# Strategy Guide — Scenario 61: "The Expired Referral"

*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: "Ending — Referred, Continuously."**

State it honestly: this is a **partial** win, and it is the best this scenario offers. The referral chain is documented end to end — sent Monday, June 15, 2026, waited out on a five-week list, nudged in writing before its sixty-day window closed on Friday, August 14, 2026, re-sent as a continuation with the original queue position honored, the Step A evaluation completed Thursday, August 20, 2026, and Step B enrolled on it. The delay is attributed on the record to the referral mechanics, not to Tanya. Cora does **not** come home at the end of this ending: her placement continues and Step B has weeks to run. The win is that the file tells the truth about a machine's failure instead of telling it as a mother's — permanently, for every future reader. There is no ending in this scenario where the referral does not expire. Anyone selling you one is selling you a different game.

## (2) The route

Verified by walking the scenario graph from the start node (see the verification note at the end). The walk passes, in order, through: Two Steps, In Order; Sent — But On What Paper?; Sixty Days, In Print; Name on the List, Date on the Wall; Everything Else Runs Clean; The Installment Book, Finished; A Letter With Two Dates In It; Your Lawyer Reads the Window; Three Names Ahead; The Quiet Weeks; Day Fifty: The Nudge; A Letter Doing Its Quiet Work; The Window Closes — On Paper; The Evaluation, Completed; Ask for the File Itself; The File's Version of the Summer; Step B Answers; The Packet, In Date Order; The Review. Key decision points:

1. **Sent — But On What Paper?** — *Ask for the referral copy in writing — sent date and validity window included.* Cash −3. Sets **referralDated**. The anchor exhibit of the whole scenario: the agency's own page showing the referral sent Monday, June 15, 2026 and valid through Friday, August 14, 2026. Without it, the window is a rumor about a month.
2. **Name on the List, Date on the Wall** — *Write down the intake date, the wait, and the batch week before you leave the building.* The provider's own arithmetic, in your hand: a five-week wait, evaluations batched in the week beginning Monday, August 17, 2026 — three days after the window closes.
3. **Day Fifty: The Nudge** — *Send the written nudge today — agency and provider, dates stated, copies kept.* Cash −3. Sets **diaryNudge**. Sent Tuesday, August 4, 2026, ten days before expiry, this is the document that converts the re-send from a discovered lapse into a documented duty — and the lapse, when it comes, into the sender's timing rather than the parent's.
4. **The Evaluation, Completed** — *File the re-referral confirmation with the original referral copy, in date order.* Cash −4. Sets **rereferralProof**. The provider honors the original queue position; the evaluation is completed Thursday, August 20, 2026; the confirmation page is the link that proves the chain has no gap.
5. **Ask for the File Itself** — *Sign the written request for the record — referral chain, chronology, draft report.* Sets **recordsRequested**. The agency's own file records the referral promptly on Monday, June 15, 2026 and the re-referral after expiry — with no expiry note anywhere between them. Quoting those dates back is what answers the chronology's "A not completed."
6. **The Packet, In Date Order (review preparation)** — Cash −6 for the court copies. The chain assembled as a single sequence: referral, intake, waitlist letters, nudge, continuation, evaluation, Step B's enrollment letter.
7. **The Review** — *Present the whole chain — dated referral, written nudge, continuation proof, and the agency's own record.* This choice is flag-gated: it is only available with **referralDated** + **diaryNudge** + **rereferralProof** + **recordsRequested** all set. It leads to **Ending — Referred, Continuously**.

Supporting route choices that cost nothing and keep the chain legible: the written waitlist check-in at **Three Names Ahead** (position and batch week confirmed in a reply you can keep, instead of a phone call the file cannot), and running every other line of the plan cleanly through **Everything Else Runs Clean** and the visit weeks, so that at the review the only outstanding line is the one the machine owns.

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

Only principles from the scenario's verified set are stated here. Note first what the scenario does **not** do: the sixty-day referral window is not stated as law anywhere in the game. It is administrative machinery — a provider's validity period — and the game treats it exactly that way: a fact to document, not a right to invoke.

- **The case record is available on written request** — 55 Pa. Code § 3130.44(d) ("shall be released upon request"). Step 5 is that right, exercised in writing. It is what turns the agency's chronology from an assertion into a quotation — and the quotation, referral date and re-referral date with silence between them, is the packet's strongest page.
- **Counsel assembles and sequences** (42 Pa.C.S. § 6337). Reviews believe sequences; the lawyer's whole function in this route is to make the machine's part of the sequence as documented as the parent's.
- **The federal clock, in this guide only, and in the disciplined form the verified set allows:** under 42 U.S.C. § 675(5)(E), when a child has been in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months, the agency is generally to file for termination — except, among the statute's three exceptions, where the agency has identified services necessary for the child's safe return that it has not provided to the family. A sequential plan whose first step sat in a referral chain — sent, expired unattended, re-sent to the back of a queue — is that exception's shape. But the exception is an *argument*, and arguments need exhibits: it is record-dependent, it speaks to the *filing decision*, and any later termination case would still have to be proven by the agency by clear and convincing evidence. The chain documented on this route is what would make the argument available. The game itself makes no promise about it, asserts no filing date, and depicts no termination outcome.

## (4) The traps

1. **Trusting the phone call at "Sent — But On What Paper?"** because Ms. Beam sent the referral and will track it. She did send it. Cost: no **referralDated** — the expiry survives the summer as "about two months," a shape that cannot be nudged against, quoted, or attached to anything, and the best presentation at the review closes.
2. **Assuming it is handled at "Day Fifty: The Nudge."** The agency sent the referral; agencies track their own referrals — a reasonable belief, and the machine's favorite. Cost: no **diaryNudge**. The window closes silently on Friday, August 14, 2026, the re-referral goes out days later as a new arrival, and five weeks of queue position evaporate without a single person deciding they should.
3. **Leaving the continuation confirmation in the provider's portal at "The Evaluation, Completed."** The evaluation is done, and done feels like what counts. Cost: no **rereferralProof**. The chain reaches the review with its most important link unshowable, and a completed evaluation gets narrated as a late one.
4. **Explaining the summer yourself at "The Review."** Your account is accurate in every particular, and the room receives it the way rooms that run on attachments receive voices. Cost: **"Ending — Expired, As Written"** — the chronology's four words stand as the whole account of the summer. Presenting partial paper reaches **"Ending — A Gap, Half-Explained"**: the gap is contested rather than attributed, which is exactly what half a chain earns.

## (5) What no strategy controls

Whether the provider honors a continuation or treats every re-send as a new arrival; whether the batch week slips; whether Ms. Beam's office, nudged or not, re-sends on time; whether a report writer reads a packet or copies a chronology; and Cora's own clock — she spent this summer three years old, in someone else's house, whatever the paperwork concludes about whose delay it was. A lighter caseload, a provider with a longer window, a queue that moved faster: any of them changes this summer without Tanya changing anything. What the route controls is narrower: whether a delay everyone involved agreed was a machine's is *documented* as a machine's — because in this system, an undocumented system failure is re-filed, by default, under the parent's name.

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*Verification: this route was walked programmatically against `scenario-61.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 (flags at the ending: diaryNudge, recordsRequested, referralDated, rereferralProof); cash never went negative on the walk. Walked path: start → copy_choice → copy_kept → intake → middle_weeks → visit_clean → provider_letter → lawyer_check → queue_check → waiting_weeks → nudge_choice → nudge_sent → expiry_kept → evaluation_done → records_beat → record_arrives → enroll_letter → review_prep → review → end_win. The walk terminates at the ending node titled "Ending — Referred, Continuously" after visiting 20 nodes, with $114 of the $130 starting cash remaining.*