By Nikki Withrow, Management Analyst, Friend of the Court Bureau (FOCB)
The FOCB recently published the Child Support Specialty Docket Establishment Guide to help courts develop and implement child support specialty dockets (CSSDs). The guide discusses both planning and operational considerations and contains targeted questions to shepherd the planning process. The guide also provides tips and examples from other specialty courts.
FOCB decided to publish this guide after years of observing grant-funded projects encounter and have to overcome the same issues. For example, most grant-funded projects know they have a sufficient caseload of parents the project can help, but nearly all of the projects run into difficulty identifying those individuals and recruiting them to the project. The guide provides suggestions on how to anticipate this issue and keep it from hindering the project.
Some of the topics the guide addresses are: assembling a planning team and operations team; defining “success” and writing a mission statement; defining a target population; setting eligibility criteria; sustainability; and much more.
The FOCB was fortunate to be able to use the Starting a Juvenile Drug Court: A Planning Guide (JDC Planning Guide) developed by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges as a model. The JDC Planning Guide authors generously gave permission to modify the steps established in their guide to provide Michigan- and child support-specific examples, hints, and tips.
