Rule 5.690.General conduct of disposition hearing

Disposition runs on the social study. The petitioner must prepare one covering everything relevant and recommending an outcome — and the rule sets out what it has to contain.

Where a legal guardian is recommended, a statutory assessment goes in the study or in a separate document. Where removal is recommended, the study must discuss the reasonable efforts made to prevent it — or, for an Indian child, the active efforts to provide remedial services and rehabilitative programs designed to prevent the breakup of the Indian family — and set out a plan for reuniting the family including visitation, a plan for legal permanence if reunification fails, and a statement that each parent was told about adoption planning and voluntary relinquishment, with their response.

The family-finding discussion is quantified rather than described: how many relatives were identified and how each is related; how many of those were located and notified; how many of those are interested in ongoing contact; how many are interested in providing placement; and for an Indian child, the efforts to find extended family members and evidence that everyone contacted was told they could seek placement approval through the tribe’s own procedure.

Where siblings are not placed together the study must explain why, what is being done to bring them together, or why doing so would be contrary to their safety and well-being. Where the petitioner says reunification services should be denied, it must say why.

Timing is enforced by remedy: the study and its copies go to the clerk at least 48 hours before the hearing, and a party who was not given a copy is entitled to a continuance within the statutory limits on request.

The court must receive and consider the social study, any guardianship assessment, the CASA volunteer’s report, the case plan, and any relevant evidence offered by the petitioner, the child, or the parent — and may require other evidence on its own motion. The disposition order must state that the social study and any CASA study were read and considered.

A written case plan must be filed by the date of disposition, or within 60 calendar days of initial removal or of the required in-person response where the child was not removed, whichever comes first. For a child of any age the court must find either that the plan meets the statutory requirements or that it does not — in which case it orders compliance — and either that the social worker sought and integrated the input of the child, the family, the child’s identified Indian tribe (including consultation on whether tribal customary adoption is an appropriate permanent plan) and other interested parties, or that they did not, in which case the court orders it done unless each participant was unable, unavailable or unwilling. For a child of 12 or older in a permanent placement, the court must also find whether the child was given the chance to review the plan, sign it and receive a copy — and order that chance given if not.

Finally, a hard deadline: where a child has been removed, no continuance may push the dispositional hearing beyond 60 days after the hearing at which removal or detention was ordered — 30 days for an Indian child — unless the court finds exceptional circumstances. And the absence of a qualified expert witness’s opinion cannot by itself be those circumstances.