BROOKINGS – East Central Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) is looking forward to serving the children of Codington County after taking the first steps towards establishing an office in Watertown. And although an office space is yet to come, volunteers have come out to support the group’s mission to promote the interests of abused and neglected children caught up in court proceedings.

Child abuse and neglect is something of a hidden part of every community, but it exists in all of them to one extent or another.

“I’ve never been in a community that’s immune,” East Central CASA case manager and volunteer coordinator Ben Quam said. “If adults did to each other what people do to kids, it would be all over the news. However, these are confidential cases, so you’ll never read about them in the newspaper. They are closed hearings; you can’t sit in on them in the courthouse, so everyone goes on thinking we have a nice community where things like this don’t happen.”

CASA works by training volunteers who will be assigned to a child or children in a single court case. When children go through court proceedings, they are appointed an attorney and a social worker.

“At that point and time, CASA is also appointed to the child’s case. While the social worker and the attorneys are all interested in the child’s best interests, they are also working with the entire family, so they have interest in the other parties that are involved in the case, whereas the CASA volunteer is solely responsible for the child or children in that family setting and their best interests,” East Central CASA Executive Director Julie Wermers said.

Generally, these trained volunteers take on one case at a time compared to the multiple cases taken on by attorneys and social workers. This allows CASA advocates to have a more personable and individualized approach, hopefully gaining better insight into the needs of the child or children.

“That information that a volunteer gathers throughout building a relationship with the child is presented to the judge so that they can make better informed decisions about the future of the child,” Wermers said, such as whether the child or children will be reunited with their original family, if parental rights will be terminated and the children adopted.

East Central CASA has been in Brookings County since 2002, and as its advocates seek to work for children throughout the Third Judicial Circuit, setting up another branch in Watertown will allow them to better serve children in Codington County.

The Third Judicial Circuit covers 14 counties, and before they started their Codington County branch, CASA officials had a presence in five of those counties. When it came time to look at where else they could expand within this circuit, they considered both Beadle County and Codington County, but found that there was a greater need in Codington County.

Quam said that they’ve been appointed to cases in that county for a few years now, but he feels that the distance has meant that they haven’t been able to give proper diligence to their work there.

There are about 30-35 volunteers working with the CASA office in Brookings, and they’ve begun taking in volunteers in Codington County and training them. In September, they hired Cammie Mengwasser as the CASA program director and case manager for Codington County, and things have taken off since then.

“National CASA statistics show that a case with a CASA advocate on it, children spend seven months less in foster care, which is a really significant amount of time. Any time we can shorten the length of time that children are away from a permanent home is what I’m most looking forward to,” Mengwasser said.

Three volunteers for the Watertown group have gone through training already, and another four are now going through that training. It’s a good start, but adding to their numbers there will be among the top priorities for them going forward.

“We have 35 kids in Codington County right now who are without advocates, so we are anxious to get more volunteers. It’s our goal to have 20 sworn volunteers in Codington County by the end of 2019. We’d like to have advocates on a waiting list and not kids,” Mengwasser said.

It’s important to have a large pool of advocates from which to choose for a court case, Quam said, so that they can find the best match of advocate and the child/children.

“We try to match up the best personalities, so we always need more (advocates) than the kids we have because we want to have the best fit,” Quam said. “We don’t need experts, but everybody does bring something to the table, whether they have their own kids or they work with children or their hearts are in the right place. That’s what we look for.”

The seven volunteers at Watertown come from a variety of backgrounds – some young enough to be recent college graduates, others retirees, some with law enforcement backgrounds, others who were in education – and previous experience is not required for volunteerism. All the necessary training is provided by CASA.

At the moment, the Codington County CASA group does not have an office, so training has taken place at the Watertown Regional Library. Mengwasser said that the hope is as additional volunteers and funding come in, they’ll be able to open an office in Watertown within a year.

In the meantime, “we’re getting pretty creative on where we meet in town,” she said.

What’s more, they take in volunteers for things other than court-appointed advocacy. These other volunteers, called Friends of CASA, help in other ways around the office and with fundraising and other activities. These volunteers are always welcome, too, Wermers said.

The training component of becoming an advocate is often the biggest commitment and hurdle in Wermers’ experience, as it does amount to more than 30 hours. They try to break up the training into multiple group sessions that take place over the course of several weeks. They try to be as flexible as they can when offering training opportunities.

“We try to meet the needs of the group to make it as easy for them as possible to get through those 30 hours. For a lot of people, when you say 30 hours of training, they run in the other direction because it is a big commitment,” Wermers said.

They will do individual training if there’s nothing else that works, but meeting with the group is the preferred setting. The biggest thing an advocate-in-training would miss out on in those situations are such opportunities as guest speakers such as the local circuit court judge or workers from the Department of Social Services.

Advocates are trained in national and state laws specific to child abuse and neglect proceedings, what is and is not considered the jurisdiction of the court and more. That’s important because the cases they handle only have gotten more complex through the years as laws multiply.

Quam added that they stress they are not to judge the parents of the children they work for.

“That’s not our job, and, frequently, we work very strongly with the parents. If a child can safely be back with their parent, that is the best place for them to be. Why would we be against that? We check our judgment at the door,” he said.

Anybody interested in volunteering in Brookings can contact the Brookings office at 697-6106. Those who want to volunteer in the Watertown area can contact Mengwasser at 605-520-8002 or at eccasacammie@swiftel.net.

Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.