# Strategy Guide — Scenario 106: "Two Courtrooms, One Address"

*Game documentation for a fictional simulation in "The First 90 Days" (Tactic Watch). The family, the case, and every choice below are fictional. This guide is general information about how the scenario is built — it is not legal advice for any real case.*

## (1) The win

**Best ending: "Two Courtrooms, One Address."**

State it honestly: this is a **full** win, and it is labelled as one. Garland and Maxine are home, the dependency case is closed *before* the fifteen-month date — Tuesday, July 7, 2026 — and the children's father's criminal case remains pending in its own courtroom, where it always belonged. The win is not that his case ended well; it never ends in this story. The win is that Corinne's case was finally measured on Corinne: a plan re-aimed in writing at her own actions, a record corrected item by item until the scored form stopped rating two adults as one household, and an exception packet filed in May for a date in July. Note the lesser ending "Home, With the Case Still Open" is **partial** by design — children home, filing held off by the packet, but the case kept open past the date — and it is not this guide's win; it is what the packet alone, without the corrected record beneath it, can buy.

## (2) The route

Verified by walking the scenario graph from the start node (see the verification note at the end). Key decision points, in order — node title, winning choice, and what it changes:

1. **What You Did, Dated** — *Provide the dated protective-actions list to the agency, in writing, and keep the stamped copy.* Sets **protectiveLog**; hidden item: the mother's fourteen dated protective actions — the calls, the nights at Cordelia's she initiated, the stay-away order she sought — provided in writing. This list becomes the correction's spine at step 6.
2. **Keeping the Paper Current** — *Keep the notebook current and go to the children's visit time at Cordelia's.* Sets **orderKept**; hidden item: the stay-away order she sought kept current, as the process allows, with dates documented. (Described generically, as process only — no protection-from-abuse or criminal-procedure proposition is stated anywhere in the scenario.)
3. **Re-Aiming the Plan** — *File the written challenge and ask that the plan be amended on the record.* Cash −10. Sets **conditionsChallenged**; hidden item: plan conditions challenged in writing, re-aiming requested. This is the scenario's founding document: the first-frightened-week conditions that required *his* attendance, *his* program, and an absence of police contact created partly by her own protective calls are challenged as a document — not argued about in a check-in.
4. **Asking for the File** — *Sign and send the written record request this week.* Sets **recordsRequested** (55 Pa. Code § 3130.44(d)). The request is what turns suspicion about the scored form into the packet itself: his program dates and her June call, rated under her name, in plain type.
5. **Two People, One Column** — *Build the written correction, item by item, with the protective-actions list and the June officer's report attached.* This choice is flag-gated on **recordsRequested**. Sets **correctionBuilt**; hidden item: correction filed item-by-item from the released record, his items separated from hers with attachments.
6. **The First Full Review** — *Complete it — starting with the services that are actually yours.* A route choice: the plan having been amended on the record in this hearing (conditions re-aimed at her actions — the § 6351 review doing exactly its listed work), completion becomes possible for the first time, because the plan can now be finished by the person it governs.
7. **The Semester Underneath** — *Ask that Cordelia be heard formally at the next review.* Cash −12 (copies, fares, a school physical fee — the ordinary arithmetic under every plan).
8. **Cordelia, Heard** — *Ask Mr. Albright what spring's work actually is.* Sets **kinshipDocumented**; hidden item: the kinship resource heard on the record under § 6336.1 (Act 48 of 2023; § 6302), her qualifications and the children's life with her documented — the kinship strand of the exception packet, built a season early.
9. **Auditing the Plan, Line by Line** — *Face the spring's first piece of weather.* Sets **auditDone**; hidden item: the line-by-line audit — every one of the mother's conditions documented complete, his items shown to live in his file.
10. **Paper Arrives Out of Season** — *Answer the draft in writing before the review, attaching the filed correction and the audit.* Cash −10. Sets **setbackAnswered**; hidden item: the covering worker's template draft — which re-blended the household, citing even a call about another street — answered in writing and reissued before it could harden into the review's record.
11. **The Packet, Assembled Before the Date** — *File the written exception packet now, ahead of the fifteen-month date.* Cash −15 (you finish the route with $113 of the $160 start). Sets **compellingPacket**; hidden item: kinship and compelling-reason exception packet filed in May, for the July 7, 2026 date. Filed *before* is the entire mechanic — a packet produced at the deadline competes with it; a packet filed ahead of it changes what the deadline is.
12. **The Other Courtroom, Still Sitting** — *Press for closure of the dependency case on the mother's completed record.* Sets **pressedClosure**; hidden item: written submission pressing for the permanency decision to be made on her record, without waiting for the other courtroom.
13. **The Permanency Determination** — *Ask for return confirmed and the dependency case closed, before the fifteen-month date.* This choice is flag-gated: it is only available with **compellingPacket** + **correctionBuilt** both set. It leads to **Two Courtrooms, One Address**.

Supporting route choices that cost nothing and keep the file separated: filing his continuance notices in the folder's separate section at **Paper From the Other Building** and **Weather From the Other Building**, the school-paper documentation at **The Semester Underneath**, and the trial-period documentation at **Home, on Trial Terms** — where his case's latest continuance is filed as weather, and the trial period continues uninterrupted.

## (3) Why this wins — the law as it is supposed to work

Only principles from the scenario's verified set are stated here:

- **The front-end clocks and counsel work as written.** The shelter care hearing comes not later than 72 hours after the children are taken into care (42 Pa.C.S. § 6332; 23 Pa.C.S. § 6315(d)), with the right to counsel and appointed counsel (42 Pa.C.S. § 6337; § 6332(a)).
- **Reviews measure compliance and progress on the record before the court** — whether placement remains necessary, whether the plan is being followed, what progress has been made, and the efforts to finalize it (42 Pa.C.S. § 6351(e)(3)(i); § 6351(f)) — and the court then chooses among the outcomes the law lists, on those determinations and all the relevant evidence (§ 6351(f.1)). That framework is what makes the written challenge (step 3) a legal act rather than a complaint: a review cannot credit compliance with conditions that depend on another adult, so the route first gets the conditions re-aimed at the mother's own actions — her order-keeping, her calls, her completed services — and then completes them, line by line, auditable.
- **Agency records are obtainable on request** — 55 Pa. Code § 3130.44(d). Steps 4–5 are the verified record-correction discipline: the released packet shows the scored assessment form rating his program dates and her own protective call under her name; the filed correction answers item by item, with the officer's report and her dated protective-actions list attached, so the record supports the separated account.
- **Kinship is documented, not asserted.** Cordelia is heard as a potential kinship care resource on her qualifications (42 Pa.C.S. § 6336.1, as amended by Act 48 of 2023; definition at 42 Pa.C.S. § 6302) — which is what puts the children's actual placement life (two doors from home, unbroken school and medical continuity) into the record in a form the ASFA analysis can use.
- **The federal clock has documented exceptions, and documentation has a date.** At fifteen of the most recent twenty-two months — here, entry April 7, 2025, so the date is Tuesday, July 7, 2026 — the agency's filing duty changes unless an exception is documented: the child being cared for by a relative, a documented compelling reason filing would not serve the child, or services the agency was required to provide but did not (42 U.S.C. § 675(5)(E)). Steps 8 and 11 build the first two strands into a packet and file it in May. Had a petition been filed, the agency would still have had to prove its grounds by **clear and convincing** evidence — the route never treats the clock as a termination, only as a deadline for paper.
- **The honest outside-the-set note:** victim-protection law surely exists beyond this scenario's verified set, and this route deliberately does not rely on it. The stay-away order appears only as generic process description — a judge's order that he stay away, sought by the mother and kept current as the process allows — with no citation, no invented conditions, and no durations. Every win on the route rests on documentation and the verified dependency mechanics above. In a real case, counsel would assess what additional law applies.

## (4) The traps

1. **Telling Ms. Harkness the protective history at a check-in instead of filing the dated list at "What You Did, Dated."** Cost: no **protectiveLog**. The facts exist as "mother has been cooperative" — atmosphere that no correction can attach, because the correction's attachments are this list and the June officer's report.
2. **Explaining the June call again at "Measured on Someone Else's Conduct" instead of challenging the plan in writing.** Cost: no **conditionsChallenged** — the founding defect. The plan keeps scoring his conduct in her column, the failure-to-protect measure is never re-aimed, and the final-review branch runs to "Failure to Protect, Sustained": an adjudication sustained on conditions she could never control.
3. **Waiting to request the record at "Asking for the File."** Cost: no **recordsRequested**, which closes the gated correction choice at "Two People, One Column." The conflation is then never answered item by item; it is merely known — and a known-but-uncorrected blend is what the petition ending is filed on.
4. **Letting the spring draft sort itself out at "Paper Arrives Out of Season."** Cost: no **setbackAnswered**. A covering worker's template re-blends the household in the review's own summary — citing a call about another street — and unanswered drafts become records by default.
5. **Holding the exception packet for the July hearing at "The Packet, Assembled Before the Date."** Cost: the packet arrives *at* the deadline instead of before it. The full-closure ask loses its footing, and the branch runs at best to "Home, With the Case Still Open" — the packet credited, the filing held off, the case kept open past July 7, 2026 — and at worst to "The Petition, Filed on Two People's Paper."

## (5) What no strategy controls

His case: its continuances, its calendar, its outcome — still pending when this story ends, on the winning route as on every other. The first frightened week itself, in which the plan was written the way such plans are written. The covering worker's template, the agency's filing posture, either judge, and the luck — it is luck — of a neighbor like Cordelia living two doors away and being willing to be documented. The route controls only the separation of the paper: that every fact in Corinne's file was assigned, in dated writing, to the adult it belonged to, before the hearings and the fifteen-month date read the file. Outcomes in this system turn on workers, judges, and luck as much as on any parent's choices. The strategy's whole claim is narrower: when the measuring was done, the measure was of her.

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*Verification: this route was walked programmatically against `scenario-106.json` — each named choice was followed from the start node in order; every intermediate node and choice exists; every flag-gated choice's requirements were satisfied by flags set earlier on the walk; the walk terminates at the ending node titled "Two Courtrooms, One Address" after visiting 36 nodes, with $113 of the $160 starting cash remaining.*