As Court Appointed Special Advocates, writing strong court reports is vital to ensuring best interest advocacy for our youth.
CASA DC is committed to ensuring that court reports are provided at all hearings and that reports are timely, well-written, informative, persuasive, and professional.
To better support your advocacy, we have created several new tools to help guide CASA volunteers with court report writing.
Please refer to this checklist when drafting your court reports. This slideshow provides details and tips on the CASA DC court report writing process. In addition, you can use our training template when drafting, which provides prompts for each section of the report. We will be sending out a video recording of the January Excellence in Advocacy In-Service training in the near future. We will be asking all active volunteers to view that training. Two hours of in-service credits will be earned upon completion.
To access the recording for this workshop, click here.
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Court Report FAQs:
How do you know that you are using the most updated template?
Any changes to Court Report templates will be sent out in the Scoop or direct emails to volunteers. You can also always find the most updated templates in this folder.
How do you draft a report for a disengaged youth? Speak to party members and relevant individuals in the youth’s life to gather information for assessments and recommendations. This can include the social worker, GAL, education attorney, placement provider, therapeutic supports, and teachers. When is it appropriate to draft a status report? Ideally, a full court report is always submitted for court hearings to provide best interest advocacy and assessment. If a CASA has not had substantive engagement with their youth and not enough information has been gathered from other individuals for a full report, a status report may be appropriate. Additionally, if there is a status hearing being held on a case about a particular topic, a status report may be submitted. Please speak with your supervisor before choosing to draft a status report.