may please the court we were before this court today asking that the orders of the trial court finding that audrey davis was an unfit parent and that it was in the best interests of her son that her rights be terminated  reversed as those findings by the trial court were against the manifest weight of the evidence that was presented at trial in this case while i am aware that the court is appointed with the facts behind this case there are some  facts that i believe need to be pointed out by the court because they are important as to the timeline of how this going or how this case proceeded with regard to this case following a complaint a criminal complaint being filed against audrey davis of the state of illinois filed a petition for shelter care on january twenty sixth of two thousand and fifteen that a criminal complaint related to a foster child that was in ms davis care and did not involve ms davis son who is the subject of this appeal but the shelter care was filed including him as well because of the substantial risk of physical abuse because auburn had inflicted excessive corporal punishment upon one of the foster children who was a minor it is important to note that throughout this case and throughout all of the investigations there was never an allegation that audrey had ever harmed her son that is the subject of this petition shelter of this appeal shelter care was ordered on january twenty eighth two thousand and fifteen and then the case proceed good for sixteen months before we came to adjudication during that sixteen months and by the time we got to adjudication audrey had completed most of the services in her service plan that was laid out initially when the children were brought into care including by the time that we got to adjudication audrey had already pled guilty to aggravated battery of a child related to that criminal complaint involving the foster child approximately a month after that a dispositional order was entered granting custody and guardianship of audrey son to the states and then less than a year later this motion to terminate audrey's parental rights was filed alleging that audrey was unfit due to failing to maintain a reasonable degree of interest concern or responsibility for her son's welfare failing to make reasonable efforts to correct the conditions that brought her son into care and failing to make reasonable progress towards his return home within nine months of adjudication according to my calculation that nine months after adjudication would have been june twenty sixt in till march of twenty seventeen and then we came to hear a note on march second time twenty eighteen for and hearing on terminations of parental rights and a finding of unfitness all of which was granted after several days of hearing and a lot of testimony from witnesses called by the state in this case your honour's first with regard to the allegation that she failed through our very failed to maintain a reasonable degree of interest concern or responsibility for her son's welfare the evidence simply just does not support that allegation and the evidence that was presented to the court was that audrey always visited with her son except during the period that she was incarcerated as a result about all of the things that audrey had done from the point that these children came into care intil and frankly right up until the time of trial she had been through parenting classes she had evidence parenting skills that she had learned in those classes during her visits with her son which of course were monitored by family service center she had a mental health assessment done that mental health assessment wanted her to have a psychological evaluation done she did the psychological evaluation as a result of her plea in criminal court she was to do a substance abuse evaluation which she did she was to take anger management classes which she did she successfully completed all of those things in fact going above and beyond what family service center ever asked her to do family service center asked her to take the parenting classes that they offered she took those classes and then she went and took additional classes at the parent place and as part of the parent places program they provided a parent mentor to her or parent coach i think they called it to her that help to coach her through some of the issues that she might be having in her parenting and understanding things that were appropriate and were not appropriate when they come to you when it came to dealing with issues that arose with her children so she was making reasonable progress i think where the courts and frankly where family service center got caught up in in evaluating the progress that she was making was when it came to this mental health assessment and the subsequent psychological evaluation that was done your honor the initial assessment was done and indicated that she had a parent child relate only concerns i believe that was a diagnosis and something something to that effect and then indicated that there were these two things call rule out rule out speaking the fact issues disorder by proxy which i think we all used to refer to as munchausen by proxy and this narcissistic personality disorder and when i asked the original evaluator when she was asked why did you put those rule out in there if you could not include those as actual diagnosis and she indicated she didn't know why she put them in there but she put them in there as part of her initial evaluation that created a snowball effect that then got down to ms mackenzie or i believe it's dr mckenzie who did the actual psychological evaluation dr mckenzie is the only person out of the five professionals that ms davis saw who actually diagnosed her with narcissistic personality disorder cook disorder by proxy and the reason that that is important is because family service center in d c fs seem to be come seem to have blinders on from that point forward about what they believed audrey was capable of doing they all the sudden believe now that audrey was not capable of fully engaging in counseling that she was not capable of taking responsibility for what she had done to the foster child really an issue from the beginning and throughout the case you talk about what she completed and course we all are familiar with those types of cases where perhaps of parents who are leading things but they're not engaging they're not exhibiting that they're learning they're not working on the issues that have been identified they're just going through the motions so to speak right and i would agree with that except for the fact that in andris counseling sessions with her counselor i believe it was no cold list and this list indicated in her counseling that they were doing while she did not believe audrey was fully engaged at that point in the year timeframe i think thirteen month timeframe that she counseled with her she felt that some of that was due to the fact that she had certain personality characteristics while not narcissistic personality disorder she had certain personality characteristics that were preventing her from being able to fully engage she did not indicate that she wasn't engaged she did not indicate that they were not discussed seen the reasons why the children came into care or how what audrey needed to do in order to get these this child back in her care just that she was not fully engaged and i don't think that the standard of being fully engaged is the same state same as the standard of making reasonable progress towards returning your child home when about the sex offender risk since right with regard to the sex offender risk assessment that assessment was not done as indicated in my brief audrey was reluctant to do a sex offender she refused to do that she did refuse to do a sigh it's offender risk assessment and her reasons for not wanting to do that was because of what had happened while couple of things while i'm at the time that this motion to terminate her printer rights was filed she was still under appeal she was still in the process of the administrative appeal with the c f s and then she subsequently appealed to the trial court to have that administrative finding overturned that was not completed until i believe november of two thousand and seventeen so well outside of this nine month period that the court was evaluating and determining whether or not to terminate her parental rights and in addition to bad she felt like the timing of this allegation against her was incredibly suspect she had not had these children in her care for well over a year before these allegations were ever even ma and frankly bottom line is she was very concerned based on what had happened in the mental health assessment and everything that had come out of it that she was going to be starting over from ground zero that when this sex offender assessment was done and she feared it's going to be a whole new plethora frankly of services she was going to have to engage in before she they would return her son home and he had already been of course out of her care at that point for well over three years and so you know she had some very significant concerns about this sex offender risk assessment being performed who was going to be performing it and what the outcome of that that was going to be now frankly should she have done it possibly she should have went ahead and done it but i said until this appeal process was over over in the trial court it did not seem like something that she should be proceeding forward with not knowing whether or not the trial court was going to say that  other allegation being the failure to make reasonable efforts to correct the conditions the condition that brought the child into care was the state's concern that because of the physical abuse allegation against her by the foster child that he at substantial risk of harm for physical abuse himself and as again as i already have stated she went through all of the steps and all of the processes that she was required to go through to correct those conditions anger management counseling substance abuse six assessment parenting classes showing that she could use the skills that she learned in her parenting classes including and and very importantly ms list who was her counselor just before coming to hearing indicating that she had no concern about whether or not audrey would be able to utilize the skills that she learned in those parenting classes and in actually parenting  her son going forward so so she definitely made reasonable efforts to correct the conditions i understand what the court is saying about the sex offender assessment but i think her concerns about that sex offender assessment in completing it during that period of time are very about the only reference to the sex offender assessment in that i saw in the transcript was that she was asked whether or not she had done it her answer was no she was asked by the guardian ad litem whether or not she would be willing to do it and again her answer was now well for one thing i believe because they were outside of the timeframe that we were referring to here i mean if she's still under appeal on those exact allegations with not only administratively with the c f s but then subsequently over with the trial court was not a party to the appeal but your client also had a daughter in the unit your petition is all allegations of abuse with respect to that child her child right that is my understanding yes  and that yet my understanding is that matter is being handled by the family court now because the case was taken out of the purview of the juvenile court because the father taking the child in that case so her rights have not been terminated with regard to that child did and i don't have the petition in front of me but i believe that's the time period in which it alleged runners in this case and as i have said you know it is my opinion it is it is audrey's opinion that she has done the things that she knew that she needed to do when the c f s came to her and said you're not fully engaged in counseling you're not owning up to the the abuse that join flicked it upon the foster children you know her response was what more do you want me to do i'm doing everything that you that you ask more they wanted from her as far as an acknowledgement that what she had done was was not appropriate was unclear and frankly remains unclear to her the same thing with the engaging in counseling as far as audrey is concerned she was fully engaged in counseling always in counseling never a period of time while this was going on when she had her not engaged in some sort of counseling initially with family service center two different counselors there and she felt like  having family service center handling the juvenile case and also handling her counseling she was not making any progress in counseling so she went outside a family service center sought out her own she makes are accusations against people in the family service cent then they want to send in there somewhere else or if you went somewhere she went somewhere else she didn't make those allegations haitians gives right on the family service center refused to investigate those allegations and simply assigned her to another counselor she did not believe she was going to be able to get a fair shake or not be judged prematurely by that second counselor and so she made the decision to leave family service center and go seek other counts is that kind of the common fee throughout all of the burgas counselors when requested that she didn't think that that information is appropriate and she would participate up to a point but at a certain point then her participation simply became showing up is that kind of theme that that ran through many of the councillors testimony there were concerns about those things brought forward by several of the councilors i think the one counselor who indicated she had made more progress than any of the other councilors was ms less tubes like i said she was with  approximately thirteen months of time and regularly seeing her i mean frankly to be the first to counselors that she was where she was with for such a brief period of time you know they couldn't even have gotten to and i believe one of them even testif you know it didn't surprise her that they had made any progress because they hadn't really been together long enough and i think it was four sessions four sessions wasn't enough time to even establish a relationship with somebody much less make progress going forward on trying to resolve what were a number of issues that were going on at the time but even at the end of this this characterized your client is still remaining guarded when it came to discuss seaview defense that led to the treatment that is accurate she had she seemed to have difficulty accepting responsibility that is accurate that it's mrs lists opinion and again you know my client believe she was being as forthcoming as she had the ability to be and i believe ms list is the one who actually recognized that there may be some personality characteristics that are preventing her from being able at that point to be more engaging in the in the process that was going on now your honor the bottom line is i believe it's against the manifest weight of the evidence for this trial court to find that reasonable efforts were not being made as i indicated she was always engaged and always  completing services throughout this three year long journey that she had bent on and she had our regularly been making efforts to do what she could to correct the conditions including learning things in parenting class and through anger management counseling noted that responded deny gauge in counseling and should deny complete the sex under sesame now as has already been mentioned she completely refused to leave the sex intercessor now it's there's general two thousand and fifteen which was probably because they were removed from her care already and that's when the now even though she did go to counseling respond it did not apply anything that she learned now while she did complete the majority of her services the progress of not of such quality that a v could be returned to respondents here and did the issue was not objective standard and with regarding the objective standard just completely refusing to do that is not objective now because the state now here in the state proved by very convincing evidence that  scared place she completely refused to do the sex offender stuff and there's just a part of potential danger that eighty could be exposed to if she if he was returned to a response care and for would only like to point out two things on rebuttal the first one is contrary to what the state has indicated the state indicated that she did not apply anything that she had learned in her parenting classes or anger management classes that she took but no one the witnesses of the nine witnesses that testified before the trial court indicated that they believe that she was not applying the things that she had learned in her parent classes and anger management classes in dealing with or in participating in visitation with her child and the only other thing that i would indicate again in in that case in re l l as the court indicated that minimally reasonable progress requires measurable or demonstrably movement toward the goal of reunification not completion of the service plan but just movement towards the goal and it is it is my opinion and it is audrey's opinion that