# STRATEGY GUIDE — Scenario 33: “The Two Petitions”

*Game documentation for “The First 90 Days,” a fictional simulation. This guide describes play in this scenario only. It is general information about how the simulation works — not legal advice for any real case.*

## (1) The win

**Ending — Goal Change Denied, Exception Documented**

State it honestly: this is a **partial** win, and the scenario does not pretend otherwise. The goal change is denied or deferred and an ASFA exception is documented in the record. Lark does not come home in this ending — no ending in this scenario returns her. The case continues, the plan's remaining work remains, and what you have won is the record position the rest of the case will be played from: a current Track A file, and a documented answer to the fifteen-month clock. That is the best ending this scenario offers, and it is genuinely the best — the alternatives are the same changed goal with less and less of your record surviving it.

## (2) The route

Key decision points, in order. Node titles are exactly as they appear in the data.

1. **Two Tracks on One Whiteboard** — accept counsel's framing and learn the clock: placement June 2, 2025; fifteen months arrives September 2, 2026. *Changes:* the hidden map item is recorded; every later choice is played against two tracks instead of one.
2. **Track A, Night Class** — *Stay for the session and sign in.* *Changes:* a hidden attendance item (session 10 of 12) enters the file; the missed-session summary that powers the weak paths never gets written.
3. **Say It in Writing** — *File the written progress statement, with certificates attached.* *Changes:* sets **writtenProgress**; your progress becomes part of the court file instead of waiting for someone to ask about it.
4. **The File, Including the Form** — *Sign and send the record request.* *Changes:* sets **recordsRequested**; the request expressly includes the full assessment — the form, the item ratings, and the outcome. This is the single highest-leverage choice in the scenario: it is the only route to the next node.
5. **The Referral That Reads 'To Be Sent'** — *Take the page to Ms. Osei.* *Changes:* sets **servicesGapFound** and records the hidden item: the coached-visit referral the plan called necessary, marked “to be sent” in month six, never sent. The third ASFA exception now has a document behind it.
6. **Two Timelines, Side by Side** — *File the two-timeline page with the court now.* *Changes:* sets **timelineFiled**; Track A progress and the Track B clock enter the record on one page, in spring, where later summaries must reckon with them.
7. **Chasing the Referral, on Paper** — *Send the letter — polite, dated, specific.* *Changes:* sets **gapLetter**; the agency is asked, in writing, to make the owed referral and confirm — so the answer (and the late-August making of it) becomes dated record instead of a hallway memory.
8. **The Overtime Shift** — *Make the trade and attend session eleven.* *Changes:* cash −30; hidden attendance item, session 11 of 12. The pattern in ink now matches the parent you are describing.
9. **Which Track Does That Belong To?** — *Let counsel ask the question on the record, and keep attending the services side as if it were the whole case.* *Changes:* a hidden item — the two timelines are stated side by side, with progress evidence assigned to both tracks. Stopping here would be read as surrender on both tracks at once.
10. **Nine of Twelve, Corrected** — *Send the correction this week, with the sign-in copies attached.* *Changes:* sets **recordCorrected**; the agency's stale “nine of twelve” draft line never gets to testify in September.
11. **Choosing the Lead Argument** — *Lead with the services gap.* (The documented-compelling-reason choice at this same node also reaches this ending, by the parallel hearing node; the services lead is the stronger route because its core fact comes from the agency's own page.) *Changes:* routes to **The Empty Referral Box, in a Letter**, setting **exceptionDocumented**.
12. **The Fifteen-Month Hearing — The Services Record** — *Listen to the order.* *Changes:* reaches **Ending — Goal Change Denied, Exception Documented**, with the goal unchanged, the exception documented, and the owed services ordered made with dates.

Also on the route, and worth their small costs: attaching the summer's clean screens at **Clean Screens, Filed**, reading the assessment pages item by item at **The Assessment Pages**, and finishing the program at **The Twelfth Session** — each converts something true into something filed before September has to go looking for it.

**Full verified route (every node, in order):** Eleven Months In → A Second Envelope → Two Tracks on One Whiteboard → Track A, Night Class → Say It in Writing → The File, Including the Form → The Referral That Reads 'To Be Sent' → Saturday with Lark → The School Form → Two Timelines, Side by Side → Chasing the Referral, on Paper → The Overtime Shift → The Interim Review → Which Track Does That Belong To? → Clean Screens, Filed → The Assessment Pages → Coffee at the Foster Home → Nine of Twelve, Corrected → The Long Visit → Seven Candles, Counted Twice → The Twelfth Session → A Letter Meant for the File → Choosing the Lead Argument → The Empty Referral Box, in a Letter → The Fifteen-Month Hearing — The Services Record → Ending — Goal Change Denied, Exception Documented. *(This route has been walked programmatically against the scenario data; every step is a real choice edge in the graph.)*

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

- **The fifteen-month clock has documented exceptions.** When a child has been in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months, the agency is pressed to file a petition to terminate parental rights — unless an exception applies: the child is being cared for by a relative; a compelling reason that filing would not be in the child's best interest is documented in the case plan; or the agency has not provided the services the plan identified as necessary for the child's safe return (42 U.S.C. § 675(5)(E)). The route wins by making one of those exceptions *documented*, not merely true — and in this scenario the services exception is provable from the agency's own service-plan page.
- **Your own record is yours on request.** The case record — including the full assessment, its form, its item ratings, and its outcome — “shall be released upon request” (55 Pa. Code § 3130.44(d)). Everything the route discovers, it discovers because the parent read the file before the hearing did. (The guide notes, as the game does, that whether the adjudication-phase disclosure rule, Pa.R.J.C.P. 1340(B)(1), reaches every scored item of an assessment form is untested; the route's request does not depend on that question.)
- **Counsel is a right, not a favor.** The parent has the right to counsel, and to appointed counsel if they cannot afford one (42 Pa.C.S. § 6337). Every structural move on the route — the timelines, the letter, the lead argument — is counsel's craft applied to the parent's paper.
- **A goal change is not a termination.** Had any later petition ever been filed, the agency would still have had to prove its grounds by clear and convincing evidence. Keeping the exception documented is what keeps that day from being scheduled on an incomplete record.

## (4) The traps

- **Skipping the record request** at *The File, Including the Form* (“one fight at a time”). Costs you the referral page, the assessment pages, and any services exception: you cannot document a gap you never saw. Every strong ending in this scenario is downstream of this stamp.
- **Raising the owed referral by phone** at *Chasing the Referral, on Paper*. Costs you the dated ask and the dated answer; by September the conversation is two memories, and the file records neither.
- **“Keep your head down”** at *Choosing the Lead Argument*. Costs you the documented exception itself: “progressing” is a summary word, and September is conducted in documents. This choice routes directly to the thin hearing, where the goal is changed.
- **Stopping attendance after the goal changes** at *The Fifteen-Month Hearing — Changed*. The most understandable trap in the scenario, and the most expensive: it converts a changed goal into **Ending — The Quiet Collapse**, because the file has a column for attendance and no column for grief.

## (5) What no strategy controls

The route controls the record. It does not control the judge, who could weigh Lark's settled year with the foster family more heavily on exactly this paper; it does not control the workers, whose unchecked referral box was an accident of an ordinary office and whose honesty about dates, in the winning hearing, was a choice they made; and it does not control luck — a referral sent on time would have deleted the route's strongest document, and a different foster family could have rewritten every visit scene. Outcomes in this scenario turn on workers, judges, and luck as well as on the parent. What strategy changes is which facts the calendar meets when it arrives — two columns, current, and impossible to summarize honestly using only one of them.