Citizen Review Panel

Wednesday, October24, 2012

4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Teleconference

Present:Susie, Steve, Kristin, Diwakar

Absent:Dana, Stella, Pat

Guest: Christy

Agenda

  • Christy or Travis come with us to Kotzebue if available
  • Which community she’d recommend as a third village
  • We need data on Kotzebue
  • Strengths and challenges in the area
  • Manillaq’s role in CPS
  • Other issues
  • Employee survey data
  • Who wants to go where in Kotzebue region

Minutes

  1. OCS accompanying us to Kotzebue

We want someone to come, if possible her or Travis. Travis is available and would like to come. Some Panel members are flying out Sunday and some Monday morning. We’re coming home Wednesday evening.

  1. Which community as a third village to visit

We will spend time in Kotzebuetalking with community partners, and then travel to Selawik and Noorvik. Did she have a preference for our third community to visit? Somewhere stellar or somewhere struggling?She hasn’t heard anything about villages in the region. But she’ll ask Coleen and Travis.

  1. Data for Kotzebue office

Christy will check on the status of the data and we’ll try to meet soon before we go to review it and discuss it.

  1. Strengths and weaknesses of Kotz and outlying villages

We would appreciate getting her perspective on this so we can be alerted to that. Travis is gathering it and we need to have a meeting.

Shelia China is head of Kotzebue field office. She’s great. She’s been out there several years. She helped tremendously in Western region. She’ll be a useful contact for us. They’ve had some stability. They are a good middle of the road office--kind of stable, but room for growth.

  1. Maniilaq’s role in CPS

Manillaq is a grantee; they have been in the past. They have a family preservation grant. They used to be co-located with OCS, now it’s a he said/she said relationship. Other divisions have same issues. Biggest contention is their operation of a children’s receiving home. Christy would like to see more work done to find relatives and less reliance on the receiving home. They change directors a lot. They can map out what grant funding they get from OCS.

Steve: They used to do some of CPS activities. Either intake or family preservation, I don’t remember.

Christy: They are working with families serving in-home non-custody cases. So after the investigation was completed and OCS decided we could serve them in their own home. They also serve families that OCS is closing, that have risk of repeated maltreatment. All those grants are going out again in the spring. The family preservation has struggled in the region. What OCS has been doing hasn’t been working. OCS workers will say they refer, but Manillaq doesn’t do stuff.

That sounds like what we’re trying to get back to. We want the tribes to take responsibility for some cases.

Susie: Do they get any IV-E funding?

Christy: They get IV-B funding. That’s administrative and training costs.

Susie: Different than what you’re about to do with TCC?

Christy: Very different. They can use it for training.

Susie: We’re just trying to figure out how much time for Maniilaq.

Christy: Tribal state was last week and no one from Maniilaq came. They have a revolving door. I’ll find out whois the director and what’s happening in terms of issues.

  1. Other issues

Susie: Anything else?

Christy: Can we add on some time to the conversation about Kotzebue? There’s stuff I want to talk to you about. I’d like Tim to join in too and Travis and Michael. AVCP invited us out for their annual convention. I was out in Bethel; I haven’t been out there for five months and it was great.

The Wasilla staff were chipper, more positive, more upbeat than ever. Almost like different people. On their own, lots of positive stuff. That was encouraging. Having strong leadership is really helping. The data is reflecting the hard work that they are doing—Wasilla has been #1 of all regions for compliance on case worker visits with children. More children are getting home. Tim is very proud.

Susie: I can’t meet till we get back from Kotzebue.

Sylvan: I’ll send Doodle with a couple times that work for us.

Christy: It was a great meeting. There were lots of Elders who got up and spoke in Yupik. The audience was very kind; they talked about some challenges and then how everyone needs to help. It was very neat.

Susie: Baby steps.

Christy: There is progress happening.

Susie: I sent you a copy of our strategic plan.

Christy: I guess I missed it.

  1. Employee survey data

Susie: We’re still tweaking it. We spent a day with Bill Hogan. It’s work in progress. From our meeting yesterday, we thought of another piece that will help us.

Diwakar: The employee survey that OCS has done the last three years. The PDFs are available. We keep having e-mails from OCS employees, so we thought it would be good to see what the employees feel. We want the raw data from the employee survey.

Christy: If you have ideas about questions to include, that would be good but the next survey will go out in a couple weeks.

Diwakar: The PDFs are just summaries of the answers to each question. We’d love to learn from the data from the surveys. We know that more than 50% of the sample are social workers. We’d love to see the answers by that. Can we get the raw data?

Christy: Just Diwakar and CRP, not UAA?

Diwakar: Just CRP.

Christy: I can’t see why not. I can get the data for you. The only data I don’t want to share is the comments because they are identifiable.

Diwakar: I think we all agree on the lack of usefulness of data that is totally negative. We want to sharpen our goals on the strategic plan using what’s already available.

Christy: We already have a good handle on it. We have been meeting with the staff advisory board. I feel like we’ve got a good data. If there’s more you can do, that’s great.

Susie: Is their feedback anonymous?

Christy: I think Bernita could track it back. But people’s comments are often identifiable based on what they say.Some areas are so small that if we break it down by positions and regions, it becomes identifiable.We want to protect the staff feedback. The managers want more meaningful data, butwe need to protect the workers.

Diwakar: Is there any written methodology?

Christy: I’m sure Bernita can tell you.

Diwakar: If she has something written up then great, but if not we can call her. With all the energy and data we’re putting into the strategic plan, we want to be more clear and specific about where we want to go.

Susie: Anything for us?

Christy: Let’s hold it for the next meeting. Travis will be game for anything. We need to look at time for the week before Kotzebue to talk.

Sylvan: I’ll send a Doodle about time the week of the 5th.

Christy leaves the call.

Diwakar: We didn’t get a timeline for getting the survey data.2009, 2010, 2011

  1. Who will go where in Kotzebue region

Diwakar: Not Selawik

Kristin: Anywhere is fine

Steve and Kristin Selawik

Diwakar and Susie Noorvik

Pat, Stella and Sylvan to mystery community

1