# Strategy Guide — Scenario 22: "Fifteen Months, Twins"

*Game documentation for a fictional simulation in "The First 90 Days" (Tactic Watch). The family, the choices, and the outcomes below exist only in this scenario. This is general information about how the simulation is built — not legal advice for any real case.*

*Route verified by walking `scenario-22.json` programmatically from `startNode` through the choices named below: the walk reaches the named ending in 21 nodes, with every intermediate node and choice present in the data.*

## (1) The win

**Ending — Both Home, at Different Speeds** (`end_both_home`).

Stated honestly: this is a *trial* return for both twins under an open, supervised case — not a closing, and not a guarantee. Maya returns on her readiness; Milo returns only because his treatment is transferred home under a written provider plan, with his aunt covering the hours the mother's shifts cannot. It is the best ending in the scenario, and it is still a beginning with paperwork and a short review already scheduled.

## (2) The route

1. **The Apartment Check** ("The Apartment Check") — *Ask for the signed check sheet, dated, one copy for each twin's tab.* Sets `housingLetter`; hidden item records the passed, signed housing check. Without it, the housing fact exists only as a verbal "looks good."
2. **Maya's Teacher** ("Maya's Teacher") — *Answer it — ask her to write it, dated, for Maya's tab.* Sets `mayaDoc` (cash −10); hidden item records Maya's documented readiness. This is Maya's half of the per-child record.
3. **Milo's Team** ("Milo's Team") — *Ask Priya for the timeline in writing.* Sets `miloTimeline` (cash −10); hidden item records Milo as mid-treatment with continuity documented. This is the factual spine of Milo's compelling-reason argument.
4. **The Waiting List Behind the Therapist** ("The Waiting List Behind the Therapist") — *Ask the desk for the waitlist fact in writing.* Hidden item documents clinic capacity — the fact no one in the family controls, made weighable.
5. **The Canceled Session** ("The Canceled Session") — *Text the worker, politely and in writing, asking for a make-up date.* Sets `makeupAsked`; hidden item logs the cancellation *and* the written request, so any gap that follows is the file's, not the mother's.
6. **Aunt Rosa's Spare Room** ("Aunt Rosa's Spare Room") — *Ask the agency to finish and file Rosa's study before the review.* Sets `miloKinship`. An unfinished study describes nothing; a filed one makes the relative exception available for Milo as a description, not an argument.
7. **Asking for the Whole File** ("Asking for the Whole File") — *Sign and send the request this week.* Sets `recordsRequested` — the hinge of the scenario. It unlocks **The Two Unsent Referrals**: per-child services the plan called necessary and never sent, which arms both the services exception and the strategy meeting. Skipping it routes you to the summary-only version of the same meeting.
8. **Choosing Doors, Child by Child** ("Choosing Doors, Child by Child") — *Build the full per-child packet.* Sets `packetBuilt`. The packet files each twin's documents under that twin's name, which is what lets the fifteen-month review rule on Maya and Milo separately.
9. **The Fifteen-Month Review — The Packet** ("The Fifteen-Month Review — The Packet") — *Ask for both twins home — Maya's return, and Milo's treatment transferred to a home program with Priya's plan.* This ask is only credible because steps 2–6 built the transfer plan's paper first. It leads through **Trial Terms, Two Names** to the win.

Also available from the same packet review — and nearly as good — is the split ask (Maya home, Milo with Rosa), which reaches **Ending — Split Outcome: One Home, One With Family**.

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

- The federal filing timeline runs **child by child**: at 15 of the most recent 22 months in foster care, the agency must file or join a petition to terminate parental rights *for that child* — unless an exception is documented *for that child* (42 U.S.C. § 675(5)(E)). The route wins by refusing to let "the twins" be answered as a set: each exception is built separately, from that child's own documents.
- All three exceptions are operationalized across the route: the child being cared for by a relative (Rosa's filed study, for Milo); a documented compelling reason that filing would not be in the child's best interest (Priya's mid-treatment timeline and the clinic capacity page, for Milo; documented readiness-plus-imminent-return, for Maya); and services the plan identified as necessary for safe return that the agency did not provide (the two unsent referrals, one per child).
- A parent may request the case record, which "shall be released upon request" (55 Pa. Code § 3130.44(d)). The route uses that right *before* the deadline, while the file can still change what gets filed into it.
- Even on the losing path, a filed petition is not a termination: grounds would still have to be proved by clear and convincing evidence at a separate hearing. The win matters because it keeps that hearing from being scheduled on an incomplete, merged record.

## (4) The traps

- **Taking verbal updates** (at the housing check, from Maya's teacher, or from Milo's provider). Each one feels cooperative and costs nothing in the moment; each converts a weighable document into a summary paragraph, and by the review the twins are answered as a set again — the road to **Ending — Filing Proceeds, for Both**.
- **Skipping the records request** at "Asking for the Whole File." You never see the services page, so the strongest per-child documents in the case — the agency's own unsent referrals — are never placed on the record in time. The services-letter door at the strategy meeting is built from what that page shows.
- **Keeping your head down** at "Choosing Doors, Child by Child." Real progress, unfiled: the review is conducted in documents, and progress that lives only in summaries produces the filing ending.
- **Letting Rosa's study wait.** Rosa's willingness is permanent; her study's presence in the file on the fifteen-month date is not. Without it, Milo's relative exception does not exist in the room, whatever the family knows to be true.

## (5) What no strategy controls

Provider capacity and waiting lists; a clinic boiler canceling a session; a caseworker's caseload and summary habits; which judge is assigned and the agency's posture on the day; and, above all, the pace of a four-year-old's treatment, which no letter can hurry. An identical mother with a provider who will not write, or a relative twenty minutes farther away, reaches a different ending on the same effort. Outcomes in this scenario — as in the published cases it is composited from — turn on workers, judges, treatment timelines, and luck as well as on the parent. The route above controls only the record. In this system, the record is the part that is yours.