Court Opinion

ID: 9525880
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:09:09.188465+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:17:20.016997
License: Public Domain

PAGE, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. Today, the court rushes to condemn 24-year-old S.E.P. and terminate her parental rights for her failure to comply with a court-ordered case plan, but never accounts for the circumstances surrounding her failure to do so. Both the court’s opinion and the district court’s findings make clear that the termination of S.E.P.’s parental rights stemmed primarily from her failure to comply with the case plan’s requirement that S.E.P. separate from her husband J.W.P. In reviewing the case plan, I have found nothing to suggest that the county provided S.E.P. with support intended to help her separate from J.W.P.1 Given the apparent *390lack of support provided by the county to meet this requirement, it should come as no surprise that the requirement was not met. S.E.P.’s case plan was doomed from its inception.
Under the best of circumstances, terminating a relationship with a spouse can be difficult, both emotionally and economically, and requires a great deal of support. Given S.E.P.’s history of psychological problems, her young age, her dependency on J.W.P. for economic support, and the trauma necessarily attendant to the removal of her children from her home, S.E.P. was unlikely to successfully end her relationship with J.W.P. without help from the county specifically focused on facilitating the end of that relationship, especially within the compressed time period between the imposition of the case plan and the hearing terminating S.E.P.’s rights. Despite S.E.P.’s background, there is nothing in this record indicating that the county ever provided her with the emotional, practical, or psychological assistance necessary to make separation from J.W.P. possible. By failing to provide S.E.P. concrete assistance in removing J.W.P. from the home and ending her relationship with him, the county effectively ensured that S.E.P. would violate her case plan and lose custody of her children. While it is true that the county worked with S.E.P. to help her develop better parenting skills, such skills would not have assisted S.E.P. in ending her relationship with J.W.P. Moreover, as I understand the record, it is unclear that, absent termination of her relationship with J.W.P., there was any real likelihood that the county’s efforts to develop S.E.P.’s parenting skills had any possibility of succeeding.
Perhaps the efforts that the county was obligated to take under the statutory scheme would only have resulted in a delay in the termination of S.E.P.’s parental rights. Nonetheless, it is not our province to ignore the statute’s “reasonable efforts” requirement. Because nothing in the record indicates that the county gave S.E.P. any real assistance in ending her relationship with J.W.P. and thereby retaining custody of her children, I respectfully dissent.

. For the court to simply assert that the county provided S.E.P. with "therapy, shared family foster care, programs through the Advocates for Family Peace, in-home family services, and personal meetings with a county social worker” is to completely ignore the issue. The failing here is not in the number of services and programs the county provided, but in the record before us. So long as S.E.P. was unable to separate from J.W.P., she could not comply with her case plan. Because the record gives no indication that any of the services and programs identified by the court would have or could have assisted S.E.P. in separating from J.W.P., it cannot be said that "reasonable efforts” were made. For the court to hold otherwise requires it to find facts which simply do not exist in this record.