By Suzanne Hollyer, Director, Oakland County Friend of the Court
FOCA Historical
Perspective
I was honored to first serve as the President of FOCA from
2007-2009. The FOCA president is typically provided a couple of years of “training”
by serving first as the vice president. Our bylaws permit a two-year term as
president. The president selects the vice president, who is confirmed by our
board of directors. In recent years, the elections have not been contested;
however as recently as the 1990s, the elections were hotly contested. The
benefit of our current system is some consistency in leadership that allows for
a four-year opportunity to participate in the Program Leadership Group (PLG).
The PLG helps the Office of Child Support make programming decisions for the
statewide child support program. The four years I spent on the PLG from
2005-2009 came at a time when the program was dealing with a different type of
crisis. We were focused on the fallout from the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005
(effective in 2006).
At that time, our program was targeted for cuts that would
have reduced funding in Michigan by more than $54 million per year. The PLG
formed the Child Support Program Review Committee (CSPR) to investigate how to
manage this drastic cut. I was grateful to be able to serve on this committee,
which issued a report on December 8, 2006. We investigated whether it was
possible to restructure, downsize or otherwise absorb the $54 million cut in
the DRA by reviewing other programs, surveying our own program participants,
and reviewing years and years of budgets.
In the end, the CSPR report recommended against making cuts
and in favor of increased funding. It was pointed out that cuts to our program
would harm the most vulnerable of our population by forcing reduced services
for families that depend on us. It was suggested that our work in recovering
TANF collections should be leveraged allowing for some of those revenues to
support the child support program. This did not happen, but the state did find
another way to allow us to leverage federal matching funds by providing us with
“make whole” funding that has been provided to the counties from the state’s
general fund ever since that time. We proudly documented the program’s ability
to recover costs of public assistance programs and to help avoid those costs by
providing services so that families can be self-sufficient.
Moving Away from Cost
Recovery
I was struck by the contrast in perspectives when I attended
NCSEA’s leadership conference in August. In the early part of the century, I
attended an NCSEA conference and learned that our pride in recovering costs to
the government was shared by others in our nation-wide program. When I went
back this August, I learned it is not just in Michigan that the conversation is
changing. As a program, discussions are happening everywhere about ceasing
automatic referrals to child support in foster care cases, eliminating or
reducing the amount we reimburse for health care costs and considering whether
mandatory referrals to child support are the best thing we can do to help
low-income clients get on their feet. A whole plenary session at NCSEA’s August
conference was dedicated to considering whether or not it is even fair or
morally just to recover costs from our low-income clients who assign away their
right to child support when they seek cash assistance. It is no longer even newsworthy
to mention the decreased emphasis on enforcement of child support orders
especially through contempt of court proceedings. For those of us who have been enforcing child
support for a few decades, the shift in perspective about what we are doing in
our program has been building for a few years.
Like many others, I’ve spent my entire career in child
support. Change has been a constant part of the job so this changing
organizational perspective should be something I am accustomed to at this
point. However, the question being asked both in Michigan and throughout the
country is fundamental to our very identity: if our mission is not to strongly
enforce orders and recover costs for our public assistance program, what is it?
Changing the Child
Support Impact in Michigan
The PLG will be looking at some big-picture issues in the next
few years. Issues such as how referrals come from the IV-A (public assistance)
and IV-E, (foster care) parts of the program will be discussed. Changes in distribution
rules to allow more money to go to families surely will be considered. We can
change how and whether we collect the costs of government-funded medical
assistance. I expect the future Program Leadership Group members will be taking
on these heavy issues. I will enjoy watching the discussions from my new
position of immediate past president of FOCA.
However, what will these changes mean to the rest of us as
child support professionals? More importantly, what will this mean to the
families we serve? As a frontline worker myself, I can honestly say I never
gave distribution of support or the assignment of child support a thought when
I was choosing a career in child support. I wanted to help families in my
community navigate a difficult time in their life. That, my friends, is where
we front line workers can continue to have an impact.
As I was writing this article, I overheard one side of a call
with a parent who is in the process of a very high-conflict divorce. Since the case
has not come to the FOC for services, the call could have easily been ended by
just explaining that our office is not yet involved. Instead, I heard my
employee engaged in a lengthy conversation that took a lot of patience. By the
end, our future client was feeling better, even though we had not really been
able to do anything with the case. This one call was a great reminder to me of something
that is easy to forget in the hustle and bustle of our busy jobs: serving our
community, sometimes by just providing a compassionate listening ear, is where
many of us make our impact.
Shifting Internal Dynamics
Speaking of history, I recently was uploading historical
minutes from the Friend of the Court Association to our website. I was amused
to see that our elections used to be hotly contested, unlike today when our
officers are often recruited to serve. Additionally, it seems not a board meeting
went by without a sternly worded memo being sent to someone at the state level.
Either the Office of Child Support or the State Court Administrative Office was
typically on the receiving end. Today we work in close partnership with both
agencies. The partnership has moved from something that didn’t exist in the
1990s to something we referred to with a subtle eye roll 15 years ago. Today we
find ourselves closer to a true partnership bonded by real friendships formed
by mutual respect between the staff and directors of those agencies and those
of us who serve on the front lines of the program. Some things stay the same,
but fortunately a lot of things change and usually for the better.
