- Office of the Child Advocate
At the OCA, we envision a future where all our Commonwealth’s children and their families can thrive. Standing in the way of that vision are challenging times: the pandemic and its aftermath, strain on our human services system, and persistent inequities. In the face of these challenges, we believe strongly that all of us must work together toward a future where every child is safe and thriving.
Against that backdrop, the OCA has released its its Annual Report for Fiscal Year FY23.
This report includes information about our statutorily required oversight and ombuds functions as well as our policy, research, and implementation projects and our work chairing various legislatively-created boards and task forces.
In FY23, the OCA carried out a number of programmatic activities in addition to our mandated functions. Highlights include:
- Developing a revised mandatory reporter training with a profession-specific module for educators;
- Implementing and expanding the Massachusetts Youth Diversion Program in partnership with the Department of Youth Services (DYS) and providing funding to improve DYS run hardware secure facilities;
- Continued partnership with the Executive Office of Health and Human Services on the ongoing implementation and evaluation of a housing support program for Transition Age Youth, which resulted in a FY23 evaluation report as well as a Policy Brief describing the program;
- Continuing to operate the Center on Child Wellbeing & Trauma;
- Issuing five research reports on a range of topics exploring the systems that impact children and youth, including reports that made recommendations regarding trauma identification practices in child-serving organizations, improving the Child Requiring Assistance System, detailing data on the juvenile justice system (with one report on racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system), and on child welfare data reporting.
All these actions, reports, and partnerships helped move us in the direction of a better set of systems that serve the children of the Commonwealth.
This Annual Report also includes data about what the OCA is seeing on our Complaint Line, through Critical Incident Reports, and Institutional reports.
