space Model Courts Program

For the past 25 years, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) has focused national attention on abused and neglected children. With funding from OJJDP, the Permanency Planning for Children Department at NCJFCJ has implemented its Victims Act Model Courts program in jurisdictions across the Nation. The program helps courts improve how they handle child abuse and neglect cases so that children spend less time in foster care and dependency courts resolve cases earlier while maintaining the adequate protections these children deserve and need.

Today, NCJFCJ oversees 18 Model Courts in 17 States. These Model Court jurisdictions have implemented a variety of programs that are being replicated by other dependency courts. For example, reorganized "one-family/one-judge" court calendars ensure that judges assigned to dependency cases remain on the same cases until the children involved achieve permanence, either by being safely reunited with their rehabilitated families or by being placed in permanent adoptive homes.

Model Court innovations are resulting in remarkable and measurable outcomes for children. When Nancy Salyers, Presiding Judge of the Child Protection Division of the Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, started work to establish a Model Court in 1996, more than 58,000 children were under the Division's supervision. By carefully coordinating their efforts to implement programs that improve the handling of abuse and neglect cases, the court, related government agencies, the legal community, and community-based child welfare and adoption advocacy groups streamlined court operations and reduced case backlogs. The court's caseload as of August 31, 1998, had dropped to 31,534 children.
Child health and safety remain paramount concerns as these alternative programs are integrated into court and community responses to child abuse and neglect. Many Model Courts have expanded preliminary protective hearings to ensure that related issues are substantively investigated at the early stages of child abuse and neglect litigation. Scheduling hearings at specific times, implementing strict continuance policies, and developing state-of-the-art data information systems are goals of several Model Courts, while others are focusing on increasing adoptions. All Model Courts are seeking to shorten timelines for children under court supervision, and many are striving to decrease the number of cases under court supervision by examining records and clearing case backlogs.

The 18 Model Court jurisdictions are Alexandria, VA; Buffalo, NY; Charlotte, NC; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; El Paso, TX; Honolulu, HI; Louisville, KY; Miami, FL; Nashville, TN; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Newark, NJ; Portland, OR; Reno, NV; Salt Lake City, UT; San Jose, CA; and Tucson, AZ.


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OJJDP Annual Report 1998 October 1999