City Council Meeting   7/19/2021

has a disability, but so what?

Look what they're doing.

I got a tattoo on my arm here, and it actually

It says life goes on, and up under it is the date that I had my accident, July 11, 1997, and there's my basketball number, number 55, and a basketball.

I mean, I just kind of have that to say to myself and to other people.

Unfortunate things happen.

You fall down, but you need to get back up.

I think playing wheelchair basketball, to me,

I wouldn't have nothing else to do.

I eat right because of wheelchair basketball because wheelchair basketball keeps me going.

It really does.

It really, really does.

Going to test the audio one more time.

Great.

Sounds good.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I hope everyone is doing well.

And I'll call this work session to order.

Mayor Walker.

Present.

Vice Mayor McGill?

Here.

Councilor Hill?

Here.

Okay, thank you.

All right, thank you.

Excellent.

Thanks, Mayor Walker.

I'm Hunter Smith.

As you have not met, I work with the Human Services Department as the current planner.

And I want to start off by thanking everyone for their time today for us to give a short presentation on juvenile probation transformation that we're doing here locally in our area, Charlottesville.

I'm going to try to introduce everybody that's

on the team.

Some are here speaking.

I'll start with the ones that are speaking first, and I'll turn it over to Opal West, who will be leading the presentation.

So today, presenters, we have Opal West with the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

We have Martha Carroll, the director of the local court services unit, the 16th.

We have Krista Gallio, who's the probation supervisor.

We have Mark Moore, who's the intake supervisor at the court services unit.

And myself, I'll be presenting one slide.

with Human Services.

We also have Andrew Wilder, who I can't tell if he's here today with the Commonwealth Attorney's Office.

We have Joey Lewis, who's with the Charlottesville Police Department.

He's on our team.

Jenna Easton with the Department of Juvenile Justice.

And finally, Judge Barreto, the local JD&R judge, has been working with us since we went to Georgetown in November 2019.

Seems like 10 years ago, but it wasn't as long ago as that, but it sure does seem like.

Okay, thank you, Hunter.

Thank you for having us this afternoon.

Can everyone hear me okay?

Thumbs up?

Great.

I am at the airport traveling, so I just wanted to give you a heads up in case there's some background noise, but I'm going to do my best.

Thank you very much for having us today.

My name is Opal West.

I'm with the Casey Foundation, and I am the technical assistance lead for Charlottesville team for their capstone project following the Georgetown certificate program for probation transformation.

If you could advance the slide.

So I'm going to give you a very high level of what is probation transformation from Casey's vision and what Casey proposed as probation transformation.

You can go for the next slide again.

This is our vision for transforming probation, juvenile probation.

We formulated our vision based on where we think the field can go.

for young people and how it can benefit them if they are involved in the system at the probation level.

It really hinges on partnerships with families and communities and our long-term and all of our goals hinge on promoting personal growth for the young person, positive behavior change and long-term success.

It all is really about relationship building and not so much on compliance and surveillance.

and while we prioritize public safety it is a priority for our initiative we really place a high priority also on serving our young people through relationships and community-based organization building so there's two pillars to our vision the first one is diversion

We know that diversion is severely underutilized throughout our country across the board.

And we believe that over 60% of young people who come into contact with the system can be better served by diversion.

And when we say diversion, we really are thinking about we're promoting community-based-led diversion programs.

So those programs that are led for diversion are really housed and led by community based organizations rather than system players.

The second pillar of probation, the vision of probation transformation is probation.

We believe that a significant amount of young people do not have to be on probation as I just spoke about for diversion.

and that probation should be isolated to a target population of young people who actually need probation and that the young people who do need probation are those that pose a significant risk to serious offending or have committed serious offenses.

You can go to the next slide.

So what does it mean whenever we refashion probation?

the way that we have envisioned it at the Casey Foundation.

It means limiting probation to youth who have committed serious or repeat offenders and pose a risk to public safety.

Most young people will age out of problematic behavior or delinquency.

We know that through research and so we follow the research and let the research guide our beliefs and

If young people are not involved in the system, they are more likely to be successful throughout their lives.

So if we isolate probation for those that really need it, that's one of the goals for probation.

The second thing would be to assign smaller caseloads to our probation officers so that they can spend that quality time, their expertise, their knowledge on the young people who actually need probation.

So we believe that we can achieve that through a caseload of 8 to 12 young people on each caseload.

To facilitate family engaged case planning process, which really seeks to partner with young people and families to create

goals for themselves to create networking and community networks that they need to support them through their probation term and achieve their goals.

But this is really to partner, seek to partner with families so that they are heavily engaged in the entire probation term and process.

The use of incentives and opportunities to explore youth's interests and develop their skills is another one.

We know that incentives are a huge motivator for young people.

We know that through the adolescent brain development science that we know now that has been explored for the past 20 years.

And we know that incentives is a huge, huge motivator for young people.

And we can actually get them to change their behavior by using incentives and rewards.

It actually doesn't have to be just incentives and rewards.

We also want to seek opportunities for our young people.

By opportunities, I mean things that they can explore that will help them develop or even be able to identify their interests in whatever it is that they're seeking.

So that could be culinary classes or art classes or

some sort of sport or any other learning opportunities that they are seeking.

We believe that those are motivators and can be used to redirect young people.

And then build partnerships with families and community organizations so that young people stay connected and get connected to the folks that are for the rest of their lives, their support systems, their neighborhood.

We know that that's going to promote public safety.

when young people are connected to their community, connected to folks who care about them, and connected to a support system.

So refashioning probation really seeks to build those up so that the community and families can wrap their arms around our young people and redirect them when needed.

Next slide, please.

So technical assistance from the Casey Foundation, I just wanted to give you a little bit of what that means.

I'm the technical assistance leader for Charlottesville.

And basically I support bringing the site support through a couple of different ways.

I support them in giving them guidance on best practice and research alignment whenever they are proposing new ways to do things or practice changes, policy changes, whatever it may be.

I help facilitate connections and network to other sites that are doing promising and best practice work throughout the country.

And then also just helping to brainstorm new ideas and strategize implementation plans and helping them achieve whatever it is that Charlottesville is endeavoring to achieve throughout this engagement, but specifically for their Georgetown goals that they set.

Next slide.

I wanted to give you an overview of our national network.

You can go to the next slide.

Probation Transformation is a nationwide initiative.

If you're not familiar with the Casey Foundation, or maybe you are, you probably know about JDAI, the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative.

It started back in 1997.

Just connection issues.

Are you moving around, or is it just, or it may be us?

Okay.

Thank you for telling me.

I'm so sorry about that.

Is that better?

Just about done.

I have two slides.

I'm going to pass it to Ms.

Martha.

It's not as it has been.

Okay.

So I'll just go over this quickly.

So the Casey Foundation started the JDAI Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative back in 1997, which focuses on the front end of the system and really emphasizes that who should be in detention or who should go to detention for young people.

It is the

It's an initiative that focuses on keeping out young people out of detention as much as possible.

We then have the deep end that expanded to the deep end initiative that focuses on reducing out of home placement, especially for youth of color.

We have 12 sites across the country for the deep end initiative.

From there, knowing that probation was a feeder through research, we learned that probation can be a feeder to out of home placement for young people.

We started to focus on probation transformation.

This is why we have this initiative now.

We have all of these sites throughout the country.

These are our probation transformation sites here.

It is a network throughout the country.

And Charlottesville attended our first cohort of the Georgetown Certificate Program for probation transformation back in 2019.

That was an application process that Charlottesville went through.

We had jurisdictions from all over the country apply to come to that certificate program.

It was a week long of training by experts across the country around probation and system reform, young people, and Charlottesville was chosen for that.

So they are now part of our national network.

Next slide, please.

And just wanted to give you an overview as well of our partner organizations, national partner organizations across the country.

We work with many that are all sort of in concert, saying that it's time for us to really look at juvenile probation and the practices that we are applying to our young people.

American Probation and Parole Association is a huge one that I work with.

The Council for Juvenile Justice, CJJ, that works with the SAGs across the country.

the Council of State Government I've already mentioned Georgetown University the National Council of State Legislatures is another one if you're not familiar with them we have worked with them around policy reform for probation for young people NCJFCJ is a huge partner of ours that has put out a resolution back in 2017 that you might want to look at around adolescent brain development and juvenile courts

And then the Urban Institute is a research organization that we also partner with to do our work.

Thank you for having me.

That's my section of this presentation.

And I think I am passing it to Ms.

Thank you, Opal.

Thank you for giving us your time today to make this presentation.

Following our training back in November of 2019, when we spent a week at Georgetown, the Charlottesville team came home to the community with the intentions of engaging our community partners and the families that we serve in a more meaningful way.

Our team includes, as you've already heard, members from the Court Service Unit, our State Office of the Department of Juvenile Justice, our presiding judge, David Barreto,

and partners from Human Services, our Commonwealth Attorney's Office and the Police Department.

We spent several months developing a guide for probation transformation in this community.

The next task was to engage our community partners.

Because of the pandemic, we held five virtual convening sessions in lieu of in-person presentations.

Many of these sessions had over 90 participants each.

These participants included community stakeholders such as staff from Region 10 and the Department of Social Services and community partners

such as Conscious Capitalist and Redemption Mentoring.

Judge Barreto, Commonwealth Attorneys, Public Defenders and private members of the bar were also included in these convenings.

In small groups, we have the opportunity to examine current policies and practices and often look for improvements and solutions that might help us moving forward.

Now the real work begins as we develop work groups on topics such as family engagement and pre-arrest diversion.

These work groups will continue to be a partnership between the court service unit, our system stakeholders, and our community partners, and of course the court.

And you can move to the next slide.

I'm one of the probation supervisors here in the Charlottesville office.

And again, I want to echo the thank yous for allowing us to present.

With all of our goals, we are approaching all of them with a race equity lens.

We're also concentrating heavily on trauma and family engagement.

and as we begin to track our data, we're not just focusing on recidivism, but we're looking at improving our opportunities, the resources and services for our youth and families and the overall community.

As Ms.

Carol said, we're currently forming work groups.

We're starting with four, one focused on family engagement, one on pre-arrest diversion,

one on technical violations and a purpose statement and then one focusing on our petitions for children in need of services for supervision.

Each group will include a member of the Georgetown team as well as staff from our community partner agencies and their stakeholders, members of the community and particularly youth and families with lived experience.

We'll be organizing focus groups and surveys to learn what our youth and families really need and what they want.

We want to empower them and include them at all points of the decision making.

We want to change our culture.

We have to change our culture of how, what, and why of what we do.

And through consultation with the Annie E. Casey Foundation,

We have developed an action plan already for improving family engagement that includes some specialized training through Justice for Families which will include all probation staff and a wide range of our community partners and stakeholders.

We'll have that initial training for new staff and we'll have ongoing training for all of our staff at least on a yearly basis.

We're also implementing a family engagement specialist

Someone who can mentor our other probation officers and staff.

Someone who can train them in the best practices, who keeps on top of best practices.

Someone who can facilitate family forums so we can give the families and our youth a voice in a non-confrontational manner.

And someone to assist with treatment planning and just everything that goes along with engaging our families.

Our unit, the Court Service Unit, has begun conversations on race.

I know that Community Attention previously completed this, but this is a dialogue to change process that's organized and facilitated by a diverse group of people to create a vision of change in one's community.

So through building new relationships, raising awareness, and considering a wide range of views, we develop and create action ideas.

And then we carry out those action ideas and assess the change that is happening.

So we're really excited about all of the work groups starting and all of the training and conversations we're having with just the community, everyone in general.

I'll now turn it over to one of our other

Probation Intake Supervisors, Mark Moore.

Thank you.

And you can advance the slide.

Thank you, Krista.

So what we're hoping for with this entire project and working through the capstone with Georgetown and Casey is just

Ultimately we want a better system, a better community, safer community for all citizens of Charlottesville.

And with that comes better outcomes for the kids who are truly needing the intervention.

As Opal stated before, not all kids who commit delinquency act or commit status offense acts

need to be on a level of supervision with the courts.

And that's a shift that we're looking to do through this process.

We're looking to isolate probation to the kids who truly need probation and make improvements where they're indicated.

And that's coming from surveys, from research, from different spectrums throughout the system.

And community partners are working with us with some policy shifts.

We also, big one is we are looking to, and we will reduce violations that result in confinement and placement.

We're moving away from, we've already with the DAI, we've already moved away from a lot of our confinements, but we're looking to actually increase that and pretty much we don't want the violations of kids to result in them being confined and placed outside of our community.

We want to keep the kids in our community.

We also want to give young people opportunities to grow and thrive.

That's looking at more incentive-based, as we indicated before, but just more ways to not just

be a checkbox, but we could be coaches for the kids and really work and help them throughout the process and connect them back to the community who's going to ultimately help them.

And then we also want to prepare them for a healthy adulthood by supporting them through maturation.

So that's just looking to give them the skills that they need, not necessarily just making sure they're in compliance with the court order, but bringing the community on board.

And you can advance to the next

Thanks, Mark.

So to continue this work, we want to communicate with council, with everyone here about how council can support our work through funding and make it very clear, nobody here is asking for any funding for anybody that's on this call doing this work.

What we're looking for is support from council for community partners.

Nontraditional programs, interventions, new developing organizations that are coming in looking to work either with us or in conjunction with us or just within our goal sets to meet the goals we've set and that are committed to probation transformation for local youth and families, particularly our local youth and family.

That's really a regional approach.

Also funding needed for training, initial ongoing shift to new and better practices, for instance, family engagement, which we've been talking about.

equity training, data improvement, monitoring and more adolescent development, maybe maybe some more trauma training as it develops in the community.

Also through communication, helping to connect new and emerging partners with our group to deepen and broaden our collaborative efforts mentioned earlier, we had about an average of 90 people per per convening.

And that really was nice to not just have the regular people there.

We had all kinds of people from the community present.

business owners, people that have been involved in the juvenile justice system.

We invited several parents.

We had a nice balanced group.

And we got some really good information about what we can do locally to improve and what voices aren't being heard.

And we could use counsel's help in spreading the word and helping us connect with new people that want to do that.

And the court service unit and the courts can't do it alone.

It's a community approach.

And at this point, as Krista mentioned, the work groups will be launching.

You know, a community effort.

That is our presentation.

We're open for questions or if anything wants to be clarified, we will do our best.

Thank you.

Presentation.

I'm just curious, so we've talked a lot about family engagement and recognizing the importance of that.

What does that look like in these models that you're talking about?

Yeah, I'm not going to talk about particularly Justice for Families.

They're a partner organization that provides training across the country.

If you'd like to find out more about them, you can definitely just Google them and it'll come up.

But when we talk about family engagement, it's really sort of getting away from the sort of traditional way that systems have always sort of operated with

Not really asking families and young people what do they need or what's best for them.

It's really giving them the opportunity to have voice in the process to indicate what works for them, what doesn't work for them, what do they think they need, what is working throughout the process and what's not working.

and then the system or the probation officers, the organization or whomever is working with the young person and family really taking the time to listen to that and then coming together as partners in the process to determine what needs to happen, what shifts need to occur, what needs to be different and what could be done differently so that the young person is able to achieve their goals that have been set out for probation.

And the other thing is

Family Engagement is really about all of this is not about just completing the probation term.

It's really about using the probation term as an opportunity to set the young person up for long-term success.

So really making connections within the community, family, any other caring adults that they have in their lives that will outlast the probation term.

Are there any other questions?

I'm curious, approximately, like what ratio do you think and the information that has come through in Charlottesville in particular, should it be reduced that youth are going to probation now?

Sorry, that's a little bit convoluted.

But potentially the reduction in caseload or the reduction in numbers

So I'll start and then others might want to join in.

I think we certainly would expect to see some reduction.

We've been seeing that statewide for a period of time and throughout.

And this kind of work is not happening in other parts of the state.

So I think we'll notice it in a more heightened way here.

I think part of what we hope is that

kids won't get to us at all that that work on the front end between human services and the police or what other community organizations we can engage.

They'll be able to offer the right services and kids will be successful and their families will be engaged in that and they won't need to come to us.

So that's that's one hope is that that front end free

pre-booking work will happen.

I think we expect to see certainly a reduction in traditional diversion where kids actually do get to a door and we'll be tracking those numbers carefully.

We already look at that on a regular basis and Charlottesville does well compared to their colleagues around the state, but I think we'll expect those numbers to increase also.

And

So in that way, then probation staff will be able to work with small caseloads for kids who really need that extra level of support.

You heard, I think, Opal talk about 8 to 12, and so we should certainly be well within that range as all these activities kind of merge together.

Yeah.

Of course.

So since we oversee, we're talking strictly about Charlottesville, we also include within our office we have the nine other counties.

So it's including Albemarle County for our office here.

So we're actually within the range that we like right now, less than 12.

per probation officer.

However, a lot of that did contribute to, of course, coronavirus did contribute to the reduction, you know, kids running out, which is a good thing, kids running out, you know, committing crimes and doing certain things that came to the police officer's attention.

We just want to ensure that the practices that we implement are going to ensure and promote that we keep the smaller caseloads so that they can deal with the kids that are strictly on probation.

Now, this does not include kids on parole or kids on diversion, things such as that.

So that's strictly just a probation.

So I can't give you an exact number on it, but I do know it's less than 12 currently of the youth that are on probation in the Charlottesville slash Albemarle caseload for probation officers.

But then on, to piggyback on the main question about the violations, it's also more so just looking to ensure that kids, if you take a step back with the parole and

committed youth.

A lot of those kids were committed and put on parole based off of violations that they had while on probation.

and that was we saw a big issue with that racially.

It was not racially equitable.

You know, a lot of, I think we had it one year, 100 percent of the people who were committed were black males and they were all off of violations.

So we're not talking about 15, 20 major numbers here, but we're still looking at the numbers here within Charlottesville saying that that's an alarming rate.

So we're looking to reduce that.

And with that, of course, that comes with family engagement and everything else.

But it has to come from courageous policy changes.

The Department of Juvenile Justice is already through a transformation, which is great.

But when you're looking at a statewide change, it's much harder to make policies where we're looking at more of a microorganism for Charlottesville.

We can do some pretty bold changes within our policy.

So that's what we're looking at and where we're saying we want to see a reduction in violations

The saying is we want it to go down to zero if we had a baseline.

We don't want any kids to be locked up based off of violations.

We do understand that we have to detain kids based off of charges that they will commit.

Will the new change in law affect that?

I understand that the new change in law about not being able... No, that won't.

...violation based on technicality.

Right.

That law is for tenure-olds in regards to us not being able to detain youth.

But then the other law that was changed was strictly just for, I think, violations of court orders off of status offenses.

That does not affect cases that are delinquent.

So within the juvenile system, you have the delinquency route, and then you have the status route where you have status such as curfew, chins, things such as that.

But for the delinquency route, nothing has changed with the detainment or that.

I have a quick follow-up question to that previous question.

So do the council your team only work with Charlottesville?

I can let Chris answer that, but I don't.

Historically, we don't break it up.

I believe by Charlottesville and Albemarle, they're typically mixed based off of what's in the best interest of the youth with the probation officer.

But to your question, yes, it's a potential that there could be 12 strictly from Charlottesville.

But if it's that, we wouldn't add any more kids.

Okay, so the max would be 12, not the potential.

I was also curious.

I'm more familiar with the adult systems.

And I'm also very familiar with the mental health population and where the crossover is there.

I know we're looking at five state hospitals now having no new admittances recently.

No, we have not looked at any mental illness rates and everything, and later onset diagnoses.

We do work very hand-in-hand with Region 10 and other providers who we do outsource our mental health youth to receive the services, because we're not a mental health community.

I'm also concerned what if we're seeing in our own juvenile justice population children who have got mental health diagnoses who are

Right, right.

I do know that we don't have a less restrictive detention center right now.

In this area, we strictly have

just detention or release when you're talking about pre like the pretrial detention.

So we don't unfortunately have that, but we we do through the DAI and with everything else do

gauge where that child is.

And it's not a mental health assessment, but if a kid is struggling with it, we are required by policy and regulations to see that kid every 10 days and then request for that child to be either hospitalized or moved elsewhere.

But a lot of our kids do have mental health concerns that are going into the facilities.

And if we find that, especially on the back end, like committed youth, if we find that their mental health

We're really fortunate to have traditional outpatient services.

We have a number of treatment modalities that go into the home and work extensively with families, some that are just local to Charlottesville and then some others that come in to the community through juvenile justice funding.

So many of the kids we're involved with are getting some kind of specialized services.

And how much effort is the equity lens piece that was mentioned before?

Because that's a key piece to view through equity lens.

So I think that's something that we'll be learning a lot more about and we'll be looking at as we make referrals for children and looking to their families to give us input in terms of what they think the needs are of those children.

If I may, this is Opal.

I hope you can hear me.

We can hear you.

But if I can piggyback on that just a little bit.

Race equity is an extremely high priority, not only for the Casey Foundation, but has been voiced many times from this team that I'm working with in Charlottesville.

And I think one of the things that's key to this is we're trying to look at everything, data, our strategies, everything through a race equity lens.

And one of the things that came up from the very beginning was we need young people to tell us and families to tell us what it is that they need, right?

Like who are they connected to within the community, who they want to be connected to so that we can provide those culturally responsive, sensitive programs.

that they are seeking, that they need, and we can then go out and see what they are most needing themselves.

I have one more question just in terms of the pre-arrest diversion.

What is that process?

Is that something that's already in place or is that something that will be developed more with the working groups?

And I'm assuming the Ohio that was made part of this process, just how are they

I guess you would call it a working MOU that we're trying to work out with CPD on how to actually execute this because it's new.

It's a brand new way of working.

I can't really give you a specific update on where it is or who has it, but we do have a template for it.

We do have an MOU that we've created through a partner.

I think the partner's out in Los Angeles that does similar work.

They helped us kind of create this MOU.

They work with their police department.

I just can't really give you a very clear answer of

when this will start or what the actual issue is that we don't have it yet.

And we do have, we do, I will tell you, we have a small amount of funding to start a pilot project to do it.

So the pieces are, the pieces are there.

And I guess probably it's my job to figure out like why to go back to CPD and ask them and figure out where the, where the holdup is.

But we do have those things in a, we do have all the parts and pieces.

The second part of your question, I'm going to have to hand over to Opal because I don't know what is going on in Ohio.

Yeah, so, Mayor Walker, I'm not sure exactly what you'd like to know about Ohio.

We do have, when we started Probation Transformation, we had two pilot sites.

Lucas County, Ohio, was part of that two-county

Two sites that we piloted at the very beginning of this.

Ohio since then has used what they call reclaim funds.

It's state funds that are dedicated to juvenile justice.

And they have redirected that towards their probation transformation efforts.

And what they did was it was sort of state to local.

If you

If the local jurisdictions wanted to apply for state funding, they had to meet certain criteria that was in line with probation transformation.

And so they sort of did this state level sort of down in the interest and motivated them with funding and got different sites on board that way.

They also did statewide training for those sites altogether.

in probation transformation and also and that's really it.

Lucas County we have the most information on because they've been with us for so long and they're a defense site and so one of the things that two things that they are known for nationwide one would be their misdemeanor services community

building.

That's where Lucas County has already determined that they will not put any young people on probation for misdemeanor offenses.

And first-time felonies are eligible for probation and most likely will be placed on probation.

So that's the first thing that they do.

The second thing that they're known for is their Family Navigators Program, which is a family support led by families that have justice involved young people.

and they are guiding and support for other families that are experiencing the court system and the justice system for the young person.

So that's the main two things that Lucas is widely known for, but there's a lot going on in Ohio.

Thank you.

Counselors, are there any other questions?

Okay.

Well, thank you all.

Yes, I believe that it is.

Yes, thank you for the reminder, Ms.

Yes, thank you, Ms.

Thomas.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

We have nine people in the audience right now.

If you'd like to address council, please click the raise hand icon in the zoom webinar.

And if you're on via telephone, you can press star nine.

Each person will have up to three minutes.

And we have one hand raised.

First up is Katrina Turner.

Go ahead.

Okay.

I'm glad to know that, you know, things are looking up to the children and their welfare because at eight years old, my grandson wanted to kill himself.

He was having many problems.

he wanted to kill my son he attempted to stab him he pulled a BB gun on him he did many things and my son and I got in contact with the people who needed to be involved with him while the mother did nothing you know plenty of proof that the mother you know was the one that the

the children were in danger of, but instead of the courts and everybody listening to that, you know, my son one day called the police and he ended up getting arrested, okay?

This is one of the things that's wrong with children today.

They take the fathers out of the household and then they don't allow the fathers

to spend that time with the children that needs to be spent with the children.

Okay, the fathers get maybe six, seven hours a week with their children, with their sons.

How is that going to help these young, I'm talking about a black child, how is this helping?

our black children by taking the father out of the equation.

And then the children are allowed to do whatever they want to do because the mothers are not strong enough.

Some of the mothers, not all, are not strong enough to raise that son.

Okay.

This is what we need to fix in the system.

We need to give more time back to that man.

So he can keep his son.

What a man is supposed to be.

Because a lot of these women out here are letting these children run wild.

And the only way that some of this can stop is to give these men the time they need.

My son can't even help his children with their homework.

He can't take them on vacation because of what happened to him a few years ago when he was the one who called for help, but the system chose not to help him.

If there's anyone else who'd like to address counsel, please click the raise hand icon in the Zoom webinar.

Thank you.

Yep, we're ready for that.

Pursuant to Section 2.23712 of the Virginia Code, I hereby move that the City Council closes open meeting and convene in a closed meeting as authorized by Virginia Code Section 2.23711A1 for discussion and consideration of the performance of the Clerk of City Council and Virginia Code Section 2.23711A7 for consultation with legal counsel and briefings by staff pertaining to litigation pending in the Charlottesville Circuit Court, case number CL

Was that a second?

Yes, second.

All right.

Ms.

Thomas.