released to aftercare. The reason they came back is because they didn’t follow the rules on aftercare and so they were recommitted on aftercare. 

So some of those could be showing up in there. When I look at these, and I’ve taken over the last few years to looking every morning, looking at every kid that comes into custody and pulling them up and kind of looking at a little bit of information, writing it down so I can just keep a sense of what our population looks like. It’s about probably 25% that don’t have any felonies. 

But I also, having experienced time in juvenile court, I can tell you that sometimes just because they have misdemeanors, it might have started as a felony and it was part of a plea negotiation to get that to a misdemeanor that the kid or the family or the defense attorney, whoever really wanted it to be misdemeanors. And maybe the judge, the probation officer’s primary goal was to get this young person some help, so it wasn’t necessarily. It’s a little different than in the adult system. 

In the adult system, your offense is going to drive specifically how much time you stay in custody. In DYS, that’s not the way it works. When those assessments come in, we look at the assessments we get from the court. We look at their school records. We look their mental health records, everything we have in front of us to decide what their needs are and estimate how long they’re going to be there. And the amount of time they’re there is typically, it depends on their progress. 

It depends on the number of incidents they might have, serious incidents. And then sometimes we’ll have a youth that just reaches a point where we have to say, I’m trying to remember the phrase that my assistant director, maximum benefit is the phrase that she uses. We do have some young people that they’re doing as well as probably they’re ever going to do. 

And maybe if they’ve been with us for a long time, we’re going to go to court and say, look, we’ve kind of gotten them to the best we can get them. They’re never going to go a long, long time without having some sort of outburst. Almost all of our kids have a behavioral health diagnosis, probably all of them. Most of them have some sort of, they are usually behind in school, their reading level is not up to par. 

So we’re trying to get them the best that we can before we send them back to the community and not hold them longer than we need to. But at the same time, if they’re still displaying serious aggression, that’s typically going to result in that young man or woman staying a little bit longer. So that’s why when you talk about misdemeanor offenses and references were made to the assessment to really look at their needs and what’s going on in their life and not completely look at offenses, there are things I will say about offenses that I kind of think you have to take into account for the absolute most violent kids, right? 

For some of those Y felonies and some of things, it’s just not safe. We do get some kids that you need to be careful before sending them home because their behavior was serious enough, that offense was serious enough. But mostly it’s driven by their needs and by the assessment that we get. So you can see in here it’s a lot of misdemeanors. 

It’s D felonies  and down, but we do get those Y felonies, those A’s and B’s. We get the serious offenders as well. So all that data is there if you want to look at that. This is the average length of stay data that we pulled together. You can see it’s declined over the last two years a little bit. I think a lot of that’s out of necessity. If you look at the top line, that is your absolute, Y felonies. We put that in there just to give you an idea that the Y felons do tend to stay longer because those Y felonies are murder and rape. They’re going to stay a lot longer.

 And there’s a caveat to those felonies I’ll add as well. We have what is referred to as extended juvenile jurisdiction cases. We also have blended sentences that come from adult court for some of the more serious offenders. Sometimes their length of stay looks shorter, not because they went home, but because if they’re not amenable to treatment, we will petition the court after a certain amount of trying and say, we give up. This young man is not even putting in any effort. They’re still displaying really violent behaviors. 

I kind of look at those EJJ cases that the court had the option of trying them as an adult the first time and decided to give them a chance in the juvenile system. There’s a lot of incentive for that person to do well and follow the rules to try to be able to return back to the community. So in those cases, we will, if it’s bad enough, we will go to the court sometimes and ask to go ahead and our recommendation will be that that person go to the Department of Corrections. 

But we’ll try to do everything we can before that happens. But we can only keep a person until the day before their 21st birthday. When they hit 21, they cannot be in DYS custody. So there’s also that matter. We’ve occasionally gotten someone who’s over 18. We’ve had 19 and 20 year olds because the offense happened before they were 18 and by the time it worked its way through the legal system, they were 19 or 20 by the time they got to us. So clearly that person’s not going to stay in custody a long time because they have to leave before they turn 21. 

So there’s a lot of factors that go into it. But if you look at the other lines underneath the Y felonies, you can see it’s pretty much– the no felonies are the bottom two lines here. You’ve got the felonies on top. And then the middle line in that bottom group is just the average overall. 

You could see starting in 24, 25, it started to decline a little bit. I think that a little of that’s out of necessity. I know my team has been working with Rite of Passage, our vendor, to identify youth in custody who are doing well enough that we can go back to court and request a review hearing and just let the court know how well they’re doing before we send them home and try to make some room for some of the beds to be able to get those kids out of juvenile detention centers and get them in treatment to make room for the more violent, the more serious offenders. 

So the length of stay has dropped a little bit over the last two years, which in my opinion, it’s a good thing for the health of our system because we have so many kids. This is a report from education. You can look at that one. It just shows our graduation rates. Six years, we’ve had 222 young men and women obtain their GED. We’ve another 102 graduate from high school. We are a school district. We’re the Arkansas Consolidated School District. But as you can imagine, our population is a little different than every single school in this state in many ways. 

Obviously, they are some of the children with the biggest difficulties. They have a lot of obstacles to learning that were mentioned here before with substance abuse, mental health, learning disabilities, and someone mentioned dyslexia. There’s a lot reasons. They typically come in several grades behind on their reading level. And so when you compound that with we don’t get all of our kids coming on August 27th and then stay the whole school year. They’re coming in every day. They’re going out every day. 

So some of them, we’re just not going to have long enough to be able to earn the credits, and they typically are way behind in the number of credits they need to graduate. But because we have 17 and up kids, we are able sometimes to, in that time, they’re there eight, nine months a year, we’re able to get them their high school diploma or a lot of times their GED. Representative Shephard and Shorter College, we started a partnership with them a little over a year ago. 

We’ve had a lot success at our Alexander facility. We brought someone over that Shorter had employed that had worked with the adult population on GED. We’ve seen a lot of success there at getting our kids their GED, which is great for those kids when they leave. It’s something great to be able to go back to court and show they accomplished before they go back home. But you can see in this data, not a lot of seniors. 

If you look at the senior enrollment from over all these years, it’s typically 20-something, 30-something seniors in a year we might get that come to us as a senior. But they might come as a junior and we do credit recovery and we do all the things we can to catch them up, to get them as close to graduating or hopefully graduate those kids that are 17, 18, 19-year-old. And if they’re so far behind that we just don’t think it’s going to be possible, we’ll get them in a GED program and try to get them their GED so they can do something when they leave.

I brought some recidivism data. I was asked about recidivism. There’s not really a set definition for recidivism in this state. Probably you get a different definition any state you go into across the country. We keep ours pretty simple. This is a dashboard we had developed several years ago because we have data showing who’s committed to DYS and we have data showing who goes to the Department of Corrections, either in prison or on probation. We’re able to do some data matching. 

So if you look at the top one, we’re looking at youth that come back to DYS within three years. So for each of the years listed, what you see, the big number is, that’s the number of youth that discharged from our custody that year. And then the smaller number you see, that’s going to be out that bigger group, how many of those ended up coming back to DYS in the next three years. 

Now, I was talking to someone earlier about counting, sometimes a kid might show up as a commitment multiple times in the same year. You might have someone come back, so they might be counted in multiple years. So if they were recommitted two years later, they’re going to show up in that two years later if they come back again. 

But this gives you a really good idea of the number of youth that come back to DYS. It ranges typically 15 to 19% of the youth that leave our custody end up back in custody within three years. Obviously, it could be higher because a lot of those kids, if they leave our custody and they’re 18, the only way they’re coming back is if there’s an aftercare violation and they are sent back. 

If they commit a new offense they’re not going to come back on that offense because they’re 18 now. So there is a certain level of they’re aging out of the DYS system and not being able to come back. The next one underneath there, you’ll see the Department of Corrections data. So we track that for five years and we look at all the kids at discharge. And that runs anywhere from, you’ll see a low of like 28% up to 42% will end up– and I’ve looked, I didn’t bring that data that divides that. 

I’d say about 60% of that is ending up in prison within five years. 40% is on probation. So a little more than half of that number that you see in each year is going to be kids that actually end up in prison within five years of leaving DYS custody. And we only have the Arkansas Department of Corrections data. We had that because it’s needed for other things within DHS. 

So we were able to tap into that data stream. So it’s not a lot of kids, if you look at the bottom number. And this is the tricky thing with data that if you see the 42% on the bottom, the height, the peak there, well, if you look at the number of kids that that was from that year that ended up going to Department of Corrections, it’s only 92. That is not the highest number by far. 

But if some of these reforms that are earlier working and you’re not sending us the low level offenders and the misdemeanors, so you’re only sending us the high risk, serious offender, felony kids that need a lot of help, your recidivism numbers are going to be higher because you’re taking those lower level kids out of the picture. So, it’s kind of one of those things where the data can kind of not necessarily tell the real story, but we still track it because we want to know. 

And I think it’s really good to know that smaller number, just how many kids do we have that are leaving our custody that are ending up in the Department of Corrections within the next five years. It would be great, I think, aspirationally to know other things, how they’re doing as far as quality of life, education, public benefits, some things like that. But that’s a really heavy lift. We have this data, so that’s what we track right now. 

The next slide, there were discussions about the SAVRY. You will see that in six years, we’ve only had 28 youth who showed up at intake with a low score on their SAVRY risk assessment. There were six that the system didn’t show one. Since this is going back all the way to 2020, you probably, a lot of the jurisdictions, there were those, some started during that pilot phase, some didn’t start till later. I forget If it was 19 or 20 where it officially became a requirement. 

And there’s a lot training that goes into training those juvenile probation officers and staff in the courts into performing the SAVRY. And you have a lot of turnover when it comes to probation staff and court staff coming through, just like we do at DYS. So you might, some of those might be just in the early stages when people either didn’t complete those six or might’ve not necessarily been just really good at it yet. 

But I think you could see that 1,691 out of 2,007, as long as it’s done with integrity when you do the SAVRY, that’s a really high percentage that came in that did score high on the SAVRY which showed that there was a risk of violence or reoffending that you could go ahead and send those kids to DYS. The next one, I was asked about the number of DCFS custody, dual custody, we call them. 

Currently, that’s something we have now. We have 28 youth who are both DCFS and DYS custody. 22 of those are waiting for a bed at the time I did this to come into DYS. And then we have 26 who are already in treatment. We have about just under 390ish in DYS custody right now, so 28 out of 390 is not a large number of DCFS youth. But we do have some that are dual custody. 

We work closely with DCFS to work on placement issues and do things that we can to try to make sure they’re able to transition out of DYS custody as soon as possible. 

The next one I have here, I was asked about the cost of incarceration. You’ll see underneath with our costs, we pay $320 a day for those in the secure setting. That’s not counting their pharmacy is a separate expense. And if there’s offsite medical, if we have to take them to the emergency room or the dentist or something of that nature, we’re going to have to pay for that. Medicaid does not, if a juvenile is incarcerated, their Medicaid coverage is turned off. It’s suspended. 

The only time that changes is if they leave and they are admitted as an in patient. If they go to a psychiatric facility or they have to stay in a hospital overnight, then their Medicaid can be turned back on and Medicaid can pay for those expenses. But for medications and for kids breaking arm, playing basketball or whatever it may be, that comes out of our budget on top of that $320 a day. 

It’s not a huge amount, but it is a little more than just 320. And you’ll see the juvenile detention centers, they range typically 90 to $100 a day. I think Probably 10, 15 years ago, that was $50 a day. Everything’s, we all know at the cost of labor, everything’s gone up. So if you look at the budget numbers here, you’ll see our residential contract treatment centers, our secure side. You can see the expenses that we’ve had since 2020. As the commitments rise, our expenses rise. 

Every time a kid comes into our custody, we have to take them. We find a bed. We get them assessed as quickly as we can and we start treatment. So you’ll the rise in expenses over the last six years. That’s also reflected in the juvenile detention center expenses. You’ll see that as we’ve have to utilize more juvenile detention center beds, that expense has risen as well. 

This is where I get to, and I’ll go through these really quick, just kind of give you a highlight really quick sentence for each one. I was asked about interagency collaboration with these different groups. I mentioned DCFS already. They’re on the same floor as us. I know Tiffany and her team really well. We work closely with them to try to deal with any issues around our DCFS dual custody. 

And we also are working more on, when it comes to community reintegration and some of the placement options that are out there, we’re trying to figure out a way that we can make sure that we’re utilizing the beds the best way for both of us and with both of our youth because they share a lot of needs. The DCFS and DYS youth, their treatment needs are very similar. 

Juvenile courts, I work closely with juvenile courts with the administrative office of the courts. I go to as many of their conferences and meet with judges as I can. My phone is always on and I’m always open to talk to judges about any concerns they have. We work with them and we work closely with their juvenile probation officers, that last slide. We attend their meetings. 

They have a couple of annual conferences every year. Again, Administrative Office of the Courts has someone that works with juvenile probation. We do everything we can to share information about the SAVRY, about treatment. We’re working right now on giving them access to our system where they can see their kids’ progress in DYS and the documentation without waiting on us to send it to them because a lot of things get lost in communication when you’re waiting on emails. People are changing, things like that. So we work a lot with the juvenile probation officers. 

We’ve had more than half of them, or probably two thirds, we brought to tour our facility at the Alexander facility in the last year and a half, just so they can, if they hadn’t already, we wanted them to see the facility. Department of Education, primarily there’s a lot of oversight because we’re a school district. So obviously we’re audited at the very highest level because of the nature of our population and the high needs. 

Also, when it comes to the schools, we primarily get the information on the youth’s academic progress when they come in and we send that data back when they go back to their school and let them know what credits they’ve earned and send all their education. It’s all pretty much electronic now and we utilize a lot of Virtual Arkansas, which makes it easy as well because all the schools use Virtual Arkansas to some extent. 

So we use that. We’re working right now with our provider to try to get to do more face-to-face. Virtual Arkansas has been really good for us because when it comes to efficiency and those records being able to transmit instead of just having to send paper records when you have a 24-bed facility. Some of our smaller ones, it’s hard to to meet the education needs and hire all those face-to-face teachers when among those 24 kids you got a wide variety of grade levels and different types of education needs. 

So Virtual Arkansas allows us to have one teacher teach a class at all five of our facilities. You know, we’re trying to place kids at some places based on gender. We have an 18 to 21 year old facility in Dermott just for males. So the needs are different, but it allows us to be able to do that. But we’re trying to move to more face to face. There’s a teacher in the classroom. There are paraprofessionals in the classroom. 

But some of the work is done with a virtual Arkansas teacher as well on the computer screen. But I think for our population, and if you’ve ever been out there with these boxes we had to build around the computers just to protect our computers, it’s kind of difficult line of sight. And everyone’s not facing the teacher. So we’re trying. We’re talking to our vendor right now about hiring more in person. 

And they have a plan to be able to do, especially maybe starting at our largest campus in Alexander, of doing more face-to-face and utilizing Virtual Arkansas just in certain situations for certain populations that we might not have enough need. But we’re going to keep that as a piece of it. I think virtual will always be at least part of what we do with education. Our community-based providers, this is a big part of what we do. We have 10 community based providers around the state of Arkansas that cover the entire state. The regions are divided up and we have contracts with them. 

They provide both diversion and prevention services for those FINS cases that were mentioned, for those intake delinquency issues, for those kids who have been adjudicated but not necessarily committed to DYS. They do a lot in the community for that population that has not come to DYS and we’re trying to do what we can to keep them from coming in our front door. They also handle aftercare. 

So when every person leaves DYS custody, they’re going to have an aftercare plan. The community-based provider is going to be in charge of monitoring their adherence to that aftercare plan, assisting where they can, providing some cognitive behavioral therapy, some life skills. We have vocational coaches that we pay them to hire to help them if they need help filling out resumes or applications or finding further education. So our community-based providers are a big piece of that. They’re stretched really thin as well, like everyone is. 

Their caseloads are really heavy, but they do a really good job helping us on the prevention side and aftercare. In the last couple of years, we’ve been able to utilize intensive in-home services, family center treatment, which is now, I think, in Medicaid covered, family center, treatment, service. At a limited basis, we’ve be able to use that as a prevention measure. 

And for some of the youth leaving aftercare, it just provides another level of in-home visits to the family to deal with everything that’s going on in the home. Like we’ve talked about here, it’s typically not just the youth, but it’s the things going on at school, the things going at the home. So if we can take a kid into DYS custody for six months, nine months, a year, provide them structure. 

We tell them when to go to bed, when to get up, they’re going to eat, when they’re going to go to school. Everything is structured out, which is not something they’re typically used to. And they might leave in a really good place. But without those step down options and without that additional support when they go home, it’s kind of hard to go cold turkey back to an environment where you might not have that support. 

Because single parent, grandparents, whomever it is, just doesn’t have the time or energy to supervise at that level. So there’s been some tools we’ve been starting to use to try to help do that. It’s just, we don’t have probably enough of it, but I think it’s been pretty beneficial so far to provide those things. And our community based providers are a big piece of that puzzle.

Let’s see, I mentioned here, we’ve started a prevention unit about a year and a half or two ago. And we’ve grown that to three individuals now to just really have a DYS unit that’s focusing on prevention work. Well, what we’ve tried to do is go to those areas of the state where we are receiving the most commitments and see what we can do there to help. We started off in South Arkansas. 

We’ve had a large meeting where we went out and recruited different groups that were out there and wanted to help but maybe just didn’t know who to reach out to and got them in a room with the courts and with the probation officers to make those connections so that since everyone else is stretched thin just to give them some more resources that they can turn to when a kid comes into the court so that they could help that young man or woman and their family. 

If there’s somebody else they can reach out to who has their own funding and the interest and they want to do this, we want them to be able to help as well. So a lot of that, we’ve developed a database for probation officers where we’re going to try to keep up with on our website, here are some resources you can tap into. 

But it really is depending on where you are. There’s just not as many resources in every single part of the state but we’re doing our part to try to grow that. It just takes a lot of time. And we have 28 judicial districts so, as you can imagine, you can kind of do one at a time. 

Let’s see the next page. This was just an overview of the clinical process. It’s going to tell you how things work when youth come into custody. It tells you a little bit about them. They typically all have a behavioral health, mental health diagnosis of some kind when they come to us, almost every kid that comes to us. If they’re not already enrolled in a PASSE, we get them enrolled in the PASSE before they leave DYS custody so they can maybe access some services when they leave that are not available to them in DYS or maybe they didn’t have access to before. 

Educational challenges, 80% of our youth, according to my education staff, are reading at or below a third grade level when they come to us. It’s a struggle, but we try to do what we can. We do dyslexia screenings. We try to do everything we can to get them the help they need when it comes to education, do credit recovery, and get them– I think we have, I think it was 55% of the population is on either a 504 or an IEP, which I think is significantly higher than in a traditional school. 

Substance use, I will tell you from my experience the last seven or eight years, virtually all of our kids utilize at least marijuana. I mean, there’s very few that don’t at least smoke marijuana. And then we have some that have more serious substance use issues. We have peer support. We have therapists that work on that. But I do agree that it would be– and I think there’s some coming online soon, but we need more out in the communities to help these young people with substance use issues. 

We had a brief period where we used some grants to operate a substance use facility back during those low commitment years, but it was opioids only. And we didn’t see a lot of youth in the age range that we were looking at that had opioid issues or stimulants. So we do have substance use and the trauma and behavioral risk. And trauma obviously could be just not having your basic needs met at home all the way up to physical abuse and everything in between. 

So almost all the kids come in and have some sort of trauma when they come into DYS custody, and we try to address that while they are in our custody. The last, here we go, and this is just the intake process. It’s going to tell you how long it takes, all the different things that they are assessed for when they’re coming to custody. And it’s going to to tell you about how the treatment team that we have meets at least every 90 days once they start a treatment on every youth to look at their progress and make recommendations.

I wish we could meet more, but that’s a lot of kids and it’s a lot of time to pull our therapist and all of our different staff into meetings. When they’re in meetings or when they are on the road to go to court for hearings, that means they’re not providing services to the kids. So, you need to be able to have oversight. They all have a case coordinator assigned. They all have a case manager assigned to them. They’ll have a therapist assigned. It’s tough to keep those positions filled. 

It’s been better the last couple of years, but staffing is just, it’s a lot of turnover, especially when it comes to teachers and therapists, you have to find people who just have a passion for working with this population. They could probably make more money in other areas and not be with our population behind a razor wire fence, just to be blunt, might not be as attractive to some people to get them to even look at these jobs. But we do get some great staff that just have a passion to do this. So they want to do this work, but we have a lot of turnover.

Education, I mentioned it already. We are a school district, consolidated school district. So we operate on the same rules as everyone else. We have to follow all the standards. We’re audited. I wanted to kind of highlight one of my last pages here, something that’s been my goal over the last year and a half or so is to turn our focus to be a lot more intensive on vocational and job training since half of our population is 17 up. 

I think the kids that I can do the most good for, if we can find ways to tap into the funding and get these things done, the kids I think we can do the most for are those kids that are old enough where they’re about ready to set out on a path on their own, right, and get an education and find the right employment to get the stability they need and, as I say, break the cycle for a lot of these families. 

So we’ve been really focusing on that. Our community reintegration that we have in Haskell, the first of those that we opened in partnership with Counseling Clinic. We have a 12-week career exploration program with the Saline County Career and Technical Center. It’s really great. They do two-week modules where they learn about construction, mechanic, networking. They get certifications while they’re there, and then they go back, and it kind of gives them an idea. 

We have some things we do on the inside of our facilities as well to do some career explorations and things we’re adding. We’ve had some kids do recently, we’ve got a group right now going through tower climbing, telecommunications tower. There’s some grant funding that the Saline people had, so we’ve been putting youth through a tower climbing program where you can get certified to climb the big 200, 300 foot towers, which can be pretty good jobs if you’re up for it. 

Some of the kids find out pretty quickly that’s not for them and that’s fine, but a lot of them really took to it and it’s just something good for their confidence as well. We’ve had a couple of kids get their CDL. A lot of challenges around CDL. I think it’s a great opportunity and there’s a lot of jobs out there. The hurdle we run into is a lot these kids don’t have a driver’s license, learners permit. And they don’t have a car at home that they can drive. So, some do. We’ve been able to get a couple of kids their CDL, and we’re kind of trying to figure out how we can at least get them sent home with a learner’s permit so they can start developing that skill. 

Arkansas Baptist College, I think you’re going to hear from Coach Fitz Hill in a little while. We’ve been doing a program called Meta24 with them. We have five youth right now that finished the boot camp, and they’re at Arkansas Baptist College going to school during the week and then they come back. As long as they’re in DYS custody, they come to our facility on the weekends. Once they discharge, they can just keep going to school, but they stay in the dorm. 

We screen and pick those kids based on how well they do in the boot camp. Those that go to the bootcamp are the ones we screen to see how well they’ve been doing to earn the right to go to that boot camp, so it’s a really good incentive. It’s something we’re looking at is trying to find two year colleges that have a residential option. 

So some of these kids that are older when they go, if they’re left to try to be able to get to class on their own, and they have no car, they don’t have much support at home, chances aren’t real good. But if we can find places where they can take advantage of Pell grants or whatever it may be and live on campus, I think it’s going to give them a better chance. So that’s Shorter College. 

We’re working with, like I said, on GED. We’re looking at some grant opportunities to do maybe construction or CNA with them as well. The Arkansas Rural Health Alliance, we have an MOU we’ve drafted, just trying to figure out the funding to do patient care tech, medical assistant classes, some of the jobs that they can leave and get immediately and go work at a hospital. 

CNA classes we’ve talked about doing more of. It’s where they could go work at a nursing home if they needed to. And then the virtual career exploration, I mentioned we use Transfer, which I think is through Workforce Services. And then we also have a program called ICEV, who are our juvenile ombudsman. Help me get in touch with them, that’s going to let us, the kids at Dermott, those older boys are going to be able to do career exploration at their own pace and give them some more things to do. 

So that’s the end of my piece. There’s a piece here the last couple of pages. DCFS provided a little bit more background when it comes to those dual custody kids, sort of where they come from in DCFS, where they go when they leave DYS custody. I will just leave that to you all to read and maybe follow up later if you have any questions about those slides that have to do with what the kids look like at DCFS coming in and leaving. And then at that, I guess I’ve concluded my slideshow here and I’ll take any questions you all have. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Looks like we have a couple in the queue. Thank you for the presentation and going straight to a Representative Barnes. 

Representative Glenn Barnes Thank you, Chair. One question, do Job Corps connect with you all? 

Michael Crump Job Corps, I think we’ve had a couple of youth we’ve placed in Job Corps, but not routinely. And I think there was some question a while back on the funding for Job Corps. We’re trying to develop some of our own programs, and I think you’ll probably hear some of that a little bit later, that we could use. In my time there, there’s not really been a strong relationship with Job Corps.

 I think some time ago, DYS, before I was there, tried that and maybe just didn’t have a lot of success. We’ve been having meetings with Workforce Services as well to see what we can do as far as funding some of these things. And so we’re going to figure out how to tap into like WIOWA funds or rehab or whatever it may be because this population is ripe for that type of– it’s not a large number of people when you just think about it, but they’re the ones that need this the most. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you, Representative. Going to Representative Shephard, you’re recognized. 

Representative Tara Shephard Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you for being here today, Mr Crump. I’m glad that you put out there that you and I have worked together in the past, in full transparency to this committee, and I’m hoping that we’ll continue to work together and do great work. 

Related to your presentation on page 10, where you have the annual cost of incarceration, which as in my opening statements, I listed that was one of the reasons to be found in the resolution. So, does that number still equate to roughly $127,000 annually to incarcerate one child in Arkansas? 

Michael Crump It has to be in that range because just on the $320 a day, you’re talking, I think 112. I’d have to do the math on my calculator. But one bed is going to cost us just on a 320, probably $112-114,000 a year. And then when I mentioned the other things there, their medical needs and their medication needs and things of that nature, yeah, that sounds reasonable.

Representative Tara Shephard So this confirms the earlier statement in the report that this is a costly system that we’re relying on? 

Michael Crump It is expensive. I think Arkansas, from what I’ve learned, is probably on the lower end as far as what we pay per day. So you can imagine how much, it can even get higher. But it is expensive to incarcerate a person for a full year. 

Representative Tara Shephard Comment I want to make on page 13. And a lot of the commentary that, I don’t know if she’s still in here or not, Senator Irvin gave earlier, she related back to education in Arkansas. And basically, the school to prison pipeline is what she was alluding to, and those are my words. 

But if you look at the second bullet on page 13, it states that over 80% of the youth that are committed to DYS read at or below the grade level, reflecting substantial impairments in literacy, comprehension, and academic readiness. So over 80% of the kids in DYS custody barely read at a third grade level. 

Michael Crump And I think, if I may, I think if you look at that level, and I’ve got a hunch that Coach Fitz Hill’s probably going to talk about this too, the need is not just for these kids in court. I mean, you need to get upstream to get those kids in second and third grade, because when they fall behind and they can’t read when they start getting in third, fourth, fifth grade, that’s when they start acting out. 

And when they start acting out in school, they fall back behind further, they kind of get labeled, and then you end up getting— I mean, it starts really early is my point. I talked about 10 being the youngest we can get, but really the need is even earlier. Reading is, I mean, it’s a huge issue for us. 

Representative Tara Shephard I agree. Because what’s happening is we’re seeing the progression of the school to prison pipeline. It’s happening in the younger years and it’s maturing over into the juvenile justice system and it is costing the state of Arkansas over $100,000 a year for one kid. Now here’s a follow up question. 

Mr Chair, I apologize for talking out of turn. You mentioned Virtual Arkansas, Virtual Arkansas. If you could explain to the committee how that works. Because that’s an interesting point, if nearly 80% of the kids cannot read, but they are on a virtual platform once they enter the system. 

Michael Crump Sure, I can do that. I think it’s explained in here, but the good thing about our use of Virtual Arkansas is the teachers that are assigned through the Virtual Arkansas contract only work with our kids. There are no other kids from the state of Arkansas in those classrooms, so we can find teachers that are going to learn how to work with this population that maybe has some issues around reading and find other ways to teach them and to help them make progress. 

So, I mean, if you come to us and you’re 15, 16 years old and you’re reading at a third, fourth grade, fifth grade level, obviously there’s going to be challenges. I think when it comes to virtual, my kids did a lot of virtual, especially during COVID, but even before that. Even in college, they’re staring at computer screens a lot. 

So I think this is, I think you have to balance out the fact that they’re going to be looking at computer screens for the rest of their life. But I do think that facing the teacher and having that one-on-one engagement is really important. So we do have teachers in the classroom. We’re just trying to figure out a way to make sure that it’s not, that the virtual aspect is not interfering with their ability to lock in and actually engage in their education. 

Representative Tara Shephard Thank you, Mr. Crump. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you, representative. Thank you. I was about to move on, but it looks like Representative Gonzales Worthen got it in. Here we go. Going to you. 

Representative Diana Gonzales Worthen Yes, thank you, Chair. You mentioned that many of the kids, obviously you mentioned that they’re not reading at grade level, about 80% of them. And then many of them are 504 or special ed background. I was curious as to how many of the kids come in with not yet proficient in English, English language proficiency background. And then how is that if you have kids who are still learning English, how are they being taught? 

Michael Crump I can get you some numbers. I can think of just some individual cases where we’ve even had to bring in someone to translate. It’s not common. I mean, it’s not very often. Most of them, at least, English is their first language, almost all the kids we get. But we’ve had a couple of instances of that happen. And if you give me some time, I’ll be happy to dig in and see over the last six years how many came to custody that were not.

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you. If you would just forward that to staff and have them send it to the committee Okay, seeing no one else in the queue, thank you so much. Thank for your presentation. Thank you for being here. 

And looks like we are going to move to Item H. And I know we’ve had folks sitting out in the audience being patient. I know it’s been a long committee. We’ve got a couple more items to go. I’ll ask that we be succinct and keep an eye on time because it is getting late. Yes. Alright, if you would introduce yourself for the record. 

Courtney Salas Ford Good afternoon, Courtney Salas Ford for the Department of Education. 

Stacy Smith Stacy Smith, Deputy Commissioner with the Department of Education 

Senator Ben Gilmore And you have an exhibit that was in the packet. That’s exhibit H. If you have any remarks you would like to offer on that, or you want to go straight to questioning, that’s up to you. 

Courtney Salas Ford We could do some quick remarks where I’m very quick. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Perfect. 

Stacy Smith And so really the questions that were sent over to the department– and first off, thank you for including us in this conversation. And it was very interesting listening to the speakers before us because we could actually connect with several of the things that they were saying. So thank you for including us. Several of the questions that we were asked pertained around data points. 

Specifically on attendance, as we listened to the conversation today, the data points we gave you on attendance, I don’t think align. What I really think we look at was chronic absenteeism. And so I had sent over some– texting people in my office to say, what’s our chronic absentee rate for the state? 

And chronic absenteeism is defined as missing more than 10% of a school year, calendar year. And so about 15% of our students are considered chronically absent, all right? And so when you were talking earlier with the judges and they were talking about FINS petitions in court, like you get to the point where you get those really high level chronic absenteeism FINS referrals happening. 

So that’s one thing I think we need to look at. When you think about chronic absent kids, the highest group, that’s 18-19% of kids that are chronically absent are in that 9th, 10th and 11th grade. The other group that is really, really high is kindergarten. Those mamas don’t want to let their babies go to school. And so that’s really about educating parents about their kids going to school. But your biggest group is that 9th, 10th, and 11th grade. 

So chronic absenteeism, I think, was more of the attendance questions that were sent over. Data for suspension and expulsions, that’s kind of clear-cut. The suspensions, that could be repeated, the same kid more than once, all right? Expulsions are unique kids. So 857 individual kids were expelled from school last school year. And then on alternative learning environment, that’s actually a K-12 program where schools set up alternative learning environments, it’s part of categorical funding. There are rules that follow how ALE’s look.

 We broke that down by the number of students per grade level. The highest grade level there is you’re going to see our 12th grade students. And a lot of times what you see with 12th grade students and 11th grade student are drop out prevention, kids that are so far behind in their credits, and then trying to keep them from dropping out of school. So a lot of times that’s what you see there. Courtney, do you want to get into the–? 

Courtney Salas Ford Yeah, so I’ll be brief as well. I think some of the other questions we were asked was about ensuring that educational services are being provided in these facilities. Juvenile detention centers, DYS and alternative learning environments, all of them are expected to meet the standards for providing education to those students. We monitor each of them. 

Each one has a little bit of a nuance set out in law as to who is responsible, whether it’s the facility or the district where that facility is located or even the resident district of that student. And so I’ll leave that to questions if any of you want specifics on that, but happy to speak on that as well as addressing some of the mental health issues that have been brought up or any other questions that you all have. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you. All right. So first in the queue, Representative Bentley and then to Representative Shephard. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you, Chairman. Thank you for being here today. I had a meeting last week with my superintendents in my district. They pretty much cover a very rural district, and they’re just really at a loss about what to do with some students that are violent in their school, where they’re not having very, they don’t have any options. They don’t have any ALE programs there. 

So what are the parameters for them to expel a child? Because to me, it’s like they don’t have the opportunity to expel a child, and the amount of paperwork they have to do to verify that the student is so disruptive in their classroom is harming the education of the 50 other kids in the room. So do we have any help for these superintendents in rural districts, what they can do? They’re just at a loss and it’s really been one of the biggest issues that they’re dealing with right now. 

Courtney Salas Ford So I’m going to let Ms. Smith talk about some of the other alternatives. But one thing I want to say is where districts are limited is because of a state law that says students in kindergarten through fifth grade cannot be expelled or receive out of school suspension unless they are physically violent. And so that’s when they are left to find those alternative options. And I’m going to again let Ms Smith talk about some of the things we’re doing to try to help with that. 

Stacy Smith Yeah, we have heard from schools, and actually Judge Braswell when he was talking earlier about kids who have been admitted into a residential facility and then our mental health facility for their extreme behavior, for violence or disruption, they get kicked out and then they end back up in his courtroom. Well, the same thing happens to school. They end up right back at school. 

And so we have heard a lot from schools on what do we do, right? We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the wraparound services. So we have been working with some districts on some pilots around the state. In Jefferson County, the Pine Bluff area, they have a multi-tiered ALE there that even offers an evening ALE for some of their students that don’t need to be around some of the other kids. 

It’s very unique to that area. In Northwest Arkansas, we’ve launched a pilot up there as well. And it’s kind of, what is it when it’s beyond a kid that a traditional ALE K-12 public school can handle, right, but no one else is taking the kid, courts are involved. 

The pilot we’re doing there, we’re trying to make that a cross-agency collaboration about what could this look like as a state, trying to find that in between ground between a traditional ALE where the school’s helping and something a little bit more that’s not necessarily a residential facility. So we are doing some pilots there. I also know we’ve done the pilot with mental health and the concierge service that this legislature has heard about. 

Courtney Salas Ford Right. We brought to you a few months ago a contract with Care Solace, a care coordination company. And so we all know schools have a lot that they’re doing and the counselors in those schools have so much on their plate. They can’t provide the intense time that they need with students who really need therapy and counseling. And so through our Care Solace contract, the counselor at the school can reach out and try to identify providers in their area who can serve those students.

 Because it’s not always that the parent or the school doesn’t want to get help, but they just don’t know how to find it. And so this care coordinator can help them identify it. They can make appointments for the parents. They can help the parents navigate insurance and other avenues. We know that DHS does a good job of preparing and serving those kids who are Medicaid eligible, but there’s a large population that don’t have Medicaid or are underinsured or uninsured. 

And so through our Care Solace contract, we’re really trying to help identify that. And then the next step will be trying to identify more telehealth providers, because as many of you know, in rural areas, there just are not, there’s not enough providers or counselors in those areas. And so we’re continuing to look at that and to look at how we can continue to find more providers to provide the mental health services through telehealth for these students as well. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thanks for the update. And I will tell you that one of my superintendents is using Care Solace, was very happy with the results they are getting out there in a rural district. So thank you, chairman. 

Stacy Smith Thank you for sharing that. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you, representative. And coming to Representative Shepard, you’re recognized. 

Representative Tara Shephard Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you all for being here today. And thank you for the explanation, because I was quite surprised when we received this exhibit based on what the information that was asked of you all. So can we get a follow-up, now that you know what’s being asked and present that information, the data that came through the email? 

Stacy Smith The chronic absenteeism? 

Representative Tara Shephard Yes. 

Stacy Smith Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am, I will type that up for you and send it over for them to distribute. 

Representative Tara Shephard Okay, because that would be great. Because some of the questions that were asked by my colleagues were referenced in that email related to disability and things of that nature. But really quickly, what you did provide us, are we saying that roughly 37,000 kids are not attending school on any given day? 

Stacy Smith Yeah, when we were looking at the daily average attendance, the difference between that was 92%. So yeah, you’ve got 8% of those total kids that are absent, yes. 

Representative Tara Shephard So basically, we have a small city of kids not at school on any given day? 

Stacy Smith Yes. 

Representative Tara Shephard Thank you.

Courtney Salas Ford If I may, Representative Shephard, I’d like to add, because I know I’ve had many conversations with Judge Braswell, and he even said he wished he had brought this up when he was up at the table, but we are working with him in his court and a school district in his area on an attendance addressing pilot, having almost like a liaison between the court and the school to identify those kids who are at risk for ending up in court because of their chronic absenteeism and how can we be more proactive in finding out the why. 

Why are those students not at school? Because we know they need to be there and we know oftentimes there’s more reason to why they’re not there than just they don’t want to go to school. But maybe it is. Maybe the parent doesn’t want to bring them. And so that’s a pilot that we are looking at and working with Judge Braswell and that we hope to eventually upscale so that we can reduce those numbers. 

Senator Ben Gilmore All right, thank you, representative. Going to Representative Gonzales Worthen, you’re recognized. 

Representative Diana Gonzales Worthen Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. It was mentioned previously that approximately 80% of our kids who are incarcerated or court involved are not reading at grade level, third grade reading level. And so it was also mentioned that with chronic absenteeism, we have a lot of 9th, 10th, and 11th graders. But yes, kindergarten is one of those grades in which we have a lot of parents oftentimes, they do want to hold on to their kids. At the same time, that’s their first time to be in formal education, which means that they haven’t had the pre-K resources. 

So essentially, that when the fundamentals of reading and reading literacy foundation, the strong base happens is in that early grade so that by the time they get to third grade, they’re reading on grade level. So I was just curious as to help to prevent these particular kids now as they continue in school, they’re not reading on a grade level and now they’re court involved, et cetera, they continue to be absent and then we see what happens and ending up being incarcerated. 

So I’m just curious as to what we can do in terms of just ensuring that we can provide more resources at that end, especially with early childhood, kindergarten. I know that there’s been some grants, et cetera, that are going to be focusing on that, and I wondered if that was going to part of that or what we can at that very early kindergarten age because it’s critical with their literacy foundation. 

Stacy Smith We agree with you on that. And there’s lots of conversations going on, especially around early childhood right now and early literacy. State legislation in recent years has required that 30 day screener, it’s required interim assessments, it’s required screening for at risk reading, especially in kindergarten, first and second grade. 

All of that is in place. Lots of work being done right now in the coordinated services between especially pre-K moving into kindergarten and defining what kindergarten readiness looks like. Looking at curriculum materials for our early learning centers is another area that’s being worked on right now. So that is definitely an area that there is a task force. The early childhood commission is tackling that right now and  there’s several conversations happening about that. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Representative Lincoln Barnett, you’re recognized.

Representative Lincoln Barnett Thank you, Chair. I had one, well, I have two questions. The first one is regarding the 2024-2025 suspensions and expulsions data that was shared with us. And I wanted to know, do you have comparative data that can be sent to us for a prior year so that we can see whether or not expulsions and suspensions are trending upward or downward? 

And then the other question that I had and as it relates to expulsion. Do we have a way of tracking how many of those expulsions result in school dropouts? Is there a way for us to know how many students are returning to school after an expulsion and completing? 

Stacy Smith I definitely can get you the trending data. So we’ll make sure and do that and then I’ll dig in and look at the other. I mean, our statewide graduation rate right now is 90 percent. So that means 10 percent are not. That’s the four-year graduation rate. 

So definitely see if we can look for a link between expulsions and that percentage that’s not graduating on time now. We do have a group of those kids who do graduate in five years, right? So we can definitely go back and dig into that. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Alright, thank you representative. Thank you both for being here. Really appreciate the information. You’re dismissed. Last but certainly not least on the agenda, I’m going to go ahead and ask you if both would come to the table. And that way you can both present and then take questions. And I understand presentations are different, but on similar subjects. I will ask you to introduce yourself for the record and whichever one wants to go first, you can certainly do that. 

Keesa Smith-Brantley Good afternoon, members, and thank you, Chair. My name is Keesa Smith-Brantley. I’m the Executive Director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. And it is a privilege to be with you today to talk about juvenile justice. I want to start by thanking Representative Shephard for continuing to uplift juvenile justice. 

Senator Missy Irvin may have stepped out, but I equally want to thank her for always being a champion for the children that are justice involved. And seeing our children, as opposed to their charges, because that’s often a real reality. Also, Chair, I’m very cognizant of the fact that we are letter I, so I will try to be as brief as possible so you can get out of here. I’m not so far removed from my state employment days that I don’t know that you all are ready to go. So, with that said, I think it’s important– 

Senator Ben Gilmore We are here as long as you’re willing to be here. 

Keesa Smith-Brantley Got it, got it. So I think it’s important for this conversation to have a little bit of context about the juvenile system because you’ve heard about reforms and you’ve specifically heard about the SAVRY system. But I want to give you some context from the administrative side of state government.

 So in 2015, I was working as the Deputy Director of Children and Families, or excuse me, Youth and Families for DHS. And on Governor Hutchinson’s first day in office, my boss at the time got a call, Director John Selig, and we got a called directly from Governor Hutchison. And his request was that he wanted to visit the Alexander facility, and he did not want any members of leadership to go with him because he wanted to see the facility as it was. 

And he wanted to see it that day in the next hour or so. And after he went to the facility, while we were all shocked and nervous. He went to the facility and he felt as we did that we were running the facility with fidelity, but he did say there is not enough being done for kids in this state. And he noted that it was going to be one of the top priorities of his administration to focus on children that were justice involved.

 And shortly after we got that phone call, I got a call from Justice Wood. She was aware of Governor Hutchison’s desire and what she wanted to do was look at the SAVRY System, which you all have heard a lot about. One of the things that Justice Wood was very aware of was the challenges that we were having in the system, specifically around children that were coming into the system and not being assessed properly. And what we knew was that there were children in our facilities that did not need to be in long-term residential facilities. 

When we had children that were defacing property or stealing items from gas stations or having incidents at home or at school, namely because of undiagnosed mental health conditions, they did not need to be at DYS, specifically for two reasons. One, juvenile offenders that are committed on these types of crimes, but then find themselves removed from their families, their education, their school often came out of the system worse than when they went in. 

And equally, reason two was that these children were much better served by evidence-based community programs that held them accountable– because I’m not ignoring accountability– but allowed them to stay home or close to it. And I believe that Representative Barnes, you mentioned the efficiency of many of these programs. So back in 2015, we started on a significant reform effort that included the SAVRY system, but also included creating a statutory law and a reform board that looked at institutional change on top of SAVRY. 

That included streamlining DYS assessments of youth when they came into the system, so making sure that we were able to give medical assessments so we could diagnose some of these children who had gone undiagnosed for years, equally opening more beds for juvenile sex offenders, which was a particular problem. I don’t want to speak for Director Crump. 

Maybe finding beds for those children are no longer a problem, but it was significant at the time. Finding solutions pertaining to substance abuse were all things that we were able to do because there was a concentrated look at the system. SAVRY ended up being so successful for us and really determining what were the right children and their right placements that we ultimately were able to close two facilities, the Colt facility and the 11- to 17-year-old facility located in Dermott. And equally, we were able to repurpose the Lewisville facility and use that for children that were struggling with opioid use. And as Director Crump has noted, that facility wasn’t quite used as much as DYS was expecting at the time and was left unopened for some time. 

And then, unfortunately, now is back to taking residential commitments because the numbers have increased. But the point of the historical context is to say that before our reform, I received concerns all the time from parents and stakeholders and advocates. And their biggest concerns were, one, the condition of our facilities and the lack of treatment that was happening at the facilities at the time. 

And equally, their secondary concern was, why were there not more community-based programs? And could we not serve children better, especially when we’re talking about 13 and 14 and 15-year-olds, better by serving them in the community, having a way of getting them away from the things that tempted them to get into trouble, but equally being aggressive about the need to help them close to home so that they can turn their lives around. 

And so when we closed two facilities, what we were able to do with permission from the legislature is repurpose the funds that were going to residential to try to– or excuse me– going to those individual beds to improve the facilities. But even with all of the work that we did, we were not able to find a consistent funding source for community-based programming. 

And we wanted to do that in conjunction with the judges because you’ve heard from them today. So you’ve them talk about the fact that their needs are not cookie cutter. So what Judge Braswell needs in Conway is not necessarily what Judge Hess, who was also here, needs in Forrest City. And we wanted to be respectful of that, but in no way were we able to find a way to consistently give them the funding that they need. 

And so in wrapping up, because I am in fact closing, one of the things that I would like to point out is the fact that we have not looked at the juvenile justice system since that time in the same way. And that was over 11 years ago. You’re hearing a lot of needs being expressed. You will probably hear even more, and I’m sure you’re hearing it directly from your constituents. 

In 2015, we didn’t have, not to say that we didn’t have violent children, but we are hearing incidents and things increase as the years go by, especially after the pandemic. And so there is a real need to do a needs assessment of the juvenile justice system. And I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the fact that on top of all of the things that the system needs, there is a real reality in that we do not fund it with any type of consistency. 

So if you’re wondering about how the juvenile justice system is funded, I’ll just high-level note that state general revenue funds primarily go to the Division of Youth Services. And the majority of the way that those funds are used, I don’t want to, again, talk out of turn because I’ve been gone from state government for three years. 

But I can imagine by looking at Director Crump’s report that the majority of those funds are still being used on residential beds, meaning they’re not being used for preventive services and they’re not being used for community-based programming. And that is a function of need. I’m sure, knowing the individuals at DYS, that if they could dedicate more money to community-based programming, they would. 

Equally, there’s some small general revenue that goes to AOC that they use for administrative functions. Federal revenue for juvenile justice is limited. Typically those are given out in small grants to community programs and organizations that support this work. And then that leaves much of the front end administration of this system on however counties choose to fund it. 

Many counties fund their juvenile systems and their juvenile courts very well. Others don’t have the capacity to do that. And what we see is a little bit of judges trying to figure it out, on top of having to utilize fines and fees and things of that nature, one for punishment, but also as a funding source. And I don’t see Representative Bentley, but that is an issue that we attempted to address in this last legislative session and something that should be noted. 

If we are going to see improvements pertaining to our children, particularly our children that get in trouble, we can’t leave it to happenstance as to how we address when they start approaching trouble. I’m not asking for specific funding, and I know that funding is limited right now, but I do think it is important that we look at the needs of the system and determine if there is not capacity within the state to fund those programs that we know will help turn children around. 

Because what I know after being in state government for several years and now being on the advocacy side is that a slot in a community-based program or a bed in a residential facility that serves children that have substance abuse issues is a lot cheaper than a bed at the Department of Corrections. And so it is incumbent. We have seen children’s lives being turned around. 

A child making a mistake at 14 and 15 does not have to dictate what they do for the rest of their lives, but it is important for the state of Arkansas for us to think about what we need to do to ensure that our children are on a better path. So thank you, Chair. And thank you, members. 

Senator Ben Gilmore All right, thank you. Any questions for Ms. Smith-Brantley? Representative Shephard, you’re recognized. 

Representative Tara Shephard And Mr. Chair, I don’t have a question, but I have more of a statement. And Ms. Smith-Brantley, I want to thank you so much for that presentation. You all were saved until last because we wanted to hear advocate sides, what’s really happening. Not saying the state agencies aren’t doing what they’re supposed to. But I really appreciate that, and I’m going to follow up with the Chair with some additional comments in regards to funding for community-based programming as an alternative to incarceration. So thank you for that. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Alright. Coach, you’re recognized.

Fitz Hill OK, thank you. And thank you, Representative Shephard, for the invitation to come and present to the Bureau of Legislative Research. And as I was listening, after serving seven years on the state board and working with Stacy and her team with Senator Keith, I was over the Discipline Committee as one of the things that I kind of led the leadership on. 

And it was just amazing to listen to how all the research has come together, understanding how this is actually working and looking at the suspensions and continue to see how this manifested itself over a period of time and see where we are today. I didn’t know that at the time how that was working out, but visiting schools throughout Arkansas as a state board member, I was just going to share anecdotally some things that kind of pull this in perspective. 

Because we’ve heard the data, we’ve heard the numbers. And so I want to make this come home as we close down today. But perfect example, I’m visiting a school in the Delta. And I go into the school with the superintendent, and I vividly remember the young man, fifth grade, sixth grade, and they was getting ready to suspend him. And he was crying, and so I asked the superintendent, what plans do we have for this young man right now? 

They said, Well, he’s been violent in school, and we’re going to suspend him. And I said, Oh, okay, so what’s the game plan for him when you suspend him? And so he was still crying when I came back. And then he said, Well, we can’t send him home because his mother says she can’t come get him. 

And so we’ll just kind of push him out and end up, those are the students that we find out, to the question you asked, that will end up dropping out later on. Because we’re suspending our kids oftentimes back to the trauma that caused the suspension. And as we continue to look forward, and I continue to hear the third grade reading level, you hear data about this number all the time, the third great reading level is where you count prison beds and things. 

But I want to say, as Secretary Putnam came to me and asked about the 500 beds, the 500 juveniles, and that’s how I met Mr. Crump and have been working very closely with him and Kim Bell in trying to find alternative measures for rehabilitation. And so just over a period of time of assessing where we are today and looking at the 400 to 500 students that we’re dealing with, the thing that excites me is that it’s only 500. Because as I travel to Chicago, to Harlem, to Detroit, looking at metal program he was talking about, from one or two communities, they have the number of children that we have. 

And so I can get excited about a plan that we can possibly over a period of time of 10 years of coming with a strategic recovery plan if we truly understand how we’re birthing our pipeline to prison population. So in point, when we look at this, it is a battle because it’s like being in combat. It’s air, land and sea. So you can’t just fight this on one front. You have to fight it on all three fronts. 

And when you look at what’s birthing our pipeline, the prison population, you go back and you look at the factors that we realize we’re one of the hungriest states. That’s poverty. You come back and look at the rate of our teenage pregnancy. Okay, and as I do the anecdotal surveys of the students, young men and women that I have counted population with, one factor that stands out to 85% of these students who we get to work with, and I’ve been to all five facilities, 85 to almost 90 percent of those that I just do and ask to stand up have multiple elementary school suspensions. 

So then when I sit there and survey those individuals and I said, Okay, what we find out is over 60 percent come from teenage mothers. Then from that you look at an impoverished background. So what we’re doing, Arkansas is really good right now in attempting to provide things to help what I’m saying, divert and intervene. But the prevention mechanism, as we all say, is where I think we have to contribute the most of our resources. 

Because I work specifically in a population to address the black male homicide in our community because I’ve had several killed on campus while I was president. And so understanding what that social factor means is that a black male born to a teenage mother in poverty upon conception has a 50% chance of going to prison. And so what we have to do is understanding that from a prevention, intervention, and a diversion standpoint on what do we do. And we talk about the third grade reading level. 

I think there’s a book by Roger Thurow called The First 1,000 Days After Conception. Well, what the research will show us in that book is that that first 1,000 days is really impacting the third-grade reading level of our students. And so we must not only continue to pull them out, as Nelson Mandela mentioned, we have to look at why they’ve been thrown in. 

And I think once we can look at this and process this tragedy that we’re dealing with, with the violence in certain zip codes and certain communities, and realize to be specific on how we’re going to address this and understand that school is sometime a place of refuge. And when we suspend our kids– I’ll give you another anecdotal example. 

I was visiting another school. And this young man came back to campus after being suspended, all right? They had him arrested. And I asked him, why was he arrested? Well, you know, he’s been suspended. You know why he came back? For lunch. He wanted to eat because he didn’t have any resources to eat. So we have to look at the judge and say, hey, these things are not one size fits all. Every individual is different. 

And so how can we bring a supportive community from the churches, from the faith base, from the business community to look, How can we come in to address these through the systems that will be transformative with working with our population of students that need the help the most? Stacy mentions only 10% of those drop out of Arkansas or do not complete high school. And so if you go back and look at that population of what we’re dealing with violence in our community, there’s direct correlation to that. 

So what we are trying to specialize in every Arkansas working with Mr. Crump and trying to find those students and give them a specific track plan of life that works in rehabilitation for their lives because the Department of Justice says that 84% of students in juvenile detention facility within five years of release without a specific life plan will recidivate within five years with the average prison sentence in adult prison of being 12. 

And so, as you mentioned Representative Shephard, the money that we’re spending to incarcerate, that’s a four-year college degree. For one year, you’re getting that. You’re getting in one year that could pay for training and welding, all the things, as Mr. Crump has mentioned, that sometimes kids can be applied to learn to do, rather than putting them in the classroom and thinking, okay, we just heard that the average reading level is under third grade, so how are we going to give these students applied learning lessons that they can deal with their hands and then teach them literacy skills as they go. 

So as I summarize, and I’d be glad to continue on. I know it’s been a long day. But you’re welcome any conversation because it’s not a cookie-cutter approach. This is somebody’s child. And this is the United States of America. And everybody, regardless of the birth that you have, deserve the right to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thank you so much. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you for your comments. Well stated. Any questions? All right, Representative Gonzales Worthen, you’re recognized. 

Representative Diana Gonzales Worthen No question, just wanted to make a comment. Thank you for all of the work that you’re doing in everything to reduce the recidivism and to keep our kids safe in the community and not continuing this pathway to prison. 

Senator Ben Gilmore All right. Any other comments? I was hanging on for you, Representative Shephard. 

Representative Tara Shephard This is for the ending though, if it’s okay, not directed towards this. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Okay, well, if that’s the case, thank you both for your time. Thank you for your work and thank you for being here and sharing your thoughts with us. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. You’re dismissed. All right, Representative Shephard. 

Representative Tara Shephard Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I want to thank everyone for being here today. I think this was a conversation that was definitely needed amongst all organizations. So Mr. Chair, my request is, and I don’t know if you can help me put my thoughts together of the agencies that came today. I would like follow up meetings with them. If they can identify a representative, the reason being that I believe what we learned today is that this is a very costly system. 

There are some gaps as it relates to the data tracking and the information that’s needed. Additionally, I think it came out today, and at last I’m proving wrong, there’s a need for alternatives to incarcerations, specifically as it relates to mental health. Additionally, as it relates to substance abuse. And the last thing I’ll add is what was just offered here at the table. There needs to be some discussion in regards to funding stream for possibly funding community-based programs as an alternative to incarceration. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you, representative. What I heard there was the need to continue this discussion, and I don’t disagree with that. Be happy to visit with you offline or have other discussions in committee. I would say that for those who are here that you want to continue to communicate with from various agencies, please reach out to them. Do so, and I’m sure they will be responsive. And of course, staff, as always, will be available to help facilitate that. Look forward to continuing the conversation. 

Representative Tara Shephard Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Senator Ben Gilmore Thank you, Representative. Seeing no further business, thank you all for being here. I know it’s been a long day, but I think, a worthwhile day. And thank you for your time. For those in the audience, thank you for your time and patience and for the agencies present. As always, thank you for your work. With that, we are adjourned.