Protective Services engages in several meeting models to achieve the best possible outcomes for youth and families, while focusing on engagement, empowerment, safety and stability.

Family Team Meetings are a collaborative activity, held for the purpose of supporting and educating parents, sharing information, and jointly making decisions, with the goal of empowering and strengthening families while keeping children safe and planning for their ongoing stability, care and protection. Family Team Meetings provide an opportunity for the parents, family, community service providers, and natural supports to be involved in the building of partnerships to increase the likelihood of having a realistic, achievable plan that will lead to better and more lasting outcomes for their children.

The process seeks to improve specific outcomes:

• Diverting children from initial placement
• Decreasing the length of time in placement
• Increasing use of kinship caregivers when placement is necessary
• Shortening case episodes (amount of time case is open)
• Increasing reunification/permanency
• Reducing future involvement of PCSA (fewer cases reopening/children returning to care)

Permanency Roundtables and Youth Centered Permanency Roundtables are meetings held on already open cases with the purpose of working with children to identify the best plan to move toward permanency.  For these meetings, permanency refers to reunification, legal custody to a relative or non-relative, adoption and adult adoption.  Through a multi-meeting process, steps and planning are developed to move a child’s case forward while focusing on the values of urgency, teaming, outcomes and optimism. 

The initial meeting in the process is the Permanency Roundtable, where agency staff (both those providing direct services and other, non-involved staff) and external consultants work together to identify an action plan to best move toward permanency for the young person.  Following this meeting, a Youth Centered Permanency Roundtable is held, where the young person and their identified support individual(s) attend and participate in revisions and editing of the plan.  Youth Centered Permanency Roundtable meetings are held every three months until permanency is achieved for the young person.