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Delaware
Systemic Court Reform
Evaluability Assessment Site Visit Report
In 1995, the Delaware Supreme Court received approximately $80,000 in federal Court Improvement Program (CIP) funds to assess the court's performance in processing child dependency cases. The assessment was completed in May 1997 and resulted in twenty-two recommendations for system-wide reforms, all aimed at shortening the time to permanency. By FY 2002, Delaware was receiving approximately $106,000 annually to implement its statewide systemic reforms.
At the time of the evaluability assessment, key stakeholders identified three of the reforms as key to impacting project goals. These three reforms are:
- The One Judge/One Case Assignment Practice where one judge presides over all legal stages of a dependency case;
- The institution of a Defined Sequence of Hearings and Reviews to enhance the oversight role of the court in child welfare cases consistent with recommendations from the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ); and
- The provision of Representation for Indigent Parents in child welfare proceedings.
A study team from James Bell Associates visited the New Castle and Sussex County courts in August 2002 to gather information about the implementation of these three reforms and to determine whether the circumstances exist that would permit a rigorous evaluation of Delaware's CIP reforms. Appendix A contains a list of the individuals interviewed.
This report concludes that due to the dynamic nature of court reform in Delaware and the multiple reforms undertaken at once, much can be learned from an evaluation documenting the reform process and its impact based on the perspective of key stakeholders. Further, at this time, it appears that it would be feasible to compare outcomes of cases filed prior to the reforms to outcomes of cases filed after the reforms were implemented in New Castle County. This aspect of the research design would involve comparing outcomes for all families that came before the court for one to two years prior to the implementation of reforms with outcomes of cases served under the new system. This appears possible in New Castle County because "pre-CIP" cases were maintained in a separate legal track and were not exposed to the reforms.
The report is presented in five sections. Section A presents a brief overview of Delaware's Court Improvement Program and the context in which reforms have been implemented. Section B presents a detailed logic model for the evaluation. This model defines the inputs and immediate outputs from the reforms, along with immediate outcomes, intermediate outcomes and the long-range outcome or result. Section C presents the recommended evaluation approach, including research design parameters and research design limitations. Section D identifies pending issues to clarify before proceeding with the evaluation. Section E concludes with an assessment of the feasibility of a full scale rigorous evaluation of this site, including strengths, weaknesses, and the willingness of key stakeholders to participate in the evaluation.
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