There is no other volunteer project that I have worked on as important as the Truancy Diversion Program (TDP). I feel very privileged to have been able to participate. I can also say how sad it was to sit and witness just exactly how funding affects all of these Clark County students’ well being and future. Although I am not trying to turn this into a political piece, I feel that anyone who was involved in this program would whole heartedly agree that public school funding has a direct effect on many of the “activities” that these children are involved in, or those that they should be but are not.

Nevada is ranked 33 in the nation for school drop out rates. The Clark County school district is the 5th largest school district in the United Stated. According to the Nevada Department of Education in February 2011, the average number of pupils per school is 957, and a graduation rate of 68 percent. This translates to a high number of pupils and low graduation rates. Finally, Nevada’s average expenditures per pupil was about $7,615 while the national average is $10,190; thus, there is a shortage of $2,575 in comparison to the National Average.

The TDP was started by Judge Gerry Hardcastle about 10 years ago. The purpose of the program was to prevent children from becoming legally truant under NRS 392.040, NRS 392.130, and NRS 392.210. Currently, TDP coordinators are Debbie Rose, and Judge Jennifer Elliot. Attorneys donate their time as judges, mentors, friends, and positive role models for children who may lack positive role models. The attorneys who participated in the program do not receive any form of monetary compensation. However, the compensation actually received was more valuable than money. I learned a great deal from my students, more than they ever did from me.

Basically, if a child is found to be a habitual truant the parent or guardian can be guilty of a misdemeanor crime. The TDP was created to avoid the legal ramifications that may occur for a habitual truant. But the TDP is much more than this: the most important function is to provide children with the extra attention that they may not be receiving at home, and to attempt to notice any “problems” that the child may be experiencing at home. I was fortunate enough to finally see some of the children smile about something, even though they wore frowns when they were first placed in TDP.

Each and every Thursday morning, I awoke bright and early (5 am), grabbed a large coffee, and headed to the school. Each student would then meet with me and the school social worker in the auditorium, one on one. We would go over their grades, attendance, attitude, missing assignments, and other issues. The age group of the children ranged from 14 to 18.

The adolescent school curriculum was not much different than my own in high school, but it did seem to me that there was a great many more second chances. For example, I recall from my own public education that when an assignment was due, it was due. In this case, for some classes, the assignment could be turned in at any time. I began to think this could be to compensate for a lack of parents in the home to assist with homework. I found out a lot about some of the personal demons that these particular children had to deal with on a daily basis with little to no support from their family.

The school that I was responsible for started with about twelve children, and then ended with about six. One of my students dropped out of the program because CPS removed her from parents who beat her. This particular student, aged 13, had been forced to escape her parents, who were not allowing her to attend school because she was supposed to take care of her many younger siblings while her parents were working. The sad fact is she was one of many students I encountered who were missing school to care for siblings at home.

One of the most profound days that I experienced was when one of my students started discussing with me how he was the subject of a bitter custody battle. An innocent victim caught between two selfish people, he was stressed to the point where it was affecting his grades and attendance. He was also incredibly angry, so it was rewarding as we progressed through the process and he acted more chipper. Being a divorce attorney myself, I found it extremely upsetting to work all week in my various custodial disputes, and then see the product of the same every Thursday morning.

There were also children affiliated with the wrong crowd, involved in drugs, and victims of the economic crisis. I relay these particular instances not as shock value, but to make the general public and legal community aware of the real problems that some of these children experience, and of the need for programs like Project SOAR, which was a boot camp offered with the National Guard until funding was cut. A helpful program in North Las Vegas and Henderson, “A Life of Crime and Keep it Real,” also had to be cut due to funding.

There were also a handful of parents who were at the end of their ropes completely, and I really felt for them. They utilized whatever services and resources that they could for their child’s education, but the programs available are few and far between. Moreover, many of the parents must choose between putting food on the table or setting the troubled youth up in a costly program; for most, the choice has to be the former.

In the end, I did help three young adolescents improve their grades, improve their attendance in school, and even smile a little more often. I will continue to watch over them this next year, until they eventually graduate. My students were all given my email in the event they needed to talk to someone, and of course, I personally rewarded them out of my own pocket when they did a good job. For some of these students, it was the only reward they had ever received.

Some might say that only helping three was not a great accomplishment, but I disagree. As attorneys, we are generally more fortunate than others, and we should give back. If all of us could help just one child, together we could save many students.

Mandy McKellar is a partner at Churchill, Harris, Mckellar, practicing exclusively in the area of family law. Mrs. McKellar, is a member of the Family Law Section, has been published in the Nevada Lawyer, and Communiqué, along with being a member of the State Bar of Nevada Professional Responsibility and Ethics Committee, and has been working with TDP for about one year. She will return to Western High School in the fall. She can be reached at (702) 868-8888 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Picture being ten and watching your father being hauled off to jail in handcuffs. Your parents’ argument escalated from verbal to physical, and now someone has called the police. Your father is cursing and your mother is crying and bleeding. They are both high on methamphetamine. The place is a mess—dirty dishes are piled in the sink and beer bottles and pizza crusts are on the floor.

Picture a Child Protective Services (“CPS”) worker showing up in a county car and saying you have to go away with her. You have never seen this person before, and you sure as hell don’t want to go anywhere with her. Your mother is screaming and pleading and now you’re screaming and pleading too. You’re scared not only for yourself but for your mother. You know she needs you to take care of her; that has always been your job. You worry about what will happen to her after you’re gone and whether you will ever see her again.

When this happened to my client, Robbie, he first tried kicking and hitting the CPS worker and, when that proved ineffective, he vomited in her lap.

Welcome to the world of child welfare practice. It’s a world characterized by contradiction and shades of gray, where best practice tells us to collaborate for the good of families, but legal training tells us to win at all costs. It’s a world where the best interest of the child often boils down to the least detrimental alternative. It’s a world where too often children parent their parents and then bear children themselves. It’s a world where, despite scientifically developed safety assessment tools, the decision to remove a child often depends more on where you live than what you did. It’s no secret that some CPS units remove more children than others, and some judges scrutinize removals more critically than others. Indeed, whether CPS removes too many children or too few are matters of intense debate within the child welfare bar.

It takes a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to practice child welfare law, given the horrific circumstances of our clients and the frustrating lack of community resources to help them heal. There isn’t one of us on either side of the courtroom that isn’t asked how we sleep at night.

On its facts, Robbie’s case is strikingly similarly to the majority of cases litigated in dependency court. On any given day, there are roughly 3,200 Clark County children in foster care and fewer than half of them have legal representation. All are in the system not because of what they did, but because of what was done to them. They are victims. Most, like Robbie, are there not because of broken bones, but because of child neglect, with substance abuse and domestic violence being the most common denominators.

What separated Robbie’s case from the thousands of others was the outcome. This was a family success story, thanks to an early intervention initiative launched in February 2009 that gave children and parents attorneys from the day of removal. The Early Resolution Project, now called “ERP,” was born out of the realization that too many children were growing up in foster care and being raised by committees of professionals with titles reduced to acronyms like WIN workers, PSR workers, and BST workers. The goal of ERP was to get government out of the business of raising children, because, quite frankly, it wasn’t doing a very good job.

The idea of an early resolution program is not new to the country, but in 2009 it was new to Nevada. Here, parents not facing parallel criminal charges are unlikely to get court-appointed counsel until their parental rights are being terminated. Too often, Clark County children don’t get attorneys at all, or at least not until they have been in foster care for years, involuntarily institutionalized in a mental hospital, or dosed with cocktails consisting of psychotropic medications. Some don’t get attorneys until their parents’ rights are being terminated—not until a judge finally realizes a child needs a voice in court.

The Children’s Attorneys Project (“CAP”) at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada has been the legal advocate for children in Clark County since 1999. Although we have grown from one staff attorney to ten, more than fifty percent of abused and neglected children here still have no voice. From this grim reality, our vision of an early intervention program was born. We thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could wrap families in a cocoon of supportive services? Wouldn’t it be great if we could help keep kids from being institutionalized just by helping their parents become better caregivers? Wouldn’t it be great if kids could just go home and be safe?

We knew instinctively that parents and children who were represented by counsel had better case outcomes than those who went through the child welfare system unrepresented. ERP gave us an opportunity to put theory to the test. Then we thought, wouldn’t it be even better if we could turn traditional courtroom adversaries like the District Attorney, the Special Public Defender, and CAP into partners? Wouldn't it be better if we could shed our traditional courtroom roles, take off the gloves, put down the defenses, and simply focus on collaborating to put broken families back together sooner rather than later?

Energized, CAP shared its vision with Nevada Supreme Court Justice Nancy Saitta, who became the advocate-in-chief and catalyst for ERP. Next to the planning table came the juvenile judges, the District Attorney, the Special Public Defender, and CAP. Even the cash-strapped county believed in the project enough to fund a dedicated position at the Office of the Special Public Defender for ERP.

Under our ERP model, every child and every parent gets an attorney from the first day the child is removed from the home. Within days after removal, clients, caseworkers, and counsel come to the table, along with families and friends, to develop an action plan to get children home as quickly and safely as possible. Under the leadership of Judge Frank Sullivan, ERP is developing a network of community partners with expertise in substance abuse and domestic violence. Our parenting plans have become more creative and more focused.

Robbie’s mother did everything the court and the team asked of her. Her ERP team was with her the day she graduated from drug court. Robbie went home within six months after he was removed, and the case was closed and court jurisdiction was terminated six months later. As for his mother, she has continued to address her sobriety with a missionary zeal. On the day her case closed, she tearfully thanked us for giving her back her life and her son.

It’s fair to say those of us who have been part of the ERP project for the past two years are passionate about what we do and the model we have developed. We want kids to go home as quickly and as reasonably possible and we want them to be safe. We also know we have plenty of work ahead of us and that ERP is very much a work in progress. Collaboration still has not eliminated litigation altogether and we do not always agree on what the child’s best interest looks like. Despite our efforts, some children do not get to go home, some parents never kick their addictions, and termination of parental rights trials still happen. Sometimes we simply have to agree to be colleagues in the hallways and adversaries in the courtroom.

Nevertheless, through ERP and strong judicial leadership, children are no longer languishing in the system. They are going home faster and getting adopted faster. This is all good. ERP has been a court of last resort for many children who, but for the support and strength the program has provided for their parents, would have faced little or no hope of going home.

The goal of the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada is to represent every child in the foster care system and to promote and give system-wide support to the opportunities for cooperation and collaboration between government and private counsel that the ERP project provides.

As the directing attorney for the Children’s Attorneys Project at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, Janice Wolf also serves as the attorney for the Early Intervention Program, a statewide court improvement program initiative to bring about better outcomes for abused and neglected children by providing attorneys to all parties at the very earliest stages of the court process. Ms. Wolf also advocates tirelessly against over-medicating foster children and heads a statewide action committee on psychotropic medication. She successfully ended Medicaid payment of radioactive “brain SPECTs” routinely performed on foster children in psychiatric hospitals.