May 12, 2026
Committee on Youth Affairs Councilmember Zachary Parker, Chairperson
Testimony of Joshua A. Miller, PhD Research & Advocacy Director, Open City Advocates
Who We Are
Open City Advocates is a small organization with a big impact. We model an innovative solution in juvenile defense in Washington, DC, and nationwide. Founded to address the racial inequities and unjust incarceration practices in DC’s juvenile system, Open City Advocates provides youth-centered legal defense and holistic advocacy for young people after sentencing in the juvenile system.
Who We Serve
All of our clients have been committed to the care and custody of the DC Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) by DC’s Family Court. “Commitment” to DYRS means that a young person is a ward of the city, oftentimes until age 21, and that their placement may change several times with little or no court oversight, including placement at home or in a carceral facility.
There are extreme racial disparities in the youth delinquency system nationwide, with Black and Latino/a children being committed and incarcerated at 4.7 times the rate compared to their white peers. It is even more extreme in the District of Columbia, where 100% of all committed children are children of color, and 96% are Black, while Black youth comprise only 51% of the DC youth population.
Open City Advocates’ clients have had extensive contact with the delinquency system; most have also been in DC’s child welfare system, and all are at high risk for entering the DC Jail or being harmed or killed by street violence. The majority of our clients hail from DC’s Wards 7 and 8, where child poverty and gun violence are heavily concentrated. Recent DC Kids Count data show child poverty rates above 30% in both wards, and our analysis of MPD Crime Cards data found that roughly 46% of violent crimes committed with guns over the last two years occurred in Wards 7 and 8. In our 20-year history, we have lost six clients to gun violence and one to a drug overdose. Open City Advocates works to help our clients envision and actualize a healthy adulthood instead of accepting death or incarceration by age 25.
The Jurisdictional Gap
The Office of the Ombudsperson for Children has authority over CFSA-involved children, including foster youth and children whose families are receiving CFSA services. The Office’s authority over DYRS-committed children is limited to those who are simultaneously involved with CFSA, what practitioners call “dual-jacketed” youth. DYRS had 308 youth committed to its care in the most recent JSTAT reporting year, and DYRS has worked with a little under 310 committed youth annually. Only a small subset are dual-jacketed at any given time. The rest are outside OFC’s jurisdiction entirely.
That structure produces a perverse result. A child committed to DYRS who has been removed from her parents and placed in foster care is covered. A child committed to DYRS who lives in a group home hundreds of miles from DC, whose staff are openly racist, who waits weeks for mental health services, and who has no parent functional enough to call a Council member has no Ombudsperson. CFSA cases are sometimes closed specifically because the child has been committed to DYRS, which means the cases where independent oversight is most needed are the cases where it least exists. The further outside the family system DYRS sends a child, the less independent oversight that child receives.
DYRS acts in loco parentis when a child is committed. It takes on obligations that previously fell to parents. The staff witnessing facility conditions are mandatory reporters, but when the problem is the system itself, there is no one to call. CFSA is not structurally positioned to serve as an independent investigator of DYRS. The agencies are peer District entities, and any finding against DYRS would implicate another part of the same child-serving system. The Council’s own oversight, while important, is annual and systemic. It is not contemporaneous and case-specific. With OIJJFO defunded, no other independent body is doing this work at all.
The fix is straightforward. Extend OFC’s jurisdiction by statute to cover all children in the legal custody of DYRS, regardless of CFSA status. The Office is already standing up the case-handling infrastructure and the systemic-recommendation function. The marginal cost of giving OFC this authority is small compared with the cost of running the placements and facilities OFC would monitor. The cost of continuing without it is paid by children.
What Expanded Jurisdiction Would Make Possible
Closing the jurisdictional gap would let OFC do four things it cannot do today.
First, data collection on the full DYRS-committed population, not only dual-jacketed youth. The 2024 Auditor’s Crossover Youth report (Recommendation 8) called for exactly this: that the Council ensure OFC has the statutory authority and staffing to collect, analyze, and report on crossover youth annually. The Office is positioned to do this work; it needs the legal reach.
Second, real-time response to individual complaints from DYRS-committed youth and families who are not in CFSA, including youth in out-of-state placements where the agency has the least visibility and the most documented problems.
Third, systemic recommendations rooted in those complaints. With OIJJFO defunded and its successor function at the DC Auditor unappropriated, no other body is producing complaint-grounded systemic findings on DYRS. OFC is the natural home for that work, particularly for youth in community-based and out-of-state placements where the District has historically had the least visibility.
Fourth, coordination across CFSA and DYRS for the crossover population. Even when a child does not have an open CFSA case, prior CFSA involvement should inform DYRS’s case planning. OFC can convene that work in a way neither agency will do on its own.
Why Oversight Needs Affirmative Access
Effective oversight cannot wait for complaints to arrive. The architecture of a DYRS-committed young person’s situation makes that approach unreliable.
DYRS’s internal grievance process, Project Hands, routes complaints through the Office of Internal Integrity, which has historically taken those complaints to the supervising Youth Development Representative and from there back to the staff named in the complaint. As Whitney Louchheim, our COO, testified to this Council in May 2024, OCA clients have been retaliated against after filing complaints under this system. Some had meals withheld. Some were labeled “snitches” by other staff. The retaliation risk is not hypothetical, and youth are rational to weigh it against the marginal benefit of a complaint that may or may not result in accountability.
The attorney channel is similarly constrained. Counsel cannot disclose allegations of staff misconduct without client consent. Knowing what we have just described, clients often decline. The attorney’s obligation runs to the client’s expressed interests, and those interests rarely include systemic reform purchased at the price of retaliation.
Incident reports do not fill the gap. As Whitney testified, “if an incident that includes staff abuse results in an official incident report, it will likely exclude the staff wrongdoing.” Disability Rights DC’s recent litigation documented an instance in which video showed staff misconduct that the internal report did not. Staff know which spots in facilities are not covered by cameras. Our clients have repeatedly confirmed this.
An oversight body that waits at the receiving end of complaints, grievances, and reports built on this architecture will see a filtered version of facility conditions. The grievance pipeline routes back to the people being grieved. The litigation pipeline is filtered by client consent and reasonable fear of retaliation. The internal incident-report pipeline is filtered by staff self-interest.
The body that has been most effective at surfacing what is actually happening inside DYRS facilities is Disability Rights DC at University Legal Services, the District’s protection and advocacy agency. DRDC’s statutory access to the facilities and to the young people inside them does not depend on a complaint arriving first. DRDC can walk into a facility, speak with youth, and review records. That access is what makes the work possible.
OFC needs the same statutory tools. The Office needs authority to enter all facilities where DYRS-committed youth are placed, including out-of-state placements, without prior notice. It needs authority to interview committed youth directly, including youth who have not filed a complaint. It needs authority to access DYRS records, including incident reports, electronic health records, and the case files used to make placement decisions. And it needs statutory protection for youth and families against retaliation for engaging with the Office.
Without these tools, OFC will replicate the existing problem. With them, it can do what DRDC has shown is possible: see the system as it actually operates, and report what is found.
Crossover Youth: Visible Need, Invisible Population
In May 2024, the Office of the DC Auditor, working with the Council for Court Excellence, released A Broken Web: Improved Interagency Collaboration is Needed for D.C.’s Crossover Youth. The report’s findings are an indictment of how the District handles this population.
The District’s statutory definition of “crossover youth,” set in the OFC statute itself, is broad: a person 21 or younger who is or was involved with CFSA and has a current or closed delinquency case. CFSA and DYRS use much narrower working definitions, focused almost entirely on the dual-jacketed subset. The result is a population far larger than the agencies acknowledge. For FY 2018 through FY 2022, the audit identified 181 unique crossover youth with active delinquency cases and CFSA involvement; only 70 were ever simultaneously involved. The audit’s characterization: “There were seven times as many crossover youths overall as there were just dual-jacketed youth.” For FY 2023, CFSA and DYRS reported only 8 dual-jacketed youth to OFC. As of September 30, 2022, court records showed 93 unique crossover youth with open delinquency or neglect cases. All but 10 of those 93 youth were Black.
The audit also documented what justice-involved youth bring with them, and what they do not get. In a 2020 CJCC study, 49% of justice-involved DC high schoolers had a history of neglect, against 18.9% of non-justice-involved peers; 19.2% had a history of abuse, against 6.2%. Two in three DYRS files reviewed had an ACEs score of 4 or higher out of 11. DC’s 2020 Child Fatality Review Committee identified child welfare and delinquency involvement as “the two primary risk factors in youth homicides.” Among DYRS and CFSA case-management staff, only 8% had received any training on crossover youth, and 68% were unaware of any specific protocol for handling such a case. In September 2023, about 10% of youth in DYRS care were receiving mental health treatment, and none were receiving substance use treatment.
The audit’s framing is direct: “Crossover youth are functionally invisible in the laws, policies, and practices that guide the two key D.C. government child welfare and delinquency agencies.” Its central recommendation to the Council (Recommendation 8) is exactly the change we are asking for today: “D.C. Council should ensure that the Office of the Ombudsperson for Children (OFC) has sufficient statutory authority and staffing to fulfill its obligation to collect, analyze, and report on the population of crossover youth in D.C. annually.”
Without expanded authority and resources, OFC cannot do the work the District has already directed it to do.
What Recent Oversight Has Shown, and What Will Be Lost
In October 2025, OIJJFO released its final report on behavioral health services at New Beginnings. The findings are detailed and devastating. They are also exactly the kind of report that will not exist going forward.
OIJJFO and its behavioral health expert, Dr. Terry Lee, reviewed 17 youth sampled from the 89 held at New Beginnings between September and December 2023. Of those 17, 15 had identified substance use histories prior to admission. Ten were recommended for substance use assessments. None received them. For 16 of 17 youth, behavioral health problems surfaced in screenings and assessments were not identified at New Beginnings or were not added to the problem list. For 15 of 16 youth with independent evaluations, at least one diagnosis identified by the outside evaluator was missing from New Beginnings’ problem list. Conduct Disorder or Depressive Disorders were diagnosed by independent evaluators for 8 youth and not added to the problem list. Trauma was omitted from problem lists in 7 cases despite documented extensive trauma history. Low cognitive functioning or learning disorders should have appeared on 14 problem lists; they did not. Treatment plans for 13 of 17 youth failed to adequately address disruptive behaviors, trauma-related symptoms, cognitive or learning concerns, or substance use disorders. One youth had no treatment plan developed by New Beginnings until six months after admission. Another had only one treatment plan in a 13-month span. Of the 11 youth with substance use histories who needed evidence-based treatment, none received it as documented in the electronic health record. Of 13 discharged youth, the families of only 4 received a call from the therapist within one to two months of discharge, typically just one call.
The downstream picture is no better. Of 72 committed youth admitted to New Beginnings in 2023, 56 (78%) had further involvement with the juvenile or adult criminal justice system after release. Of the 30 youth recorded as having “completed the program,” 21 (70%) had further criminal-system involvement after release. Dr. Lee’s summary, on the District’s behavioral health interventions: “None of the youth were provided with services to address all of their behavioral health needs.”
Facility managers told the auditor that “much of what happens at New Beginnings is a security model largely overseen by YDR staff.” That description matches what we see in our cases. As we testified to this Council in February, what New Beginnings runs is warehouse management with clinical paperwork.
This report exists because OIJJFO had statutory authority, behavioral health expertise, and access to electronic health records. OIJJFO is no longer funded. The successor function lodged at the Office of the DC Auditor by the Recidivism Reduction at DYRS Amendment Act of 2024 has not been appropriated. Opposition to funding that position came from the Auditor herself. Both decisions are defensible on their own terms; the periodic deep-dive audit (of which the 2024 Crossover Youth report is an excellent example) is a different function from contemporaneous facility monitoring, and the Auditor’s office is right that the latter is not the natural fit for an audit shop. The result, however, is that contemporaneous, expert, complaint-grounded oversight of DYRS facilities and placements has no remaining home in the District.
That is the case for putting it inside OFC. The work is necessary; the District has just defunded the office where it was happening; and OFC is the body that already exists to investigate complaints from children in the District’s care. The Council does not need to recreate OIJJFO. It does need to give OFC the authority, access, and staff to do this work.
DYRS’s FY27 proposed operating budget is approximately $104 million and 572 FTEs. The agency had 308 youth committed to its care in the most recent JSTAT reporting year, with secure-facility populations on the order of 175 youth on a typical day. Per-day secure-confinement costs run roughly sixteen hundred dollars per confined youth. At that level of investment, the public should be able to see individualized plans, real treatment, and real transition planning across the full committed caseload. Oversight is a small fraction of that spending. It is the minimum the public is owed for what the District is already paying.
Lessons from Other Jurisdictions
The District does not need to invent this function. Other states have built different versions of the same basic idea: when the state takes custody of children, an independent office must be able to hear from those children, enter the places where they are held, review records, investigate complaints, and report systemic findings publicly. We have not found clean causal evidence that ombuds offices, on their own, improve youth outcomes. The stronger claim is that these offices produce concrete outputs that the District is now missing.
Rhode Island shows the unified child-advocate model. The Office of the Child Advocate (R.I. Gen. Laws § 42-73) is an independent agency overseeing the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, which itself houses both child welfare and juvenile correctional services. The office has statutory authority to initiate litigation against state agencies on behalf of children in state care. Recent work includes serving as the court-appointed monitoring team for the Andrew C. v. McKee DCYF settlement and a 2024 Review of Seven Fatalities and Twenty-Three Near Fatalities that produced 56 recommendations and drove a June 2025 Rhode Island legislative oversight hearing on youth deaths and substance use in the child welfare system. The FY2025 enacted budget added $250,000 and three FTE for a new investigator unit. The lesson for DC: when the state takes custody of children across both systems, one independent advocate can hold jurisdiction over both.
Illinois shows the dedicated juvenile justice ombuds model. The Office of the Independent Juvenile Ombudsperson (730 ILCS 5/3-2.7) was created by statute in 2014, functions independently within the Department of Juvenile Justice, and reports to the Governor and General Assembly rather than to DJJ leadership. The governor appoints the Ombudsperson with the advice and consent of the Senate. Public Act 103-0397, effective 2025, expanded OIJO’s jurisdiction from five state-operated Illinois Youth Centers to also include all sixteen county-operated juvenile detention centers, more than quadrupling facility coverage. OIJO’s FY2025 annual report describes more than 900 calls received from young people across IYCs, aftercare, and county detention centers. Illinois shows what a dedicated youth-facing complaint and monitoring function looks like, and it shows that statutes built with incomplete coverage need to be amended later. DC should not repeat the mistake.
Maryland is the close regional example, and the comparator the District should study most carefully. Maryland’s Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit (JJMU) has produced quarterly public reports on Department of Juvenile Services facilities and conditions since 2006. Until July 2024, JJMU sat within the Office of the Attorney General. Chapter 836 of 2024 (Senate Bill 134) transferred the unit, including four positions and $603,067 in general funds, to the newly created Office of the Correctional Ombudsman, which is housed in the Office of the Governor and is statutorily independent of DJS and the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Maryland’s FY27 budget allocates approximately $707,407 to JJMU operations. JJMU’s 2024 and 2025 reports have continued to identify concrete health, safety, and conditions concerns in juvenile facilities, including pests, unsafe living conditions, and unsanitary food practices, and to bring them to the Governor, the General Assembly, and DJS leadership. The institutional move is recent enough that whether the unit’s independence has been preserved in practice deserves continued attention; an ombuds office whose host now reports to the principal who appoints the regulated agency’s head is, in theory, more capturable than one housed under an independently elected Attorney General. Two further points are worth noting for the District. First, Maryland is a near neighbor that has maintained a contemporaneous juvenile facility monitoring function across two institutional homes, while the District was legislating away its own. Second, the District’s current DYRS director led Maryland DJS from 2011 to 2023, and JJMU’s reporting covered the full span of his tenure there. The contemporaneous public record JJMU built has been substantively useful to Open City Advocates in DC for that reason.
Texas shows what the function looks like at scale. The Independent Ombudsman for the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (Tex. Hum. Res. Code § 261.051 et seq.) is statutorily independent of TJJD, appointed by the Governor, and reports to the Governor and Legislature rather than to TJJD’s management or Board. The office reviews facilities, receives complaints, advocates for children in custody, and has statutory access to confidential information. Its annual operating budget is approximately $1.1 million. In the first quarter of FY26, the office conducted 55 facility site visits, interviewed 485 youth, and received 161 complaints. Texas is not a model for juvenile justice conditions. The 2024 DOJ findings report concluded that “children in TJJD’s secure facilities are exposed to conditions that cause serious and lasting physical, mental, and emotional harm,” and the office’s documentation across years built the empirical baseline for that conclusion. Texas is, however, a useful model for ombuds architecture and operational expectations: independent oversight cannot be desk-based. It must be recurring, youth-facing, and facility-facing.
California shows the youth-rights model. The Office of Youth and Community Restoration includes an Ombudsperson who investigates complaints from youth in juvenile facilities about rights violations and harmful conditions, develops youth-rights information, and attempts informal resolution. OYCR’s 2024 annual report frames the Ombudsperson as an independent problem-solver responsible for investigating complaints and attempting to resolve them, and tells youth in juvenile justice facilities they have the right to ask questions or file complaints with OYCR. California is useful because its ombuds function is tied directly to youth rights and facility conditions rather than to agency performance review. The District should adopt the same youth-facing framing: the Office exists for the children in care, not for the agency that holds them.
Connecticut shows what statutory affirmative access produces in practice. The Office of the Child Advocate (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46a-13k, 46a-13l) has the strongest facility-access language in this set: statutory authority to “periodically review the facilities and procedures of any and all institutions or residences, public or private, where a juvenile has been placed,” to “communicate privately” with any child who has received state services, and to access and copy records on a fourteen-day deadline. The office’s November 2024 Conditions of Confinement audit of Manson Youth Institute documented that pepper spray use rose from 9 incidents in 2023 to 26 in 2024, and that all youth subjected to pepper spray in 2024 were Black or Hispanic. The findings drove a September 2024 Department of Correction policy change ending the use of solitary isolation to discipline minors. The Connecticut statutory access language is lift-and-edit-ready for the District’s purposes.
Michigan is best understood as drafting language rather than a substantive comparator. The Office of the Child Advocate (M.C.L.A. 722.921 et seq.) is primarily a child welfare oversight agency; its juvenile justice authority is secondary. Its most useful contribution to the District is the exclusivity provision (M.C.L.A. 722.932), which clarifies that the Ombudsman’s authority “is in addition to” and “does not limit or affect” other remedies of appeal or objection. That language settles in the statute the standard objection that ombuds expansion will duplicate or displace existing remedies. A 2019 state audit, which found the office could not investigate over 200 child deaths from 2014 to 2017 in a timely manner because of capacity problems, drove a 2024 workforce doubling and case-management overhaul. The audit underscores our appropriations point: statutory authority without adequate FTE and case-management infrastructure produces another bottleneck.
A cautionary note: New Jersey. New Jersey is the only state to have eliminated its Office of the Child Advocate. Governor Christie folded the Department of the Public Advocate in the FY2010 budget amid a $2.2 billion deficit. The Office had been the only independent statutory advocate for children involved in state systems. The District should draft its statute against this risk, through appointment structures, reporting lines, and clear budget designation.
What the District should take. From Rhode Island, jurisdiction across child welfare and juvenile justice and explicit litigation authority. From Illinois, a dedicated juvenile justice ombuds function with public annual reporting, and the cautionary lesson that incomplete facility coverage requires later amendment. From Maryland, contemporaneous facility monitoring with public reporting to elected officials, in a neighboring jurisdiction that is moving in the opposite direction from the District. From Texas, recurring on-site visits and direct youth interviews at scale, plus reporting lines that run to political branches. From California, a youth-rights complaint and rights-information frame. From Connecticut, statutory affirmative-access language and a documented record of race-disaggregated facility data driving policy change. From Michigan, the exclusivity-of-remedies clause and the audit-driven lesson that statutory authority without appropriations becomes a bottleneck. From New Jersey, the standing warning that single-executive defunding is a real risk.
These offices do not eliminate the need for litigation, Council oversight, agency reform, or public defense. They make those systems less blind.
Legislative Vehicles
The framework we describe is not hypothetical. Two pieces of draft legislation, between them, would accomplish substantially all of what we are asking. We are submitting the comprehensive draft as Appendix A; the narrower bill is reproduced as Appendix B for the Committee’s convenience.
The OFC redline (Appendix A). A comprehensive amendment to the OFC statute. It extends jurisdiction to “DYRS youth,” defined broadly as anyone 21 or younger involved with, previously involved with, or otherwise known to DYRS. It creates a Deputy DYRS Ombudsperson with clinical credentials and statutory seats on the Juvenile Justice Advisory Group, the Child Fatality Review Committee, the Commission on Human Rights, and the Corrections Information Council. It grants the Ombudsperson direct login access to DYRS electronic case-management systems (including FAMcare), unannounced inspection authority over DYRS facilities and contracted placements, subpoena power enforceable in Superior Court, statutory authority to communicate privately with DYRS youth without prior notice or DYRS consent, and retaliation protection backed by civil damages and a private right of action. It requires an annual crossover-youth report with population data, outcomes, and an interagency-coordination assessment. Its framing of the Office’s authority as “in addition to other remedies or rights of appeal available under the law” tracks the Michigan exclusivity-of-remedies provision discussed above. The redline has not been debated in committee. We commend it to the Committee’s consideration.
The Deputy Ombudsman bill (Appendix B). The Deputy Ombudsman for the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services Amendment Act of 2024 is a narrower, introduced bill that creates a Deputy Ombudsman for DYRS within OFC, with unrestricted access to facilities, records, and personnel; authority to conduct private interviews with youth and staff; and a mandatory cooperation requirement on DYRS and its contractors. It is a useful minimum-viable vehicle if the broader redline cannot move this cycle.
We commend the redline to the Committee. Two points warrant sharpening regardless of which vehicle moves. First, the redline’s inspection authority extends to “licensed or contracted placement providers, including secure facilities and group homes,” which likely captures out-of-state placements but should say so explicitly. Most of the District’s most documented placement problems sit in out-of-state facilities; the statutory text should remove any ambiguity. Second, the redline creates an agency-level code for the Office but does not appropriate funds for the expanded mandate. Authority without staff produces another underfunded oversight body, and we have seen that pattern fail this District before. The next section addresses the appropriations question directly.
Funding a Real Oversight Function
Expanding OFC’s jurisdiction without funding dedicated DYRS oversight staff would create a paper mandate. The FY27 proposed budget preserves OFC at $733,094 and 4.8 FTEs, with no dedicated DYRS oversight component. Against DYRS’s $104 million FY27 proposed budget and 572 FTEs, OFC at its current scale cannot do the work described in this testimony.
Comparator jurisdictions show the operational scale of a real oversight function. Maryland funds JJMU at approximately $707,407 per year, dedicated to juvenile facility monitoring within the independent Office of the Correctional Ombudsman. Texas funds its Office of the Independent Ombudsman for the TJJD at roughly $1.1 million per year; in the first quarter of FY26 alone, that office conducted 55 site visits, interviewed 485 youth, and received 161 complaints. These are illustrative scales, not adequacy benchmarks. The point is that a real oversight unit costs money in dedicated staff, and produces concrete outputs in return.
The District has already costed this work. The Fiscal Impact Statement for the Recidivism Reduction, Oversight, and Accountability for DYRS Amendment Act of 2024 (B25-0826) estimated that placing juvenile facility oversight at the Office of the DC Auditor would require six positions: four new ODCA employees to inspect treatment facilities and complete compliance reviews of all committed juvenile IRPs, plus continuation funding for the OIJJFO Executive Director and Special Assistant. Together, those positions cost $480,000 in FY25 salary and fringe, growing to $3.76 million over the four-year financial plan. Non-personnel costs to contract subject-matter experts and cover out-of-state travel for facility inspections added $230,000 in FY25 and $2.1 million over the plan. The District’s own Chief Financial Officer certified the total cost of implementing the ODCA accountability function at $710,000 in FY25 and $5.86 million over the financial plan, or roughly $1.46 million per year on average. The Council passed the ROAD Act without appropriating any of those funds.
The FIS figures reflect the cost of building a new oversight function from scratch at an office that does not currently perform this work. OFC’s marginal cost is lower. The Office already employs an Ombudsperson, a Deputy CFSA Ombudsperson, administrative and complaint-intake infrastructure, a public-facing website, and statutory authorities that the redline extends rather than rebuilds. A Deputy DYRS Ombudsperson and two or three investigators with juvenile-justice expertise can share legal, communications, data-management, and administrative resources with the existing OFC structure. Duties can be combined and expertise distributed across the entire office. The range we propose, $500,000 to $1 million annually, captures what OFC needs to add to its existing infrastructure to do the work, which is meaningfully less than what the FIS estimated for the standalone function. We are asking the Council not to repeat the decision to legislate the authority without the appropriations, and not to over-cost the appropriations either.
For the District, the funding question maps onto staffing tiers, assuming fully-loaded position costs in the range of $150,000 to $175,000.
A $250,000 enhancement above OFC’s current budget would fund fewer than two fully loaded positions. That is functionally symbolic given the work this testimony describes.
A $500,000 enhancement is the minimum viable floor for a dedicated DYRS oversight unit within OFC. It funds approximately three positions, sufficient to handle complaint intake, facility visits in the District, record review, and a baseline systemic-reporting function.
A $750,000 to $1 million enhancement is the more defensible range if the Council expects unannounced facility visits, complaint intake, confidential youth interviews, record review, retaliation follow-up, monitoring of out-of-state placements, and regular systemic reporting. This funds approximately four to six positions, the scale at which the function becomes substantively comparable to what Maryland and Texas operate.
Each of these tiers remains a small fraction of the budget the unit would be monitoring. A $500,000 enhancement is less than one-half of one percent of DYRS’s $104 million FY27 proposed budget. A $1 million enhancement is less than one percent. The Council should not give OFC jurisdiction it cannot exercise.
Specific Statutory Recommendations
We respectfully ask the Council to enact the elements below. Most of this language appears in the redline we are submitting as Appendix A; we have flagged above the points where that draft is silent or imprecise.
- Extend OFC’s jurisdiction to all youth in the legal custody of DYRS, regardless of whether they have an open CFSA case.
- Grant OFC affirmative access to facilities and placements, including authority to enter all facilities where DYRS-committed youth are placed, including out-of-state placements, without prior notice.
- Grant OFC authority to interview committed youth directly, regardless of whether the youth has filed a complaint or grievance.
- Grant OFC authority to access DYRS records, including incident reports, electronic health records, and the case files used to make placement decisions.
- Establish statutory protection against retaliation for youth and families who engage with the Office.
- Appropriate $500,000 to $1 million above OFC’s $733,094 FY27 budget to fund a dedicated DYRS oversight unit, as detailed in “Funding a Real Oversight Function” above. This appropriation must include capacity to fulfill the OFC statute’s existing crossover-youth data and annual-reporting obligations (Recommendation 8, A Broken Web, ODCA 2024).
- Consider an exclusivity-of-remedies clause modeled on Michigan’s M.C.L.A. 722.932, confirming that OFC’s authority supplements rather than replaces internal grievance processes, public defender access, or court review.
We have asked the Council before to close this gap. We are asking again. The Office is now ready, the case is now made, and the cost of further delay continues to be paid by children.
Thank you.