Vermont Parent Representation Center, Inc.

VPRC believes strongly in the importance of using performance measures to evaluate our program and improve both our service delivery process and our clients’ outcomes.  Our measures answer the following questions.

• What did we do?

• How well did we do it?

• Is anyone better off?

We engage our clients, our colleagues and our community to learn what works best, and we are always thinking about how we can improve our performance.

VPRC PERFORMANCE MEASURES

To download our RBA performance measures table click here. 

VPRC PERFORMANCE REPORT  (September 2010 through September, 2011)

What did we do?

How well did we do it?

• 50% (4/8) of the parents had completed their service plans at the time VPRC closed their cases.
• The average length of stay in foster care for children whose parents were served by VPRC:  No child was in foster care at the time VPRC closed the parent’s case. (This measure does not include children who were in out-of-home care at the time VPRC began providing service to their parents.)
• 60% (3/5) of parents with children in foster or kinship care had successful VPRC advocacy for unsupervised visits.
• 80% (4/5) of parents with children in foster or kinship care had  successful VPRC advocacy for less restrictive visit arrangements.
• 100% of the parents served met with VPRC team members in their homes and in their communities.

Is anyone better off?

• 76% (13/17) of our (pre-petition) parents did not have their children placed in foster or kinship care.
• 38% (5/13) of the children were reunified with parents from foster or kinship care.
• 40% (5/13) of the children reunified with their parents did not re-enter foster or kinship care.
• None of our parents had new substantiated abuse and neglect while being served by VPRC.
• 100% of our parents found VPRC team visits helpful in achieving their desired outcomes.
• $121,000 of public money is an estimation of what was saved from children not entering foster care. (This is based on the  $26,000 yearly cost of foster care in 2004, and an unscientific judgment of VPRC staff that at least 6 children would have entered foster care without the provision of VPRC’s services to their parents.)

PERFORMANCE REPORT HIGHLIGHTS

What did we do?

The most important explanation regarding the number of parents served in our first year of operation concerns the ratio between referrals and accepted cases.  There are two main reasons why parents who sought VPRC representation were denied our services:

1. For an overwhelming number of requests for services, a petition for abuse and neglect had already been filed in the court, and the court had already appointed an attorney. The parents asked VPRC to take over their case because they were very unhappy with their legal representation. They did not trust the assigned attorney and/or found the attorney unresponsive to their needs.

2. Many referrals involved parents who lived outside our geographic service area. Having heard about VPRC’s effective responses to parents’ needs, these parents inquired about VPRC’s program. They had learned about VPRC’s interdisciplinary services from other parents or service providers, and were hoping that we could help them. We had to turn away many parents who did not fit our program criteria. 

How well did we do it?

For 60% of our parents with children in foster or kinship care, our advocacy for unsupervised visits was successful.  For 80% of our parents, successful advocacy resulted in less restricted visits. The story of the consequences reflected in these numbers is significant.

Research shows, and VPRC has learned from experience, that when children are in kinship care for more than a year and have little contact with their parents, the established family dynamics make it very tough to change that pattern of contact. Frequent and consistent parent-child contacts during the first 60 days in custody are crucial for successful family reunification.

Whenever VPRC became involved with parents whose children had been in out-of-home care for a year or more, it was very difficult to change the family members’ interactions for the purpose of increasing parent/child contacts. As a result, VPRC will no longer represent parents from whom the children have been separated for longer than 60 days. This insight validates our mission: “To ensure, through advocacy and support, that children who can live safely with their parents are afforded a real opportunity to do so.”

Is anyone better off?

VPRC believes that one of the most important performance measures is the one that shows 100% of the completed surveys indicate that the parents believe the VPRC team was instrumental in helping them reach desired outcomes (although, it must be noted, not all the parents represented by VPRC completed a survey).

Even in the cases in which parents did not achieve the legal outcomes that they had envisioned at the start of VPRC’s representation, all these parents stated that VPRC's interdisciplinary team helped them identify and reach realistic goals by the time their cases came to an end.

Parents repeatedly commented on the importance of the trust that developed between them and the VPRC service providers. A discerning analysis of this feedback, which will require the accumulation of more data, will be very interesting.