Children and Youth — Issue No. 19 — Wednesday, May 6, 2015 (HTML)

Present: Jane Thornthwaite, MLA (Chair); Doug Donaldson, MLA (Deputy Chair); Donna Barnett, MLA; Mike Bernier, MLA; Carole James, MLA; Maurine Karagianis, MLA; John Martin, MLA; Dr. Darryl Plecas, MLA; Jennifer Rice, MLA; Dr. Moira Stilwell, MLA

2. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions on the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth Report: Finding Forever Families: A Review of the Provincial Adoption System (June 2014); BC Adoption Update (November 2014 and April 2015)

• Bill Naughton, Associate Deputy Representative, CID and Monitoring, Chief Investigator

4. The following witness appeared before the Committee and answered questions relating to Youth Mental Health:

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
CHILDREN AND YOUTH


CONTENTS
Page
Representative for Children and Youth Reports: Finding Forever Families: A Review of the Provincial Adoption System; B.C. Adoption Update	439
M. Turpel-Lafond
D. Thomas-Wightman
B. Naughton
Presentations	447
J. Church
K. Riel
Other Business	460

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. We have a series of items that we’re going to cover this morning.

First of all, we’re going to hear from the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth, who will be given 45 minutes, which will include presentation as well as questions.

I’m going to keep everybody to the time, because after that we have to do a switch with technology issues to hear two presenters to do with our special project on child and youth mental health — Jeremy Church from Mountainside Secondary School and Kathreen Riel from the WITS program. So I’m going to be quite strict on the timing.

Representative for Children and Youth
Reports: Finding Forever Families:
A Review of the Provincial
Adoption System; B.C. Adoption Update

Good morning to committee members. This is our 32nd appearance before the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. I’m pleased to be here this morning to discuss the 2014 report on Finding Forever Families and the two subsequent updates on adoptions that my office has offered since the release of that report in June of last year.

I’ll introduce the staff with me. To my left, your right, is Dawn Thomas-Wightman, the Deputy Representative for Children and Youth. To my far left, your right, is Bill Naughton, chief investigator and associate deputy representative for monitoring and investigations. To my right and your left is Shawn Daniels, who is the acting director in the representative’s office responsible for aboriginal and community relations, and youth engagement.

Shawn has been working in this role since January of this year. As members know, my former associate deputy representative, Melanie Mark, stepped away from her job at the representative’s office in March of this year. Shawn has, since January, taken on a lead responsibility. She’s with us today because we will speak briefly to some of the particular aboriginal dimensions of this report.

I have one very brief additional item that I’ll just note to the committee. I’m sure it’s something that we may come back to in the future. That is, I did write to the Attorney General of British Columbia on the issue of oversight and review of child injuries and deaths. I sent a letter to the Attorney General last month particularly around my role in chairing the Children’s Forum.

I wanted to note that for members of the committee because I am no longer chairing that forum. Members of that forum came before this committee to explain how child deaths and injuries are reviewed in British Columbia. I am no longer chairing and have stepped back from that, have written to the Attorney General about a set of concerns I have about that. I can file and deposit that letter with committee members. The Attorney General did return correspondence to me today, saying that the Ministry of Children and Families will take over that responsibility and look into that issue. That’s significant for you to know because I am no longer in a position to coordinate that. That was a recommendation from the Hughes review.

I had some very serious concerns about a number of specific cases that were troubling to me. I didn’t feel that it was appropriate to continue to operate that, just because I felt that there were some issues around how families were being treated and how information was being presented to the public that may not have been completely accurate.

Now, moving on to the report. In June 2014 we filed this report. This report showed that at any given time there are more than 1,000 British Columbia children and youth in the care of the ministry that are waiting to be adopted.

The representative’s office and the Ministry of Children and Families did something quite different with this report compared to other reports from my office. We did a joint project to promote adoptions. That involved extensive discussions with myself, my staff and ministry staff, and discussions between myself and the minister, where we really explored the underlying challenges that came out of this extensive study and how they could be responded to.

I really want to take a moment to recognize Minister Cadieux’s leadership on this. She’s been very committed on this issue, and I really applaud that level of commitment and focus. This is necessary, and it’s extremely valuable. Thus, I share, to some extent, both the delight in the fact that we can be focused together and get things done, but also the concern that the ministry is not making enough progress. We’ll talk about that in a moment.

As part of that commitment to work together, we really said we need to work together to increase the number of adoptions and permanency for children in care and to encourage and attract families who might be willing to consider adoption and opening their homes and their hearts to become a forever family.

I have provided, as I say, two updates on how the ministry’s progress is on that area. All of the report’s recommendations were accepted. We won’t have a chance today, with our time constraints, to go through those recommendations in detail.
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I can say, from my perspective, that approximately 20 percent of the recommendations have been completed or implemented; 80 percent of those remain outstanding. I can talk more about some of those specifics when we have a bit more time. One of the reasons why I’m issuing periodic updates is actually to be very clear about that progress and that type of accountability and the unique dimensions of it.

I also wanted to tell committee members that one of the joint activities that the minister hosted with myself and the directors of the delegated aboriginal agencies was a forum that was held in Nanaimo recently on reconciliation and promoting more adoption and permanency for aboriginal children.

It was attended by over 200 front-line ministry staff and delegated aboriginal agency staff, including senior leadership from the ministry, key chiefs and representatives of other organizations, like the First Nations Health Council and First Nations Education Steering Committee. Minister Cadieux herself presented, about which I was pleased. I also wanted to acknowledge the presence and participation of the committee members, including Deputy Chair Doug Donaldson and committee member Jennifer Rice, who participated in the full forum. It was very much appreciated.

The forum was a tremendous success. We will be shortly issuing a public report on that forum around what happened. I’ve circulated for you today basically a document that was used at the forum, in preparation for the forum, which is really on how aboriginal permanency needs to be understood and reanimated and supported. We will not have, I don’t feel, this morning, with the significant time constraints that this committee is facing because of the other important business before you, time to go into this at length.

We will be hosting a second such forum because of the significance of these issues and the need to make progress for aboriginal children. A second forum will be held, we hope, in Kamloops in October. I would request, via the Chair and Deputy Chair, if perhaps we could have another appearance before this committee after that October event, where we could take some time and really talk about whether or not we are getting what I would call unstuck around the aboriginal permanency.

Our study and our constant monitoring tell us a few concerning things, which is that it takes about eight times as long for an aboriginal child to find permanency in British Columbia. If they’re in the care of a delegated agency versus the ministry, it’s a 20-times longer wait. Far too many of the children that are aging out of care are aboriginal children who never find permanency, drift through the foster care system through multiple placements and for whom we can do a great deal to change that circumstance.

The type of work that’s needed to do family-finding, be more accountable to First Nations in British Columbia and have positive, collaborative relationships is important. I know several of the leaders at our event…. The committee members will be well familiar with some of these individuals. Chief Joe Alphonse from the Tsilhqot’in was at our event and will attend, I hope, again, our event in Kamloops and is really looking at new relationships with First Nations directly, to be more accountable about the state of their children, to do family-finding, to promote safety and to try and change some of the current circumstances.

There’s much, much more to say about how that work will be done. It’s intimately tied into implementing the recommendations from this report. In fact, recommendation 4 is what was the focus of that forum and continues to be the focus of that discussion.

Finding Forever Families, the report, though, was a critical look at the provincial adoption system and really a blueprint for improvement. This was the first-ever external review undertaken of the province’s adoption system. Again, it took substantial work to complete this, and I give recognition to the RCY staff because they dig in, and they look at the data. They look at the evidence, and there’s a very significant commitment to rigour in the work.

The project was launched, I have to tell the members, probably close to 2010. It demonstrated, again, that a careful review of the experience of those people actually in the system, including prospective adoptive parents, is important for the purposes of public accountability but also important for the purposes of learning and improvement.

The study looked at 450 B.C. children waiting for adoption and 457 prospective adoptive families over a six-year period. It was not easy to do that because the records were not very clear or obvious, and a lot of effort had to go into tracking and following the pathway of these children and these families through the system.

As the members of the committee will know, our prior audit of plans of care showed a very low level of compliance on planning for children in care. Not surprisingly, there’s a domino effect where adoptions can have similar challenges. Indeed, we saw some of those similar, systemic problems across the system.

The initial report included some fairly sobering numbers. It showed that there are more than 1,000 children in care waiting for adoption at any given time. Of course, that isn’t acceptable to me. Of the 450 children in the study group, only 260 were adopted. The average waiting time was 31 months after being brought into care. For some, such as those particularly vulnerable children such as aboriginal children, many of them waited a decade, and many of them never had a family.

Of the 457 prospective adoptive homes, meaning families who came forward out of courage, love and interest
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to say they would open their homes to a child and expand their families, 197 of the 457 completed an adoption or had a placement of a child within a six-year period.

I’ll note for the committee that we started out by looking at a two-year period, then we pushed it to a three-year period. We pushed it to a four-year period. We had to push it to a six-year period because this is how long families were waiting. A total of 240 families withdrew from the program along the way. The average wait time from applying to have an adoption to having an adoption finalized for the group studied — and again, it’s only 457; it isn’t all applicants over a six-year period — was about 26 months.

MCFD was not doing any learning. There was no evidence, documentation or otherwise, of any learning as to why it is that families withdraw from the adoption process. I think that through this study and our work, we now see that some of the reasons are fairly evident why they do — in part because they receive poor public service when they come forward and are willing to do so.

They are not, certainly, dealt with the type of timeliness that one would expect considering the enormity of the decision that they have personally made. I’m not suggesting to the committee that every family that steps forward is going to be in the process forever. Some people do willingly change their minds. However, they received poor public service. It took a very long time to get responses. When they received responses, it took a very long time to get a home study. They frequently were asked to do home studies again and again.

They also frequently reported feeling judged in terms of the quality of their family, even though these are often very exemplary families. I say that in part because I’ve also been an advocate for members of this Legislative Assembly who seek to adopt families, and as we all know, every member of this Legislative Assembly generally has enormous family support to do the type of work you do.

It’s somewhat shocking to me, as representative, that even members of this Legislative Assembly would wait two, three years to adopt a child, and many of the members of the Legislative Assembly that I’ve worked with over the years have actually withdrawn from the adoption process in utter frustration after waiting four or five years. That says something fairly dramatic.

The minister shares my concerns, because we’ve had detailed debriefings on many of those cases, and there is no acceptable explanation for the treatment of the families that step forward. They’re too often met with unreasonable delay, judgmental home studies and a negative experience.

Obviously, we can do much better. The adoption report really identified some significant areas for learning, for service improvement, and the good news, of course, with all of this is that there’s lots of opportunity to improve.

As a result of the report and the recommendations in it…. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on those recs. As I say, they’re at page 77. They are detailed. They do deserve extensive discussion, because, as I say, approximately 20 percent have been accomplished, but there are aspects of these recommendations that are absolutely needed if the system will change. Our last month’s, or second, B.C. Adoption Update gives you a bit of a picture.

In terms of the joint response to this report — the extensive debriefing with the minister and with ministry staff, the reflection and analysis of the data, the evidence, the experiences — I pushed the ministry to set a target and to work to obtain that target and to set an achievable target.

They set a target for 2014 of 300 adoptions. Again, at the time they expressed a great deal of confidence that they would not only meet that but possibly exceed that target. I was pleased about that. I was glad it was a modest and achievable target, and I wanted them to achieve it.

My report that was released just a short few weeks ago, at our Nanaimo forum on First Nations adoptions, showed that the ministry, indeed, fell short in its first year. Despite all of those conversations and despite all of that focus and all of that effort and all of that collaboration, they actually only had 265 children placed for adoption in 2014-2015, and that was 35 below MCFD’s stated goal.

It was an improvement over the previous year, which had a total of 227, but there had been years, in recent, that they had exceeded 300, so it was a modest goal.

I acknowledge that MCFD undertook a number of significant initiatives to support achieving this goal, including a one-time injection of $2 million to deal with the backlog of home studies. That funding went largely to private agencies to help clear the backlog, and I want to acknowledge the work of those agencies, which has been extremely valuable.

I was pleased, at our Nanaimo forum, to hear the minister announce that there will again be a one-time funding grant of $2 million for the current fiscal year. I’m looking at a detailed breakdown of where that will go, and I’m looking for a detailed breakdown of where the money went last year, not because it wasn’t spent for good purpose — I believe it was — but because I want to know what we obtained for that.

Certainly, we cannot achieve this with just a one-time grant. Now it’s two-time. Will it be three-time, four-time? We need to address some of these significant issues and, of course, learn from them.

In addition, after this report was released the ministry led a social media campaign beginning in November 2014. Again, I applaud that. We participated fully with the Adoptive Families Association of B.C.

The campaign was very successful in reach and will be relaunched again soon. The Facebook portion of the campaign delivered more than 7,000 engagements. The campaign videos were watched nearly half a million times at a higher than average time spent viewing those videos
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compared to other videos, for instance, in social media.

On-the-ground calls to toll-free adoption lines more than doubled during just that month of November, which is Adoption Awareness Month. Compared to the previous November, web traffic on bcadoption.com increased by more than 100 percent, from 9,000 visits in 2013 to 23,000 visits in that year.

That was important. That campaign is very significant, and again, I really applaud the efforts of the ministry and others to work on that. We will continued to be very dedicated to work on that.

However, the concern I have, as we’re much more successful at promoting adoption and attracting families, is: how are those families being treated when they step forward? Are they making their way through these systems that were fairly significantly bottlenecked?

This remains a thorny concern and one for which I don’t have a full accounting. I will continue to promote and attract families and find ways to make sure that there are waiting homes, but the work has to be done with those families.

I will speak about other aspects of the recommendations, but certainly, a more simplified home study process is important — moving away from a highly judgmental approach toward families. I mean, obviously, safety is important and time needs to be taken, but when you have three or four different home study methodologies that are being used, or the ministry contracts out its home studies to private agencies but then will not accept their home studies as being up to the quality of their home studies, and then they end up doing another home study….

You can see the frustration on my part, the frustration on the family’s part and, frankly, although she speaks well for herself, I know the minister shares that deep frustration — that this is unnecessary and inappropriate bureaucracy standing in the way of good progress.

The initial report that we issued on the update showed that only 75 of the 227 children and youth in the care of the B.C. government placed for adoption in 2013-2014 were aboriginal. In the next year there were 99 aboriginal children placed for adoption.

The numbers have improved somewhat, although again the time and the delay continues to decline in terms of the increasing number of months that those children wait. Even though it looks like a boost, generally the children waiting are increasing.

I will defer some of those comments, unless there are some specific questions, to our, perhaps, discussion after October, but there is a lot of detail to share around what we know and what we can change about some of those circumstances.

I just want to speak to one recommendation. One dimension of this that I feel, in light of what I’m sharing with the committee, is that I support the ministry staff that works in this area. I supported that this become a provincially driven program, that it be properly funded and supported, that the ministry have timelines for children, timelines for how it treats families, a lot of public accountability, a lot of focus.

Despite that, they didn’t get it done last year with a modest goal. They are committed this year to do 335 to catch up the shortfall. Will they get it done? I don’t know. I certainly can’t sit in front of this committee today and say that I’m confident they will get it done. I am not confident, unless there’s going to be change.

Among the changes that are needed is a change that is a reasonable and an important change — that is absolutely essential, in my opinion — because it introduces a level of accountability into a bureaucratic system that can lose sight of children. And that was I recommended there be changes to the CF and CSA legislation so that there’s a mandated annual external review by the Provincial Court of British Columbia of the ministry’s actions on each child’s adoption status. Every year the ministry would have to report on those 3,000 children, individually, on what was accomplished for them in terms of their plan of care.

This is not to have another hearing about whether they should be a CCO, a continuing custody order ward. This is about: what did the ministry do in the last year to meet the needs of a child and their right to a family and to promote family-finding adoption and permanency for the child? That would be, at least as a beginning, a de minimis small report on each child to an external independent body.

The reason for that recommendation was it creates accountability. When someone has to produce accountability for their actions to an external body, they need to prepare something as opposed to sort of when things get lost in the paper shuffle, which they frequently do inside the Ministry of Children and Families, and the focus can get lost.

That recommendation is one that I’ve been promoting very strongly. I have very limited confidence that without that change, the bureaucratic culture around the urgency for finding families will change. I’m quite fixed on that. I’ve had extensive discussions and debates with the minster about that — about the how, the what, the why, the who and so forth. I’m hoping that that will move forward.

In addition, that review needs to annually engage First Nations — we spoke about that in our Nanaimo forum, and we will speak about it again — meaning the 200-plus First Nations in B.C. need regularly to be given an opportunity to participate in family-finding and keeping connections with children. That is really part of a reconciliation agenda. It’s something that they’ve requested for some time.

I’ve asked the ministry to tell every First Nation in B.C. exactly about the status of children of origin from their community. They are caught up in some issues around that. I’m pushing very hard that they do that. Yesterday
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I was speaking to the First Nations health directors and others — chiefs and leaders — specifically about this issue. They reminded me yet again that they expect that to happen and that there’s a great opportunity for change if it could happen.

On the issue around quality of service for those seeking to adopt or interested in adoption, we’ve talked before about some of the devices: photo-listing, using technology, clearing backlogs, treating people well. I’m not the representative for adoptive families. I do quite a bit of work with prospective adoptive families who express a lot of frustration. Even though it’s not my mandate to assist them — I suppose it is the Ombudsman’s mandate — I feel that they do deserve a discussion, and so I hear from them.

I recently had a very good discussion with a foster parent about their frustrations around children that they foster year in and year out who seem to be bypassed in their opportunities. That aspect of public service needs intensive and significant improvement.

We also looked inside the representative’s office. In light of this work over the last year and my disappointment that the ministry didn’t meet its target, and I think the minster’s disappointment as well…. What will we do with these cases that we have? We just looked at 52 of our advocacy cases where we’re advocating around adoptions issues. I’m very concerned about what we will do. Do we actually see something happen, or do we wait six years for these cases?

We’re in some discussions with the ministry. It may be necessary that my advocacy staff is somewhat expanded, so that we can have a targeted initiative around adoptions for a few years to make sure that we can really do the kind of intensive advocacy in these cases that gets to a resolution. I’m very concerned about that.

As I said, I’ve advocated for many, many people — children and youth. Again, when it comes to people of the calibre of Members of this Legislative Assembly, I just fail to understand why they won’t have children placed with them after many years of waiting.

It’s just unacceptable, and something very significant has to change because there are children waiting who would be received by a loving and supportive family.

I will leave it there. I’m pleased to take any questions that you may have about the report or the updates to the report that are before you.

C. James: Thank you for the report, and thank you for emphasizing the importance of this work. I think it’s critical that we recognize that while we talk about children in care, there’s a next step that often is available and isn’t taken up because of all kinds of reasons, as you pointed out.

I just wondered — it’s not directly related to the report, but it is related to this work, which is plans of care — what you’re seeing right now with the ministry around updating plans of care. It seems to me, from having been in the system, that that’s also one of the first steps in making sure that we’re looking at adoption and permanency — that plan of care and doing that work.

I just wonder what the rate is right now. We saw the report that came out that said the ministry wasn’t meeting any of the targets around plans of care. There wasn’t improvement. I just wondered what the current status is around plans of care for kids in care.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Thank you for that question. Care planning is essential, and without care planning, the ministry will not achieve its permanency objectives.

One of the things that they’ve launched is that you’ll immediately think about permanency, meaning that this might be a return-to-parent situation, but there may be the need to be thinking about other family members, extended family and others who may provide a more permanent home, particularly when you have parents with significant addictions, for instance, or persistent domestic violence.

I’ll ask Dawn to speak to our understanding of where things are, but I think it’s fair to say, from my perspective, that I think there is still a great deal of inconsistency. I’ve seen, again, some places where care planning has been brought up to standard, and I’ve seen areas where there continues to be virtually zero compliance. I’ve asked the ministry, similarly, to the area of adoption, to set a standard on care planning.

Now, of course, anything less than 100 percent is not ideal, but I’ve even said to them: “Give us a target of 70 percent, and then tell us about it.” We do track it, but I’m not confident that they have. I am of the view…. Dawn will speak to improvements, but I’m not confident that we are necessarily at the 50 percent mark.

D. Thomas-Wightman: We understand that the rate of completion is under 50 percent, at about 30 percent. Of concern to our office is, after the report we did on the plan-of-care audit, what work has been done to increase that — and really substantial work, not just a ticky box to get the plan of care done but that actual comprehensive planning is completed.

One of the concerns we have at the office is that if the comprehensive plan of care isn’t completed, adoption may not be identified as the aftercare plan, which is important. Of the 1,000 where adoption is the aftercare plan, there are still 5,000 kids that…. What is their aftercare plan? If there is no completed CPOC, you might not have that information. There may be potentially more children that adoption is a good adoption for that we’re not aware of.

It’s critically important that the plan of care get up to date. I think one of the reasons we want the annual review is that we can look at the plan of care. In those,
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maybe, 70 percent that aren’t completed, we can have a good look and say: “What’s happening here, and what’s the planning?”

Of concern is that we’ve seen some MCFD offices and delegated agencies, like Mary Ellen said, where zero plans of care are done. That’s not understandable — what’s happening there. Is there a real plan in place to address that? We haven’t seen that to date.

J. Rice: I have a few questions. My first question is in regards to the $2 million from last year. The $2 million was to contract out home studies. I guess the goal was 138 to be completed, and yet only 22 were completed. My concern is that we’ve got another $2 million for this year. How is that going to be achievable if 22 is sort of this…?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I can start with concerns there. Again, I think the important piece is that we’ve contracted largely with private agencies to do the work. I’m confident that those agencies are doing good work.

The challenge that I’m seeing is that they may be doing a home study that the ministry doesn’t accept. So what is an acceptable home study? There is a variety of home studies. I can ask Dawn to speak to that in greater detail. We really come up against this — where an agency does a home study, and then the ministry says: “No, we want a SAFE home study,” or “We want to update your home study with certain additional information.”

That is extremely frustrating for families. We don’t want people doing work and then having to do the work again and again and again. The ministry needs to be clear about the tool, in its work with private agencies, and the targets. Whether or not they’re in the contract — it was written in, “Do X home studies” — we really need to drill into that and to see that.

Again, when I was in Nanaimo with the minister when she announced the second one-time-only money, it was very high level — how much money will go to agencies, for instance, and what work is expected of them. I think it’s important, and in fairness to those agencies, they are really stepping up here and giving a lot of leadership. But it’s not fair if the ministry says to them: “You’re going to do 7,000 home studies.” Of course, they can’t. The ministry has a staff of 4,000 and hasn’t been able to accomplish it. We can’t just put it onto them.

We also need to have some clarity around: what is that home study? This is crucial. I’ll ask Dawn to speak a bit to the issue about the complexity of home studies and some of our advocacy experience where families really feel that this is an intrusive process, because they open their homes to a private agency. Then someone else wants to do another look. It is a type of an examination of a family that can be….Well, obviously safety has to be there, but it can be quite a negative experience if it’s not done well.

D. Thomas-Wightman: Some of the questions we’ve asked. Have you done any kind of analysis of how long it takes to do a home study? And then: how many staff do you need in order to complete that? In your analysis of 300, or 138 with the contracted agencies, was consideration given to that? We don’t have a response back from that.

In addition, there are three or four different home study tools at any given time. Although the contracted agencies…. The ministry does accept them. They have to go through a quality care committee that the ministry has recently initiated, and that takes time, right?

Sometimes they need to be updated, or further information needs to be done because those agencies haven’t necessarily been involved in home studies or the ministry home study. That adds to the time, definitely. We’ve asked for one home study to simplify the process. Obviously, safety is an issue, like the representative said, but that can be achieved, we believe, through one home study so that people who are transferring back and forth between processes don’t have to do updates.

With the agencies, it can cost a significant amount of money. An update can be $1,000, and then you come back to the ministry, and they say you need another home study. Then the time is added on that.

I think, of the 240 that stepped away from the process, those are some of the concerns that we’ve understood — the time, the money, etc.

We have an example of a MCFD staff person who’s tried to navigate back and forth and had extreme frustration and backed away from the ministry program — although she’s a ministry staff person — to go through the private agency and now is back with the MCFD because of child-specific adoption and is running into all sorts of problems with time delays, etc.

We want to see some analysis on the number…. Even the 335 — how many home studies? Who’s going to do what? And then we’ve asked for one home study.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the report and also the forum in Nanaimo. The deputy critic, member for North Coast has done a great job in budget estimates just recently on this topic, on this file. I’m sure she’s getting some more information from you today and some for questions that she didn’t get during budget estimates.

My question is actually to do with your initial comments today, which I was somewhat taken aback by — on the child injuries and deaths topic and public accountability and transparency and your comments around stepping back from the, I suppose, informal forum that you’ve established, in hopes that MCFD will take that over.

You alluded to some of the reasons around information not being presented, perhaps, properly. That quickly
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brought to mind an example that I’ve brought into the Legislature at least four times this session around the death of a child in care, Isabella Wiens, who died at 21 months, in care, a couple of years ago.

There are many unanswered questions around that. We’ve had reports in the media and from the mother, who is now suing MCFD around this topic. There were the post-mortem-detected, unexplained bruises — multiple bruises — healing injuries, a broken arm of the child, a swelling of the brain. However, the coroner’s report, which actually was completed almost a year later, found the cause of death undetermined.

We don’t know anything about how those injuries occurred, and the mother doesn’t either, which is the most important part. There was a protocol investigation done. It took 16 months, and the foster home was closed down, but we don’t know what the results of that protocol investigation are. We don’t know when the foster home was shut down. The designated director of child welfare made a decision not to conduct a case review. We don’t know what factors led to that decision. And, again, the mother has no answers.

I guess my question to you, in light of your opening comments…. The coroner’s report was completed March 5, 2014. That’s over a year ago now. I assume that your office was notified immediately of this death. Since there were no police charges involved, why did your office not conduct an investigation beginning in March of 2014? I’m just curious about your thoughts on that case.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I can just say…. I mean, I notified the committee about the letter to the Attorney General and, obviously, a response today, because one of the important functions we have…. Obviously, my office is independent, has investigative powers. The chief investigator can speak a bit more about that.

The significant issue in British Columbia is that these various agencies that have an aspect of responsibility when it comes to looking at a child death or injury…. They include, of course, my office with its role — and this committee is well familiar with the reports of my office — the Coroners Service, the Ombudsman, the director of child welfare, the provincial health officer, the Public Guardian and Trustee.

Mr. Hughes wanted us to work together to make sure we had a good process in B.C. so that when cases arise, like the case you’re suggesting or bringing to us, we will have worked collaboratively and appropriately, as our roles dictate, to ensure that processes function. Families, of course, that are vulnerable and have suffered loss are treated with respect and with a type of public accountability. So it’s a system, and we want to have a good system in British Columbia.

The representative, in my role, has really advocated for that. So I took charge of this Children’s Forum, worked with everyone. In fact, we presented to the standing committee — some members were here — in 2007. We prepared a paper describing our different roles and committing to work together. I’m just not satisfied that that has happened.

A number of the cases, including the case that you identify, are cases of concern to me for a couple of reasons. One, I don’t think we’re collaborating. I don’t think that we are learning. And I’m particularly not prepared, in my role, to passively be part of a process that tells the public that there are reviews and processes in place when there are not. We will work with families, and we will do our reporting function, but I certainly do not want to be complicit in a process that is not rigorous and is not appropriate and has not done the work.

In terms of the particular case, I think it’s important that we work actively with families and we respect families and that we give accurate information, and that if anyone in any of those offices says that they’re doing a review, that they do a review, and that there be no misleading information provided.

I take a very strong role, and behind the scenes I have a strong sense of accountability to the partners in that process, that they be accurate.

Hence, I wrote to the Attorney General saying I’m not confident. I hope that she will look at it. She has written back to me to say the Ministry of Children and Families will take it over and look at it. If that’s appropriate, I don’t know. I wrote to the Attorney General for a reason.

I appreciate that’s not our agenda item today, but I do give you that notice. I am happy to share that letter with you. It’s a matter of public concern, because I have to answer the questions, which are: did you receive the report appropriately? Have you discussed the report? Are people working together in their respective roles to do this? I think there’s room for improvement, and I’m hoping we can make those improvements.

Individual cases, in terms of decisions on investigation. We will be looking at that, and I will ask the chief investigator to talk about what’s informing our decision on investigations. But I have to be very straightforward with this committee, to say: it can’t just be the representative’s office looking at these matters when other bodies have responsibilities.

We will release shortly an investigative report, which is extensive. I’ll ask the chief investigator to talk a bit about what factors we carefully weigh and consider but how dealing with families is a key part.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Mary Ellen, we’ve got to wrap it up. Was Bill going to comment on that?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Madam Chair, if you can just allow Bill to complete the answer, I’d appreciate it.

B. Naughton: I just want to say that in cases such as
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the one you’ve referenced, obviously they have multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdictions that are involved. I just want to give the committee a sense of the workload within our own office.

Between the period of October 2014 and January 2015 we’ve had 83 critical injuries reported to our office and 32 deaths of children who are either in care or receiving reviewable services. Within that framework, all of those cases will be individually looked at, screened, reviewed. Some will be identified for further review. Some will be identified for investigation.

To be frank with the committee, there’s a significant issue. I have a small office with limited resourcing. We’re able to investigate two to three significant issues a year and produce investigative reports on that topic. We do not have the capacity to do a complete and in-depth investigation on every file that would be potentially relevant to this office. That is the reality we face.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you, Bill. Much appreciated. And thank you very much, Mary Ellen, for your report.

I see that we’ve got Jeremy Church there in the back. We’ll do the transition and are looking forward to seeing him.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Welcome back, everybody. For the second part of this meeting, I’m just going to make a few remarks because we’ve now moved on to the youth mental health special project.

Part of the committee’s mandate is to foster greater awareness and understanding of the B.C. child- and youth-serving system. Toward this end, the committee agreed in the fall of 2013 to undertake a special project examining youth mental health.

Positive mental health is so important to ensuring B.C.’s children and youth can enjoy fulfilling lives, connected with family and friends and can reach their full potential. We’ve also seen, through recent reports by the Representative for Children and Youth, that mental health can be a significant health issue for young people and that poor mental health can have particularly devastating impacts on vulnerable children and youth, such as those in care.

With this in mind, the committee undertook work to explore this important issue. The committee’s first phase sought evidence on some key questions. What are the main challenges around youth mental health in B.C.? Are there gaps in service delivery? What are the best practices for treating and preventing youth mental health issues? How should resources be targeted in the future?

The committee issued its interim report on youth mental health in November of 2014. The committee received a total of 153 oral and written submissions from individuals and from organizations representing health professionals, service providers, aboriginal groups, government, academics and other stakeholders, as well as youth and families themselves. The committee will build on the excellent input received in its first phase of the work as we undertake the next phase of our work.

Our second phase, that we’re in right now, involves seeking concrete and practical solutions to enhance youth mental health services and outcomes in B.C. I remind the committee and the people listening that we had our first submission from Dr. Peterson and Dr. Morrison from New Brunswick, who discussed the integrated service delivery model to the committee a few weeks ago.

Based on our findings, the committee will make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly. Today we have two presenters that have been invited for their expertise and experience in areas relevant to youth mental health. Our conversation today seemed especially timely in light of marking National Child and Youth Mental Health Day tomorrow. I encourage everyone to join us at noon for an announcement on Child and Youth Mental Health Day tomorrow. Don’t forget to wear green, by the way.

We are fortunate today that we have now enough time on our agenda to allow a 20-minute presentation from each of our invited witnesses, followed by questions and answers afterwards. The proceedings are being recorded by Hansard, and a transcript of the entire meeting will be made available on the website.

In introducing Jeremy…. I’d like to get our committee members to introduce themselves first, so you know who you’re talking to.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I’m Jane Thornthwaite. I’m the Chair of the Select Standing Committee for Children and Youth.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Hi. Doug Donaldson, MLA for Stikine and Deputy Chair of the committee and the person responsible, in the official opposition, for oversight of the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

M. Karagianis: Maurine Karagianis, MLA for Esquimalt–Royal Roads, and I cover the files for seniors,
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for women and for child care.

J. Rice: Hi. I’m MLA Jennifer Rice from North Coast, which is Prince Rupert, Haida Gwaii, the central coast, Bella Bella, Bella Coola and all the communities in between. I am the opposition spokesperson for northern and rural health and deputy opposition spokesperson for children and families.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): And we have on the line with us Dr. Moira Stilwell. I know she was on. Moira, are you there?

I’d like to now introduce Jeremy Church, who is the principal of Mountainside Secondary School in North Vancouver. Take it away, Jeremy.

J. Church: Thank you very much. Jeremy Church from North Van. Just to let you know a bit about who I am. Mountainside Secondary is an alternate secondary school. I’ve worked in the context of alternate schooling for approximately 12 years now — seven years in a position of leadership and five years working as a teacher in the context of alternate schools.

I’m here today to talk to you a bit about storytelling, about what Mountainside is and how it came to be where it is right now but in the context of the work that this committee is doing. Jane asked me to come and present on behalf of the committee around some of the integrations that we have been putting in place for the past three to five years at this point and where we sit currently and a bit of future visioning as to how Mountainside might continue to fulfill its mandate of servicing an at-risk population in North Vancouver.

You’ve got these slides in your handout. I know it’s going to be kind of awkward because there’s a screen up there, but I’ll do my best to keep your attention.

The first slide I have here is just to paint a bit of a context. You’ll see variations of these types of charts in most school districts’ handbooks or administrative procedures. The reality being…. The slide to the left there just indicates that, really, 75 to 80 percent of our students in public schooling — or not in public schooling — live without serious mental illness or without really any major problems at all.

Just above that we have about 5 to 15 percent of a population that would be considered students more at risk. So students at risk would be beginning to show signs or symptoms of mental health or housing issues, potentially in the care of the ministry. The top 1 to 5 percent would be your most intensive — students with chronic intensive learning or behavioural needs.

Across the way you’ll see a chart around service delivery. Within the context of school…. I’m an alternate school, so my mandate is typically to work with that 1 to 5 or 5 to 15 percent of the population who are struggling with the most complex of needs — but within the context of a K-to-12 school system. Within the context of North Vancouver and most school districts, they look at how they can service a broad range of the population with universal supports. What are things that all students in the school district need and have access to?

Then as you move your way up the level of need, so, too, do your strategies change. Once you move up, your needs become more complex, and then there’d be more targetive instructional supports for you. And once you reach that pinnacle of need, you’ll have more intensive levels of support.

So as a school district and most other agencies, you’re always looking for how you can have some value-add. How can you find ways that the work you’re doing for the whole isn’t separate from the work that you’re doing for the most intensive? How do you create a system whereby all students have access to some things and you start to target that support as time goes on? That’s the work that I’m here to talk to you a bit about today.

Now, this slide here, when I go and flip it to the next slide…. This slide came directly from the presentation that the folks from New Brunswick had done. I wasn’t at that presentation, but in looking at the materials that they had sent out, it reminded me a lot of the school where I’m currently functioning but on a provincial level.

New Brunswick had put together a framework for integration of mental health services, Ministry of Children and Family services, within the context of schools or in addition to schools. I think that “in addition to” is something that I focus on in the work that I’m doing.

The reality is that my school has students during the day. I have students that have complex needs, and in my community there are service providers who have resources to support those complex needs. So from my perspective, it only stands to reason that those two agencies or more than two agencies would work together to integrate those services in a way that makes perfect sense for a school and driven by youth need.

This one here, just as the slide before, shows again that you have supports for all students, and as the level of
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complexity changes, your intervention changes, but not at the expense of your universal approaches. Your universal approaches happen for all.

I think it’s just important to recognize the importance of those systemic and systematic and developmentally appropriate approaches to mental health. It’s not a one size fits all, but there are certainly proven strategies, mental health literacy programs that can be used to support universally all students in the K-to-12 system. But as we know, there are students for whom that level of universality is not enough, and due to biological or due to situational complexities, their mental health needs become more and more.

I’m going to tell you a bit about our story before we get into how we can look moving forward. Our motto at Mountainside is “Own your journey.” It came from a student, actually, who’d said, “You keep making us responsible for our own things. It’s like you want us to be in charge or something,” and I was like: “Hmm, you’re right. I do want you to be in charge.”

So we kind of stumbled upon a slogan, but it actually has helped frame a lot of the work that we do around trying to empower our youth to begin to advocate for themselves, whether that be educationally or for their physical or their mental health or professionally. We’re wanting students to really recognize that they are the owners of their own journey.

Five years ago our school district made a decision to radically change the way that they serviced alternate program students. Alternate program, by definition, are those most at risk in a school population.

Pick a reason that a child and school would not be a fit — your mainstream school, so a school with 1,000 or 1,200 people. Pick a reason that that student’s not a fit for that school, and that would be who an alternate program tends to focus their energies on. Right now it’s typically mental health, house in transition, family breakdown, and complex behavioural disorders that we’re wrestling with.

Five years ago they made a decision to close the existing alternate programs of about 400 students and gave a two-year window to create something new. So I and a colleague of mine were tasked with creating a new vision for what alternate schools could look like.

During that window we went through weekly meetings to discuss best practice in the field of alternate education. We made visitations to Victoria, we went to Sooke, we went to the Interior, and we went down to San Diego to look at how education was unfolding, not just locally but provincially and also down internationally.

We came up with some great ideas — oh, really good ideas. We were looking at: what would a good alternate program look like? We consulted our community, our neighbourhoods, our families, our students, and at the end of the time we came up with this concept of what at that point was called the community learning program. So three years ago we started a school called the community learning program, and in September of 2012 we started with basically a clean slate.

We spent lots of time planning for what it should look like, but the reality of staffing and all the rest of it means that you get into September of 2012 and you’ve got a whole bunch of people staring at you, saying, “What are we going to do?” and I’m saying: “We’re going to figure that out.”

One of the intentions, right from the very beginning, was a large chunk of money given from the school district to do a renovation at our site. Alternate programs traditionally live in the worst possible buildings. They live in portables and basements and abandoned buildings that nobody wanted, that are totally off the bus loop, and you’ve got to get water-taxied in or something.

They said, “We need to give our alternate students the exact same thing that we’re going to give to any student,” so they gave us a large chunk of money to do a renovation. But at the core of that renovation was this concept of integrated services, this concept that we’ve got all of these supports in this community, a very affluent community, yet even in the context of this affluent community, we have students that go without. We have children and youth that don’t know how to access mental health services.

So we actually created a wing within the context of our building whereby we could have our community partners come in and access the students on site — not in the janitor’s closet, not in the men’s washroom but in an actual office.

From its inception we built our program around this concept that it’s not just about school working independently. It’s about school and community sharing ownership over a problem as it pertains to mental health challenges.

Our details. We’ve actually grown to about 200 students in the past little bit here. We are 85 percent special needs designation. So of our 180 students, 85 percent qualify for a special needs designation, being complex learning challenge, moderate to intensive mental health or behaviour, chronic physical health, autism, a mild intellectual disability. They are the ones that we get.

Primarily we are wrestling with the most at-risk population in the district. Our students are age 13 to 24. Twenty-four seems like an odd age for a high school student, but because of our young parents program, we have a daycare on site, and the moms or dads who have children that have not graduated are eligible to come and take courses with the rest of our population.

We are 25 percent aboriginal ancestry in our school. In our district all of those referrals — so all of my students — have gone through a district screening committee who would say who gets to come to Mountainside and who doesn’t.
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Just to share a bit about our core values. Our core values are mutual respect, genuine relationships, flexibility, choice, individual accountability and community connections. These are the tenets that we hold dear.

Education is our mandate, but we recognize that in the context of these students — and actually all students — education can’t be the only mandate. We look at how we are fostering our citizens of the future by having them think for themselves.

Some of our key features. We’ve got strong connection to adults in our building. We take a very non-punitive approach. A lot of folks have a traditional model of alternate school, where you get these tough nuts coming in and you’re going to train them into compliance. We take a very different perspective, which is that we’re collaboratively working with these students to help them learn to solve their own problems.

We have access to both medical and mental health supports on site. I have two medical rooms that we built as part of our renovation on site for a doctor and nurse. We’ve got on site two clinicians every day as part of a program I’ll talk to you a little bit about here, using those medical and mental health supports to help put together integrated care plans for those that they’re working with: how are we integrating our supports here?

We’ve got great community partnerships and a schoolwide emphasis on mental health and self-advocacy. During our intake we just tell kids: we talk about mental health. That’s what we do. Everybody talks about it. Everybody sees people. In the context of a small school we’ve really worked to normalize that.

We are focusing also on this idea of 21st-century learning or personalized learning. Students are able to basically personalize their programs. I have 180 students; I have 180 programs. We make these up in an adviser block format to allow our students to get to know a key teacher, a key adult, in the building.

We also make use of more of a hands-on learning approach. I was here last week for the careers event out front, the Find Your Fit event. I’ve got 17 kids doing a pipefitting program in partnership with the Squamish Nation and Kwantlen Polytechnic — again, trying to get kids not only focusing on taking care of their brains and their bodies but thinking professionally and thinking about what they want to do afterwards.

For me, at least, I’ve seen a direct correlation between kids not knowing that they have skills and their ability to feel like they’ve got value and worth. The correlation between career and mental health, for me, is a huge one.

Our primary partnership with our agencies is the therapeutic day program. It’s actually a partnership between North and West Vancouver school districts and Vancouver Coastal. It’s an educational program targeting internalizing mental health concerns. It’s semester-long with two clinicians. They take a group of 14 students and target skill-building, exposure and transition back into the context of a school system. After that semester those students would transition to Mountainside regular or they would transition into another mainstream school in our school district.

Vancouver Coastal Health also has concurrent disorders clinicians not attached to the therapeutic day program but at our site every day, coming to talk to our students individually around their own unique mental health challenges.

The Ministry of Children and Family Development has also gotten on board. In our district MCFD owns the intake process. They actually have a group called interpersonal psychotherapy educational program that they’ve been running, where they are exposing students who have not had access to counselling at all with some entry-level skill-building around sleep hygiene, diet, nutrition, exercise, and through that process starting to screen out who is a good fit for continued mental health support and who actually just needs some intensive education training.

Our doctor. Our nurse. Restorative justice is with us once a week running a circles program looking at how you speak to each other in justice-oriented ways and looking at social justice. Our youth service providers — again, we’ve got a very strong community partnership within the context of North Vancouver school district. I feel we’ve been able to build a place where people say: “Mountainside’s doing good work. Let’s connect with them.”

Our students are very positive and have really enjoyed meeting. We’re still reasonably new three years in.

The interesting thing for me is there’s definitely an appetite for this conversation. We’ve been on this journey now for five years in North Vancouver, but during the past two years alone, since we’ve become Mountainside — which is really only two years ago — we’ve had over 30 different visitations from school districts across the province, coming to say: “What are you guys doing? How are you integrating services? How did you change from the old way of doing business to the new way of doing business?” At first, I thought it was kind of fun, and now I recognize there’s an appetite out there for people saying: “We are in the same place you were five years ago. We’re just starting this journey.”

It’s busy. We’re having to re-staff ourselves to say: “How can we support these visitations?” Folks have come not just once but two or three times to say: “We came once. I wanted to bring back more people this time to hear the journey that you’ve been on.”

To focus on what we’ve learned, there are kind of five key areas that we recognized. To be an agency within our school district, to have any meat or impact, there are five areas that we have to focus on, those being active case management, central intake and service referrals, family
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education and support, system outreach into the entire K-to-12 system and having an educational program that meets their needs. I’m going to unpack those a little bit more right now.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Jeremy, apologies for the technology. We’re just trying to connect with Moira. We’re not going to worry about it right now until after you’re done. Are you done, or do you want to…?

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): A little bit, yeah. Then we’ll get people to ask some questions. So go ahead.

J. Church: I do want to focus on what we’ve learned — basically saying that these challenges did not occur overnight. It’s a long lineage of an unfolding pathway to some of the challenges that we see.

This integrated approach is essential. We have students that have barriers, just like transportation. I take for granted transportation, but if a student has to leave my site to go to another site to get service, they’re probably not going to go.

Sorry, I’m rushing here. This is a big one for me — that students still fall through the cracks, despite the fact that Mountainside has all of this stuff. If a student refuses to come to school, we lose access.

A current problem that I see right now is that those with the least advocacy or voice and most in need receive the least amount of support. If they don’t come to school, even though I’ve got this glut of service, there’s nobody out there that keeps track of them after that. That, for me, is that question around: who actively case-manages those students?

We’ve talked a lot about: is there a better way? We believe that Mountainside is on a pathway that is working in the right direction. We’re really looking at: how can Mountainside potentially become an integrated support model for the North Shore? We’re implementing current and evidence-based practices in the field of mental health, doing professional development on site, but broadening that to across the North Shore and maybe even across school districts, between the North and West Vancouver school districts, as is already happening.

What if we can continue to enhance our integration of services for things like not just mental health but employment and housing and food? We’ve got a great partnership with Salvation Army right now, looking at running a food bank out of our site so that students can have a dignified way of getting protein and fruits and vegetables without having to go down to the food bank, having it right through our site — this idea of a one-stop shop, which again, is very much in line with what the New Brunswick model was talking about.

Active case management. Maybe that could extend beyond just Mountainside students to an entire district of students, whereby they say: “If I’m struggling with mental health, I’ll go to Mountainside.”

Helping to facilitate each family’s journey. I know that Keli Anderson is coming tomorrow, and she’s been working with me as well around: how do we make this a family-friendly site? How do we make Mountainside a place that families can come to without being a Mountainside student but to seek support?

Lastly, it’s just a reminder of the context within which Mountainside plays, but looking at the role of that value-add that a school like Mountainside could have on not just the students that are there but on a community in general through an integration of services in the context of a school setting.

I’ll wrap it up there, because I know Jane wants to allow some time for questions.

D. Plecas: Jeremy, I’ve got a couple questions, but I’ll start with one. What do you see as the essential difference between what you’re doing at Mountainside and what’s happening in New Brunswick — what we’ll call the New Brunswick model?

J. Church: That’s a good question. Again, it’s tough when you’re so focused on the here and the now of what you’re doing. I read the New Brunswick model, and I look at that being a systemwide approach at integrating those services — at the universal, all the way through to the targeted and intensive. For me, the biggest one is that it’s done on a global perspective.

When I read the details, I don’t see anything within there that says: “Oh, that’s a striking difference between what we’re aiming for.” For me, I’m driven by…. I want students to get the best possible service in the most respectful and timely manner. When I read through the New Brunswick stuff, having not been at the presentation, it seems to me as though that’s the intention of that service as well — to try and catch those kids that could fall through the cracks.

How a Mountainside model could play itself out on a provincial level, I’m not exactly sure, but I certainly see more similarities within there than concrete differences that stand out for me.

M. Karagianis: Jeremy, a really excellent presentation. I have a couple of questions here.

You talked about the budget. Does your funding come out of existing school district dollars, or are there any new dollars coming to help run the alternate school and its programs? That’s the first question.

Secondly, you talked about referrals, a screening process by the district resource team. Who is that, exactly? Who represents the members of that team, please?
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J. Church: The first is the budget. We claim students, so of my 200 students, those are eligible for funding just like any other student, and they all carry a special needs designation, which also generates funding.

We also make use of…. From the district level, I’m assigned money through the CommunityLINK funding. CommunityLINK funding is another kettle of money that is used to target at-risk youth. Between that, we get given a block budget for our photocopying and other things.

We have a cash account. We do charge student fees. And we generate…. A third of those fees come into us, and two-thirds are waived. But we don’t get anything additional then. We just get the kind of standard…. You know, you get your $19 per student and whatever else the district’s formula is.

But we get in-kind. At this point we’ve probably got four FTE of adults that are in our building that are not coming out of my budget, because they’re coming from Vancouver Coastal Health or they’re coming from somewhere else.

The second question. The district resource team is a team of people who basically work to problem-solve complex cases in the district and look at student transition based on social or emotional learning challenges. I’m on it. Maureen Stanger, my co-worker, is on it. A director of instruction for the school district and two district counsellors are standard members on that, and we invite the school-based teams to come and present their individual students.

For the most part, it looks…. A student is in need at a mainstream secondary school. They use their supports. They make use of their on-site mental health supports. Once it becomes more complex than that school is able to contain or deal with, it comes to the district resource team. We would either say, “Here are some other strategies,” or: “Let’s move them to Mountainside.”

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Great work. Thanks for the presentation. It’s impressive. I did have to pick my jaw up off the table when I saw the amount of services that you have at your fingertips. It’s in no way a criticism of you, because other places do have that level and aren’t doing what you do. But representing a more northern, more remote and more rural area, it’s mind-blowing what you are able to tap into.

My question is, again, similar to what was asked before about the district resource team. The 85 percent special needs designation rings pretty real and true for me, for the schools I represent, especially when it comes to fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

Then the 25 percent aboriginal ancestry. I’m wondering how, beyond strictly the special needs designation…. The impacts of residential school are intergenerational, and there’s a lot of lateral violence and impacts on kids. How do you deal with trauma counselling? Is there a large component of trauma counselling within the services you provide?

J. Church: Both of our school-based counsellors have taken multiple trauma-informed practice professional development opportunities and training, so a lot of the work there they are doing. Again, that’s not specific to our aboriginal population. Many of the students that we have, have witnessed trauma in the countries that they have come from, through war or other things. We’ve had impact of violence in family homes.

Definitely, of the aboriginal population I’m thinking of right now, the residential schools continue to have an impact on their families’ propensity to engage with school. We’re working hard.

To be fair, I have a First Nations support worker right now who also lived through residential school. His story helps to juxtapose or helps guide those families through that, and the students as well, saying: “I was there too, and we’re finding ways to move on.”

Definitely, trauma-informed practice is not a new word. But certainly it’s looking at at-risk populations and some of the underlying reasons for the behaviours they’re exhibiting. Most folks recognize that trauma along the way is very front and centre for a lot of these students.

D. Barnett: Thank you very much for your presentation. Your program looks like something that is really accomplishing what we need in most communities in our province for these types of students and children. You said you have four full-time equivalents from the health authority?

J. Church: In total, so not from the health authority. If I add up all of the adults that are in my building — our two clinicians, our concurrent-disorder clinicians that come to see our at-risks, their individuals; we’ve got a new team called the Integrated Youth Outreach services team that are in the school; our restorative justice staff; our youth outreach workers — it ends up being about four additional adults. But they’re kind of in 0.1, 0.2 chunks throughout the week.

D. Barnett: With the health authority, for the youth that need special psychologists or psychiatrists or some special health work, is that an easy access, or is that difficult for you to obtain?

J. Church: It’s always changing, depending on who’s been hired or who’s just left to go do private practice. I know right now we are looking at September having access to on-site psychiatry once a month in tandem with our doctors, so looking at a funding model by which we can be contracting a psychiatrist to be at the school with some billable hours for September.
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We have a new Integrated Youth Outreach service team for the North Shore, which has improved that ability. I know a year ago it was a six-month wait-list for psychiatry, whereas I think right now Vancouver Coastal has done a couple of new hires and has certainly sped that process up.

C. James: Thank you for the presentation. It’s a follow-up on that question. It’s interesting. When you mention the in-kind FTEs, I think it is the struggle of how to integrate those services that we hear from everyone who presents, even the successes. It’s a constant pressure, where agencies are taking back their own staff, or it becomes a budget issue, and the pressure isn’t there.

What do you think has been one of the strengths in being able to get that commitment of that in-kind support and those in-kind staff to be able to work with your program? Do you think there are some tips or some areas that you feel that there’s been some strength to make that happen?

J. Church: It’s taken a lot of work, for sure. The TDP program has been around for a long time, but very fluid in its staffing mechanisms. Myself and the managers and team lead from Vancouver Coastal meet frequently to look at child and youth need, liaising with the emergency room at the hospital. They’re gathering a ton of data for us right now, saying: “Here’s the need, and here’s where all the students are coming from.” So if we’ve got access to clinicians, and their mandate is to see children and youth in need, and Mountainside has 50 percent of those students on the North Shore, it only makes sense to connect those dots.

I know through that Healthy Minds, Healthy People right now, one of their mandates is non-clinical settings for counselling. I kind of wag that document every once in a while and say: “Hey, this is your document, and you’re supposed to be coming to see us.”

We play nice. We sometimes have to get a little stuffy now and again, but for the most part, we recognize that shared purpose of servicing kids that need it, trying to catch as many kids as possible, pick out which ones we didn’t catch and find a way to get them afterwards. I think it’s been helpful.

For whatever reason, it’s just not become territorial, and I know that that’s not the experience for lots of other folks. I had a visit from somebody on the Island who came over and said: “We’ve got all those things, but we send each other e-mails, and they’re never in the school. I have to drive them in my car over there.” So I think that it’s been through a lot of shared visioning, saying: “This needs to work together. We have the same kids.”

D. Plecas: Jeremy, I love what you do. I think your school is awesome. But how much does it cost, relative? Have you looked at how much the cost is? And have you got to a place where you want to be? It sounds like you’re not there yet. Per student, what is the added cost, relatively speaking? Secondly, and maybe this is too early to ask this question, but what do we know about outcomes?

J. Church: The first question, the cost, is a good one. I ballpark it in my head all the time, because I’m constantly looking for more. The role of a building principal is always to say: “I need more.” But I don’t have those numbers. I know, for me, how much a teacher costs, and I can just do some rough algebra and add up, you know, 12 times that and six times this.

I feel as though, as a school, we’re probably breaking close to even in terms of money in, money out, without considering things like facility and maintenance and stuff like that.

J. Church: All those support pieces — again, that’s a good question. That would be if I factor in 4.0 FTE of in-kind work coming from Vancouver Coastal Health or other people. I don’t worry as much about those ones, because I know for them that they also have bottom lines. I know Vancouver Coastal has their mandate, and they’ve got their budget. So when they come to me and say, “We can provide this,” I’m assuming they’ve got that covered in their budget as well.

D. Plecas: I ask that because it may turn out that the model that you’re trying to develop is one which could actually save us a considerable amount of money in the end. It’s just a reallocation of resources.

J. Church: The question I always have is: how much money is lost in inefficiencies? You know, I book an appointment for a kid who’s totally at risk. I sit in my office, I wait for them, and they never come. That hour-long slot is now gone because I can’t book it for everybody else, but I’m still getting paid my salary during that time.

The ability to have a clinician, with a list of students, who can walk around, recognizing that these kids…. They’re not great attenders. That’s why they’re with us. That clinician can walk around and find kids who are there on that day and make a phone call and drive to their house and see them. I feel like that’s a far more efficient and accountable system. I think that’s what we’re striving for in our site.

The ability to have those things managed…. Not managed. They’re not mine to manage. Certainly, the clinicians in the therapeutic day program are considered part of my staff, but they’re not my staff. I don’t pay their salary, but I can go to them and say, “I really need you to follow up with this student,” and they’ll say: “I’m on it.”

When I look at the model, I keep wondering: am I missing something here? I feel like the efficiencies piece is one that a model like that would really improve. You’re
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not wasting energy on spending time having to drive to each other’s places or whatever, or having kids miss appointments.

J. Church: Outcomes. Honestly, the alternate program is the one that we’re always trying to find some solid outcomes. I would say, you know, what’s our goal? Our mandated goal would be graduation, as an educational program.

We have 180 students. I had 52 graduates last year. These are 52 kids that didn’t drop out of school that were on that pathway. For me, I get a little soft in the heart and say every one of those kids could be considered a success, but 52 out of 180 is a pretty good turnaround.

J. Church: No. Our population tends to be older. We have a lot of 17- and 18-year olds. Our bell curve tends to the older. Again, we’re a self-paced program, so if they don’t graduate now, we’ll get them to graduate next year.

We’re trying to expand our definition of “success” for these students. For me, I would say it’s not just about grad. If all we do is graduate them, we’ve probably done a terrible job. I want them to be transitioned into something, whether that be community supports, transition into an employment program, transition into a job. That’s data that we’re just collecting now — this concept of transition. A lot of self-reports from students as well.

I think for me, my bar is set by: what did you have before, and what are you having now? So we do a lot of student self-report data on feelings of connection to teachers at school, feelings of belonging and safety, and mental health support — all those things. We’ve got lots of self-reported data of students saying: “I feel more supported here than I did where I came from.”

D. Plecas: I have another question, but should I wait until somebody else…? I just have one.

J. Church: We do. We’re looking right now at trying a targeted group for that. Again, with our population, we’ve probably got…. I don’t like hucking out designations, but we probably have 15 to 20 students with an FASD or an FAE designation, with varying levels of complexity. There are those that really struggle to do on-site, work-based programming. Others are able to kind of engage in a regular academic program, which is already really targeted and flexible for their needs.

What we’re looking at is…. We’ve just recently hired a work experience facilitator and a youth engagement worker, whose role is now to target this concept of transition into life after school and targeting life skills to make that transition outside of school more successful for these students.

Once they’re done with us, I really want them to be with somebody else until they’re ready to take that next step. It’s an area that we are currently developing — recognizing that that’s the next need.

Given that the students that you’re seeing are Mountainside students and that the benefit, of course, to an integrated model would be to get the kids before they would technically end up at an alternative school, what and where do you think you are in your capacity to offer your services earlier to more kids within the district? What would it take to do that?

J. Church: Yeah, I think a lot about that as well, because you recognize…. I’d rather just have them stay at Seycove, because they’re pretty happy at Seycove. I don’t want them to have to come here.

Even during our visioning process, it was interesting. You could paint the picture of the perfect alternate school — supportive, caring, on-site supports, all this stuff — and recognize that should just kind of be school in general. It shouldn’t just be alternate schools.

I think what role a Mountainside could play might be to be that — taking on more universal and targeted interventions, where maybe a Mountainside role would be that it becomes a centre for intake. Rather than having to go to five different intake places, what if treatment began here?

What if there’s one intake that you would do at Mountainside centre, let’s call it, and through that intake, they could do a comprehensive needs assessment to say: “It looks like you need some housing, some food and some mental health support.” Have those supports available and be able to be case-managed for you right here, right now, while you remain a student at Seycove or while you remain a student at Sutherland — to have those addressed there.

I think that’s where…. I know that Steve Mathias has been talking about a model and the New Brunswick model as well, around having these centres where everything happens in one place. What makes us different is that we’re a school that’s already doing it. Rather than putting that at a different site, the concept being “just have it be at a school,” because school’s a great place for kids to be anyway.

Maybe in the end they do come to Mountainside, but having Mountainside be seen as that place in the com-
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munity where good things happen for mental health and for housing and for career and all of those things, I think, would serve a role in the district, plus the value-add for in-servicing.

If you become that place, you could be doing some training through your site, your facility, doing in-service training, shared in-service with multiple agencies to come together and look at shared in-service at one site — having a point of contact for the district to look at those integrations and how those integrations could roll themselves out. Not just at one site, but could those be replicated at other sites? Not on the same scale, but in some way, like Mountainside is. As a role model for that, I think it’s a role that we could play.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I just have another question. What about the capacity of North Vancouver school district, the people that work there now? Is there a universal acceptance of this so that, if you did expand, say, the attitudes, so to speak, to Seycove and other high schools…? Actually, I was going to ask a question about elementary school as well, because, obviously, we want to get them really early.

Has Mountainside itself changed the attitude within, say, the environment of the school district, just because you’ve got these services that are essentially normal and happening every day and that make it easier for folks within the school system — not just the kids, but the staff — to understand that this is really good thing?

J. Church: That’s my hope, obviously. I’m in charge of one school, and my hope is to change more than just my school. I think what we’ve done is create a place where our school district staff say, “That’s a good place for kids to go,” which may not have been the case previously. It was always used as a threat: “Oh, if you don’t shape up, you’re going to go to that school.” Not Mountainside — before us.

I think what we’ve done…. I think right now our school staff are in a position to recognize that the work that Mountainside is doing is making…. I tell my mainstream folks all the time that the student that you have exited from your building might be my valedictorian.

We are changing people’s perspectives by saying: “Oh my gosh. You took that kid that was drug dealing and mentally unwell and hurting people. You turned…. He’s got a job as a pipefitter now, and he’s graduated.”

I think we’ve been able to kind of change people’s impression of what we do. To that end, though, people are now saying: “I’m not the expert, so we should get them to Mountainside to have them do it.”

I see our next step to be: no, no, no. This is work that we all do. This is part of all of our mandate — to make sure that we’re educating people around mental health literacy. I think all of us have a role to play in supporting that social-emotional development of our children and youth.

Finding ways for Mountainside to play that role…. I think our district is in a position where they recognize that we are, kind of, the experts, but now it’s around: how do we find ways to use that expert role in our district to increase the capacity of each of our sites?

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): What kinds of barriers did you have with regards to privacy concerns and sharing information about that one child with others? Is everybody sharing the same information that’s dealing with that one child?

J. Church: We have all of our FIPPA, our confidentiality agreements and all that stuff. Obviously, our goal is to make sure that everybody has the same information about that same student.

I think the district resourcing, just to add quickly, has been really huge in the change process. The district resourcing now becomes a bit of a gatekeeper for those students that come out and also a resource developer — so saying: “Hey, have you considered getting a youth outreach worker. Hey, have you considered connecting with this specific clinician.” It has certainly helped. That’s capacity built at the mainstream school.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): That was one of the concerns that Keli Anderson from the FORCE would say. A lot of times these families had to tell their same story a hundred different times.

J. Church: Oh, that’s what you’re saying. Yes, again that’s that concept of central point of intake. You could have one story told and have everybody hear it afterwards, as opposed to, “I’m going to tell you my story” and then: “Oh, I’ve been sent to this place. Here’s a new form. Here’s my story.” It’s exhausting.

I think that, for me, I’ve had a pretty bread-and-butter upbringing here, and I haven’t had to experience any of this stuff. But I know how frustrating it is to go through a customer service lineup at Ikea sometimes and try and get a refund.

To do that while you’re struggling with addiction or mental health or anything else and have to re-tell your story over and over again, it could only be completely frustrating. Definitely, trying to find a way to streamline that process would be on our list.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Seeing no other further questions, thank you very much, Jeremy, for coming. It’s inspirational what you’re doing with what you have. Those kids that are lucky enough to make it to Mountainside
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have you and your team to thank. Thank you very much for coming. It’s been great.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I see Kathreen is here as well, so we’ll do a little bit of a transition and maybe reconnect Moira.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Hopefully, no more technological problems. I’d like to welcome Kathreen Riel, from the WITS program.

I thought, Kathreen, what we’d do is we’ll just get the group to reintroduce themselves. We’ve already done it once before but just so that you can get a feel of who you’re talking to. We’re missing Maurine, who’s coming later, and Mike Bernier, but we’ll continue on. I’m Jane Thornthwaite, the Chair of the Select Standing Committee for Children and Youth.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Doug Donaldson, MLA, Stikine. I’m the Deputy Chair of this committee, and my official opposition portfolio is the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

C. James: Good morning. Carole James, MLA for Victoria–Beacon Hill and Finance critic.

J. Rice: Jennifer Rice. I’m the MLA for North Coast. That includes Prince Rupert, Haida Gwaii and the central coast — so Bella Bella, Bella Coola. I’m the opposition spokesperson for northern and rural health and the deputy opposition spokesperson for Children and Family Development.

D. Plecas: Hi, Kathreen. I’m Darryl Plecas. I’m the MLA for Abbotsford South.

Well, good morning. My name is Kathreen Riel, and I am a teacher. I have spent 17 years in the classroom. About five years ago I moved from the classroom to work with Dr. Bonnie Leadbeater and the research team up at UVic.

On behalf of Dr. Leadbeater, as well as the WITS research and development team, I would like to thank Ms. Thornthwaite as well as the members of the select standing committee for inviting us to make a presentation today about the WITS program and how WITS may enhance mental health outcomes and services for youth in this province.

Before I begin, I wanted to direct your attention to the handouts that have been distributed to you. The infograph that you have, this colourful infograph, summarizes some of the outcomes and the highlights of the WITS program. Another page that you should have is also a page of publications describing the research of Dr. Leadbeater and what she has conducted in reference to the WITS programs.

Then there are a series of pamphlets that I gave to you as well. The WITS program summarizes all of its elements in the English pamphlet as well as the French pamphlet, and there is one for parents as well. This is actually just a selection of three. There are a number of pamphlets you can find on our website. We have, in the last couple of years, translated these pamphlets into multiple languages, including Mandarin, Punjabi, Arabic and Spanish.

The interim report on youth mental health in British Columbia highlighted the importance of bullying prevention. One of the quotes that came up for us is that “bullying can exacerbate mental health issues, hinder youth from seeking treatment and eventually lead to self-harm and suicide.” The WITS programs bring together schools, families and community leaders to create responsive environments that help children deal with bullying and peer victimization in order to mitigate these challenges that may escalate during adolescent years.

During this presentation I would like to give you, first of all, an overview of the WITS program, its history and its approach. We’re also going to look at markers of success as well as the potential for maximizing a positive impact on mental health outcomes in services for youth in this province.

The WITS program is actually comprised of four components. The WITS primary program is based on an acronym that describes four basic strategies: walk away, ignore, talk it out and seek help. WITS is for young children between the ages of five and eight or from grades kindergarten to grade 3. The focus of this program at this young age is to help children make safe and positive choices about peer conflicts and bullying.

The WITS Leads program is a program for older children between the ages of about eight and 11. This WITS
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Leads program is a communication and problem-solving program. It’s for students to consider how they may communicate with one another more effectively and how they might problem-solve situations that are difficult. It teaches children how to look beyond their first impressions, how to practise active listening skills, how to explore more than one point of view without necessarily agreeing with one another, how to act. What this means is how to take action during an uncomfortable situation and become a positive, constructive bystander.

The strategy “did it work?” is about assessing your own patterns of behaviour when faced with conflicts and bullying. Is this behaviour helpful? Is it constructive? Are there alternative ways of responding to some difficult interactions you’re encountering?

Then the last strategy is “Seek Help,” and this is an important strategy for both programs. The aim of the WITS primary program and the WITS Leads program is to model ways in which children can seek help when they’re faced with conflicts. It’s also a way to create an environment in which adults respond effectively to a child’s request for help.

Both the WITS primary program and the WITS leads program have been adapted into French. So we have le programme DIRE for primary students, and we have DIRE Mentor for older students. They essentially are the same strategies but for francophone communities and French-speaking people in our country.

Essentially, the three goals of the WITS program are to prevent or reduce bullying and peer victimization, to promote pro-social behaviours and to create responsive communities. When we see that objective to create responsive communities, really what we’re talking about is to create responsive adults, adults who will respond to a child’s request for help when they have the courage to seek help.

The WITS timeline is very interesting in that the WITS program started here in Victoria in 1993, and the acronym was originally coined by a school principal, Judi Stevenson. Then in 1997 Judi joined forces with some lacrosse players to form the Rock Solid Foundation, and they began making presentations about what it means to stay safe and use your WITS.

In 1998 the Rock Solid Foundation joined up with Dr. Leadbeater in order to initiate research about the use of WITS in schools, and then in 2006 WITS expanded to include the WITS Leads program. In 2011 Dr. Leadbeater obtained a grant from the Public Health Agency of Canada to develop and disseminate the WITS program across Canada, with particular focus on rural and remote regions of the country.

In order to understand what WITS looks like and sounds like, we’re now going to watch a video of it in action.

As seen in the video, WITS is successfully implemented through four integrated principles. The first principle is that it’s not just a school program. It is a community-based program that involves many adults, including parents and community leaders, who get involved in discussions and activities with children to explore strategies to deal with conflicts and bullying.

The second principle is that there is a shared common language around four simple strategies that can be communicated in the home, on the playground, at school and in community centres. These strategies are intentionally simple so as to initiate and guide discussions towards constructive strategies.

The third principle is that this common language is explored through the framework of stories carefully selected to explore challenging social situations.

The fourth principle is that there are tools and resources for everyone — for parents, community leaders and teachers — and there are no barriers to accessing these materials because they can all be downloaded from our WITS website. There is also on-line training for community leaders and school staff who wish to implement this program in their schools.

How is this WITS program model implemented? Well, the WITS program was mobilized across the country by developing multi-stakeholder partnerships at the national, regional and community levels. Through these partnerships, we learned how to maximize reach and impact with our program.

WITS maximizes access to the program through partnerships to achieve three objectives. The first objective that we wish to achieve is to provide relevant information and resources. To conduct research and develop tools and resources, we work with organizations such as PREVNet, which is the national organization for promoting relationships and eliminating violence. We work with the Safe School Network, provincial agencies such as administrators and curriculum specialists, as well as at the district level.

The second objective is to minimize barriers to information and resources. The WITS program research and development team has informed and widely disseminated practical resources through open, simple and free on-line systems such as websites, learning management systems and social media streams.

This could not have happened without partnerships with key organizations, including the Rock Solid Foundation, which continues to be the charitable arm of the WITS program. In fact, Rock Solid raises $200,000 a year to provide books and resources for schools and communities.

We also worked with the University of Victoria. The University of Victoria hosts the WITS website, and all
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curricular resources can be viewed and downloaded for free by anybody.

We also worked with BCcampus. They provided the structure and support, with Simon Fraser University, to host the WITS on-line training environment, and there are no barriers to accessing that on-line training.

The third objective was to engage communities, particularly in remote regions of the country. In order to do this, we worked with the RCMP and regional police and, in particular, with members of the crime prevention, First Nations and drug and organized crime units. These people were already working in schools as liaison officers. In many rural communities the police have already established a connection and a rapport with people, especially those supporting mental health programs.

These officers were key conduits in providing school staff, principles and school board members opportunities to explore the WITS program and see if it was an appropriate fit for their community.

The police officers also provide the follow-up interactions with the children in order to maintain momentum of the program. What we’ve discovered is that the police also invited other community members to also become, what we have called now, WITS champions — people in communities who are actually initiating the WITS program and taking it on as one of their projects so that everyone can be involved.

Even though it started with police officers, and in particular the RCMP, what we’re finding now is that university athletes, elders or people like Chief Bill Erasmus from the Northwest Territories have initiated the WITS program in their own communities.

The police have also invited other leaders to share the implementation of WITS. This happened in places such as Canim Lake, where Const. Claire Myers was invited to attend a WITS day celebration. What she did is she invited all the emergency responders, the elders, Chief Mike Archie, as well as everyone else, including parents, to take part in what they called a WITS day — a celebration with the children in that community.

WITS champions have also come in the form of our youth. People such as Keisja Cox from Courtenay, B.C., who went through the WITS program and then she herself experienced bullying and was a target. What was exciting about Keisja is she took what was a fairly difficult and challenging situation and created a song about it. Then she performed that song, not only to her school but to a wider audience, and published that song on iTunes. This is now part of her path to be a musician.

Another youth was Jasmine Richards, who also took the WITS program and created songs and, in fact, organized a concert in her community in the Maritimes, where she raised $6,000 so that schools in a variety of communities could have access to the books and the resources for the WITS program.

WITS strategies then. Although they are based on a common language, they can be affirmed by people from many different contexts and in multiple ways. The WITS program can be communicated through the swearing-in ceremony, stories, plays, songs. These all provide a framework to initiate conversations about what does it look like, what does it sound like, what does it feel like to walk away, to ignore, to talk it out and to seek help when faced with conflicts and bullying.

WITS strategies are also affirmed by sharing stories. In fact, WITS offers over 50 stories to share with children. We often get asked: “Why do you use stories to deal with bullying?” What we’ve discovered is discussing thoughts, feelings and actions that underlie hurtful behaviours is very affective within the context of stories.

Sharing stories has the power to shift perceptions, to develop empathy and discover different options for responding to conflicts. In fact, Pam Allyn wrote an article entitled “The Best Defence Against Bullying is Arming Your Kids With Stories.” She suggests that when discussing stories, we put ourselves in the shoes of others.

We are able to discuss their situation and our own response as well as the response of others. Reading stories helps to initiate conversations about difficult and sometimes emotionally charged and painful situations.

Sharing stories enables us to talk about conflicts and bullying before it happens, so that if a child experiences a bullying incident, they may be more inclined to talk it out with a trusted adult or a family member and seek help if necessary.

WITS uses books such as The Invisible Boy. This book describes a child who’s different, who sees the world differently and who has a hard time connecting with his peers. It doesn’t target any one child as being the bully or the target or the perpetrator. It just talks about how, sometimes, it’s very difficult to connect with one another, and what does that sound like and feel like? The story allows children to discuss what are some intentional actions that are needed to be able to include people who are different than us?

We also use stories such as Each Kindness. This is one of my favourite stories because it’s about a girl who faces discrimination when she shows up to school in the middle of winter with summer clothes on. The story allows children to talk about our first initial judgements, the ones that we don’t often think about, and sometimes our perceived risks and fears of reaching out to people who are different from us.

Each story has a series of questions and activities that allow a parent, a teacher or a community leader to unpack some of the social concepts within the story.

We believe that WITS helps to reduce stigma. By promoting discussions about differences in order to connect with those who are different from us and see beyond our judgments and fears, we are able to reduce the stigma of what it means to be different.
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We believe that WITS enhances youth mental health outcomes by normalizing conversations about conflicts, about difficult social situations, with a variety of adults early in a child’s life, so that when they face social challenges as a youth, they may be more inclined to talk it out, to seek help, especially from a broader circle of responsible adults.

This supports a common theme from your interim report that states that mental health education is needed, and it has to start early for children, and “elementary schools can play a key role in building protective factors in their practice.”

WITS has also experienced many markers of success, particularly in the last five years. Right now we know that over 600 schools are using the WITS program across Canada, and that’s about 78,000 children. There are actually many more. We have all of our resources open, and so we discover schools from as far away as Cairo. We know that many people in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, are using the WITS program, people in Thailand, the United Kingdom and South Africa.

In B.C. 216 schools are currently using the WITS program, and we’re pleased to say that 48 of those schools are in aboriginal communities. There’s a good fit between the WITS program and aboriginal communities because we use the structure of sharing stories. This is a good fit for many of those traditions in which the sharing of stories helps to model appropriate behaviours and values.

In fact, just recently we worked with the elders of the Tsawout Nation to translate one of our books, Walrus’s Gift, into the local dialect of Sencoten. After we actually published the book, what we discovered was that we need an audio version. So we worked with some of the language revitalization specialists, and we came up with an audio form of the book.

The picture on the slide also depicts a swearing-in ceremony that happened most recently at Penelakut School, on Penelakut Island. This school has just begun to use the WITS program, so they had their very first swearing-in ceremony. In this swearing-in ceremony everyone was invited — all the elders, all the emergency responders and all the families and high school students.

It was a privilege to watch the high school students. Many of them were parents, and they put the badge on some of their own children and then publicly declared, as families, that they were going to use their WITS in order to promote a safe learning environment not only for themselves but for their children.

Other markers of success include that over 6,000 people have taken our on-line training, maximizing program fidelity and cultivating best practices and equipping people to use the resources in a most effective way.

WITS has also undergone rigorous research. There have been three research studies, the most being the largest study, in three areas across Canada — Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick. Findings in 27 schools involved in this project indicate that greater implementation of the WITS programs by school staff and community leaders as well as parents is associated with children’s effective use of the program’s language and its strategies.

This, in turn, predicted increases in targeted protective processes such as social responsibility, prosocial leadership and positive perceptions of the school’s climate. Increases in these protective processes predicted subsequent declines in children’s aggression, peer victimization and emotional problems. For more information, I’ve also distributed a handout of some of the findings as well as other results on the bibliography by Dr. Leadbeater.

Potential for expansion. To date, the curricular development of the WITS programs has relied on research grants obtained by Dr. Leadbeater. The Public Health Agency funding for the development and distribution of WITS across Canada has now ended. To disseminate the program to all elementary schools in British Columbia, WITS requires core funding to sustain ongoing development and publication of curricular resources to the remaining 766 elementary schools.

For $100,000 per year, we can maintain efforts to offer the WITS program to every school in B.C. We can continue to cultivate community partnerships to initiate and sustain the program. We can continue to support the adaptation of this program in aboriginal communities. We can continue to offer the free on-line training to everyone, with particular focus for educators and community leaders. We can produce and distribute more curricular resources, and we can work with Rock Solid Foundation to support the distribution of books and badges as well as reminder gifts to schools.

I think it is fitting that the last quote come from one of our early champions of the WITS programs. “It’s not just the role of the police officer, the school counsellor, the teacher or the mom and dad. It’s all of us working together to make our schools and our communities safer and comfortable places for our kids to be.”

D. Plecas: Thank you, Kathreen. I think this is a phenomenal program. I mean, it’s really just a best-case example of such things as designing out crime.

So you need $100,000. I’m thinking: “Why not get that from the police?” They talked about programs that they could do in schools. They couldn’t do anything as cheaply as what you’re doing here, although I would also say I’m not sure that you need police to make this successful. It seems like you’ve got a highlighting of police here. It’s not clear that that adds value.

But to the extent that they are involved and they’re interested in doing things in schools, I would be thinking that you should be talking to them about making a contribution. It turns out to be about $150 a school. That’s what it sounds like — 150 bucks. It is cheap, cheap, cheap.

The question I would have is: is there any thinking about
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taking what you’ve done here and moving it up grades? Obviously, it would have to be different kinds of dialogue, etc. But we know that there’s a certain amount of bullying that goes on in later elementary school and a very significant amount of bullying that goes on in middle school and high school. One would think that you could take off in terms of future development to kids in higher grades.

The first is that the reason why we profiled the police in this presentation is because we were asked to disseminate the program to remote regions of Canada. It’s very difficult, with a core group of staff who often live in urban areas, to get to those remote communities. We relied on the police to begin that dissemination process.

From there, we actually were able to include many other people who were invested in the WITS program and catalyze the program and continue to implement that program within those communities. But the police were actually the instigators of scaling up this program, especially in northern regions of our country and more remote regions that don’t have a lot of services available to them but do have police liaisons.

The second question is about moving towards looking at programs for middle school and high school students.

We’ve just signed an official partnership with the national Red Cross. The reason for that is because they have a program that has been proven to work very effectively at the middle school level, as well as high school. It’s called Beyond the Hurt. They also have a preschool program called Be Safe.

What we would like to do is work together to create a composite of programs, so that a child, before they start school and when they move on from elementary school, has a continuum of using some of these strategies integrated with both WITS and Rocks and the Red Cross.

D. Barnett: My question is…. You’re looking for $100,000. Is that over a ten-year period, or is it just a one-time $100,000 you’re looking for?

K. Riel: In order to continue to provide the services and to extend the development, especially the curricular development of this program, we would need $100,000 per year.

Many communities are involved and engaged in programs; not this one but in these types of programs. Many of them have community volunteer organizations. You take Rotary clubs, Lions clubs. They all put money towards these kinds of initiatives. Have you talked to any of the national or provincial organizations about this program? This would be of interest to many of these people.

K. Riel: That’s right. What Rock Solid does, which is the charitable arm of the WITS program, is look for avenues of funding. They have been very successful in getting funding for actual materials. Organizations, both private and non-profit as well as government organizations, are willing to donate when there is an actual product involved and they can say that so many books or so many materials were delivered to a school.

It’s very difficult to find funding for operational. Because of that, we continue to look for those sources of funding.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. I hadn’t heard of the program before, and I live in a northern rural-remote area. It’s good to know, and I’ll be checking out to see…. I think some of those dots represent some of the schools in my constituency. It’s a little hard to see. If not, I’ll make sure that the schools that I know have a link to your presentation and to the website.

My question is to the conversation, just to get you to comment on the relationship you have with the provincial Ministry of Education. How are the discussions going there with them? Are they very supportive? Have you had discussions about making this integrated in a formal way into what the Ministry of Education does with the school districts? Tell me a little bit about the discussions you’ve been having with them.

K. Riel: The great thing about the WITS program is that it works very well with the provincial initiative of ERASE Bullying, which is an intervention program that allows a process to take place when a child has reported an incident of bullying. So we have a program such as WITS, which talks about how to engage in conversations before these incidents happen, and we have ERASE Bullying that then takes the child, as well as the family, through what can happen, in order to work through resolution and restitution.

We continue to work with the Ministry of Education and see how we can integrate both of those processes. Those conversations continue to happen. We have nothing formalized yet.

Thank you very much, Kathreen. Maybe what you could do…. I just wanted to make a quick comment. Of the kids that you’re serving, and even the kids that you had in the videos, etc., can you give us an idea of the relationship between the bullying that they have experienced and, say, anxiety or depression or other forms of mental illness?
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K. Riel: Well, I think what your interim report suggested…. Many of these conditions, such as depression or anxiety, are exacerbated when there is a sense of disconnection, a sense of isolation, particularly among your peer group. What I believe the WITS program allows children to do, and allows teachers to do within a framework that is constructive, is have conversations about what it means to be different, what it means to feel different and what it means to extend yourself beyond your own fears and initial judgments in order to make those connections.

It sounds almost too simple, but in fact, simple is good. The reason why is because with emotionally charged subjects when you get into behaviour patterns that can be somewhat destructive, it’s very, very effective to go back to simple ways in which we can connect as humans. That’s really what children need — just simple strategies that they can use when they feel isolated, whether it be because of a mental health issue or because of a peer group interaction.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Yes, I understand. Thank you very much for your presentation.

I have just a little bit of housekeeping, a heads-up, about our next presenters. Unless anybody has any more, I’ll just go through that.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Just for the committee, the next draft agendas that I have. Wednesday, May 27, which is here in Victoria, nine to one. We’re going to be having joint ministry presentations between MCFD; Health; Education; Advanced Education; Community, Sport and Cultural Development; and Social Development and Social Innovation. So we’ve got lots of ministries there.

We’re also going to be getting a presentation from the Canadian Mental Health Association — Bev Gutray and Jonny Morris, both of whom were here yesterday for the breakfast; Dr. Steve Mathias, who we’ve heard before; and the Interior Health Authority — David Harrhy, who’s the director of mental health and substance use.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): It’s nine to one, four hours.

The next dates that we have — and again, we’re still waiting to get some submissions back in — Tuesday, June 23, and Wednesday, June 24. These are in Vancouver with a venue to be determined.

We’re got Laurie Birnie, who’s a principal from Aspenwood Elementary School and chair of the B.C. School Centred Mental Health Coalition.

Chief Superintendent Derren Lench from the B.C. RCMP deputy criminal operations. Ingrid Söchting and Dr. Colleen Wilke. They are psychologists. Brent Seal and the chief officer, Neil Dubord, Transit police. Brent Seal has a child- and youth-driven initiative that he’s working with in schools.

Then Wednesday, June 24. Pius Ryan, who is the assistant superintendent of schools in North Van. He works with Jeremy. Dr. Fedor from the Cariboo Action Team for the collaborative. Dr. Rev. Stephen Epperson. I don’t have his title. Dr. Jeff Shipper from the Focus Foundation of British Columbia. We’ve still got others that have yet to be fit in. And we actually have quite a bit of follow-up that we’re still waiting for people to respond.

If folks wanted to find out what other people we’re still waiting to hear back from or have other suggestions, please let me know.

D. Plecas: Just one little bit. Neil is not with Transit anymore. Was he coming to talk about Transit?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): I believe that we have made contact with him. We’ll confirm.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Oh, right. That’s a recent thing. Thank you. We’ll confirm if there is another opportunity for the transit police to provide that.

D. Plecas: The other thing I was wondering is about these dates here. The four-hour stretch is really awkward. Is it possible to think in terms of June meetings instead?

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): We sent out — actually, quite a few times — suggested dates, and Wednesday, May 27, was initially one that everybody agreed on. I recognize that we’ve got a lot of people that now are unavailable.

It’s really difficult to get everybody together. I understand that. We can try again, but these dates have gone through everybody, and we’ve gone back and forth and back and forth. These were the dates we settled on.
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C. James: I think it makes sense. I recognize everybody’s time pressures. I think it makes sense to have the ministry folks and do that on the last day in May, when we have ministry people and we’re here, but I’m very worried about adding other people. I think we are not going to get past having all of those ministries. That will fill the four hours easily.

My advice would be to move Steve Mathias to Vancouver, to look at those two days we’ve got in Vancouver, add a little bit of time there and put the other speakers there. Do your joint ministries here, but we will not have time to get through anybody else other than that, in my view.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): We would be pleased to make any adaptations to the proposed draft to reflect how you’d like to spend your time on May 27. We would note, just as a point of clarification, the joint ministry presentation…. It has been proposed for a 45-minute presentation. So there is a coordinating role. I think that MCFD, if I’m not mistaken, is playing with developing the presentation. We’ve scheduled up to 45 minutes for questions and discussion for committee members, so an hour and half of the meeting that day.

The others that follow…. We had proposed a 20-mimute presentation followed by about 25 minutes of discussion, as per the format with Jeremy and Kathreen this morning. But we’re pleased to check the availability of the other witnesses.

If you anticipate you would like to spend more time with the ministries that day, I think that was probably the most challenging for us on our side logistically — to confirm their availability.

That being said, they probably anticipate at this time that they may move on to other endeavours by 10:30. I understand a number of deputy ministers will be involved in that presentation. We can certainly make the request on your behalf and see what their availability is later in the day.

M. Karagianis: It occurs to me in listening to the presenters kind of trailing out long into the future that at some point I think we need to kind of structure this and say: “What are the most effective groups of people that we should meet with? What’s the timeline here?”

If we’re doing two days in Vancouver, it sounded to me like those were not fully packed days. I just think at some point…. We could hear from people for the rest of our lives here, if we wanted to, and I’d like to find a way to constrain it. I believe in full and fulsome consultation, but I am concerned that it continues to kind of trickle out.

We’re now meeting with, I think you said, a school superintendent from North Vancouver, when we’ve just had a really effective presentation from somebody from North Vancouver. I just think that we have to be a bit discerning about this. Maybe the Chair and Deputy could get together and think about how we more effectively meet with people at this point to finish our work, rather than make this an ongoing work in progress for a long, long haul.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Well, I can tell you that everybody that’s on the list we went though was requested by our group. We’ve got a lot of people there, and we’ve still got outstanding people. But we wanted to make sure that the ones that were recommended by the Chair and the vice-Chair were given the opportunity to present.

With regards to the actual days, it basically came down to the availability of everybody on the committee and the availability of the people.

I can leave it up to the Clerk’s office to fiddle around with the timing and stuff. But the actual people that are on this list were people that were requested by the committee.

M. Karagianis: Could I just maybe respectfully ask if the Chair and Deputy Chair could review that list to see whether or not there’s duplication, whether or not we still feel as inclined to need to speak to so many people, given the presentations we have? Maybe we have already touched on areas. I just respectfully ask for a review of that list, if that’s possible.

D. Barnett: I would ask for the same. I think we’re duplicating things. I feel that this is going on too long. We’re hearing great stories. We’re hearing great initiatives. But I think the time has come that we have to pull everything together and move forward. We’re all busy people. We all appreciate everything everybody is presenting to us, but I agree that I would like the two of you to get together and wrap this in a nice little bundle for us. And I’m speaking on behalf of my colleagues here too.

D. Plecas: Can we think in terms of, so that we are getting it over with, a two-day marathon in Vancouver or whatever? Let’s just do it all at once here, so it isn’t dragging on.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): I’m curious as to whether Doug Kelly has confirmed, from the First Nations Health Council. I didn’t hear a lot of….

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes, I can confirm that Doug Kelly, of the First Nations Health Council, is one of a number of other stakeholders who have received invitations to participate in one of the June meetings.

We will certainly endeavour to confirm the best use of time for the committee on those two days in June. If we can, we can consolidate into one of those two days. Certainly, I’m hearing that that would be appreciated in terms of members’ scheduling.
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At this stage, pursuant to the direction that we had received, we have issued invitations for up to 12 others that had been identified by the committee. At this stage I would recommend waiting to hear from those individuals. The committee will recall, as well, that the consultation option to present a written submission continues until July 31.

I wouldn’t anticipate additional meeting days, other than the three, at maximum, that the Chair has outlined. It may turn on the responses that you receive to invitations that have already been sent.

I’d be happy to get together and review all the groups that we’ve confirmed and decide whether we have the balance that’s needed.

My question was around…. I don’t think I heard on the list that you presented that there were health authorities. I think that was a big part of the buy-in that we were seeking. So I would be happy to eliminate, perhaps, one of the multiple policing presentations that we’re getting and get some health authority input.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): I might just clarify that you’re quite correct. The committee has issued an invitation to all health authorities, including the Provincial Health Services Authority. At this stage the only one that we’ve heard back from is Interior Health, which is confirmed for May 27. That was the day that best worked for that individual.

We have a number of invitations, as I mentioned, that have been issued to health authorities and to a number of other educational stakeholders — the First Nations Health Council, some expert researchers that I think you had identified, Mr. Deputy Chair, and a number of other key practitioners in the field.

We haven’t run through the list of individuals, but there are up to about 12 or so that are still pending in terms of their availability. As mentioned earlier, should they not be available, we’ll encourage them to provide you with a written submission by July 31.

C. James: I would recommend, as well, that we keep the two days in June. I think it’s actually an efficient use of our time if we take a couple of days and block them in. It’s certainly what we did the first time around, and I think it’s really a good, efficient way of doing it.

I know none of the comments were made that way, but I just want to leave, for everybody out there, that these are valuable presentations. These are important. I know people aren’t saying they aren’t. But I don’t want to leave people with the impression that we’re rushing through the work.

It’s been a long session. I know everybody has some pressures to get back to their own community work that’s been waiting while we’ve been in here. Certainly, the presentations we’ve had and, I know, the ones to come are going to be really important to us on the committee and really important to our work. I think we’re feeling the time pressures of the end of the session. That’s understandable, but I think it’s important to also acknowledge the work that people are doing in coming to present to us. They have busy lives too. They’re feeling the pressure, and they’re coming to make presentations.

I just don’t want to leave anybody who reads Hansard with the impression that there’s a rush to not have presentations be made.

The Clerk will confirm who’s who on those particular dates, given the feedback from the committee today. Then Doug and I will take a look at the remaining list and streamline if we need to and just reconfirm the people that are on the remaining lists that we still haven’t confirmed. If everybody is okay with that for next steps for at least this portion, then you don’t have to worry about any other dates. Those are the only dates that we have. There are just three more dates.

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Chair:	Jane Thornthwaite (North Vancouver–Seymour BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Doug Donaldson (Stikine NDP)
Members:	Donna Barnett (Cariboo-Chilcotin BC Liberal)
	Mike Bernier (Peace River South BC Liberal)
	Carole James (Victoria–Beacon Hill NDP)
	Maurine Karagianis (Esquimalt–Royal Roads NDP)
	John Martin (Chilliwack BC Liberal)
	Dr. Darryl Plecas (Abbotsford South BC Liberal)
	Jennifer Rice (North Coast NDP)
	Dr. Moira Stilwell (Vancouver-Langara BC Liberal)
Clerk:	Kate Ryan-Lloyd

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
CHILDREN AND YOUTH