Background
In early 2024, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) petitioned the Ingham County Circuit Court, Family Division, to take jurisdiction over respondent-mother’s three minor children. The primary concern was the impact of respondent’s persistent mental-health struggles on her ability to safely parent. Those struggles included auditory and visual hallucinations, multiple hospitalizations, and diagnoses of schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type), panic disorder, and PTSD. A court-ordered psychological evaluation further identified evidence of cognitive impairment, likely attributable to medication or hallucinations, and recommended that respondent receive extra time and written copies of oral explanations. The evaluating psychologist concluded that respondent’s children would face significant risk of harm if returned to her care.
DHHS developed a case service plan that provided respondent an extensive array of services aimed at addressing barriers to reunification, including emotional stability, parenting skills, housing, domestic relations, and finances. Accommodations included transportation, appointment reminders, coordination with service providers, assistance completing the psychological evaluation questionnaire, material support such as pill organizers and planners, and help securing a financial payee and placement in an adult foster-care program. DHHS also helped secure the appointment of a lawyer-guardian ad litem for respondent before adjudication.
Despite respondent’s participation in most services and her evident love for her children, witnesses at the termination hearing—including her foster-care supervisor and multiple mental-health service providers—testified that she failed to demonstrate sufficient benefit from services or meaningful progress toward alleviating reunification barriers. DHHS filed a supplemental petition for termination in late 2024. Following a two-day termination hearing, the trial court found that DHHS had made reasonable reunification efforts, that statutory grounds for termination existed, and that termination was in the children’s best interests. Respondent appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the termination order, holding that the trial court did not err in finding DHHS made reasonable reunification efforts. The court declined to resolve whether respondent’s challenge was preserved, because even under the more demanding plain-error standard she failed to demonstrate any error at all. The record showed that DHHS knew of respondent’s disabilities from the outset and modified its standard practices accordingly, satisfying its overlapping obligations under Michigan child-welfare law and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The court rejected respondent’s three specific arguments. First, it found ample record evidence of concrete accommodations, catalogued in the foster-care supervisor’s termination-hearing testimony. Second, it found no support for the claim that DHHS prematurely pursued termination: the psychological evaluation was completed in April 2024, services continued for months thereafter, and the supplemental petition was not filed until late 2024. Third, it found that DHHS’s decision to seek termination was grounded not in an unquestioning acceptance of the psychological evaluation but in the weight of testimony from multiple service providers reflecting respondent’s continued inability to meet her own daily needs without intervention.
Applying In re Sanborn, 337 Mich App 252 (2021), the court emphasized that a respondent challenging the adequacy of services must establish that she would have fared better had other services been offered. Because respondent neither identified specific deficiencies in the accommodations provided nor proposed alternative services that would have produced better results, she failed to carry that burden.
Key Takeaways
- DHHS’s duty to make reasonable reunification efforts encompasses an affirmative obligation under the ADA to modify its policies and procedures to accommodate a parent’s known disability, provided such modifications do not fundamentally alter the service.
- A parent challenging the adequacy of DHHS’s disability accommodations must identify specific deficiencies and demonstrate that alternative or additional services would have produced better outcomes; generalized complaints are insufficient.
- Courts will consider whether DHHS continued providing services after receiving an unfavorable psychological evaluation; filing a termination petition months later, with services ongoing in the interim, does not render reunification efforts unreasonable.
- The court reiterated its expectation that DHHS timely file appellate briefs in termination cases, noting that a brief submitted 166 days late—without a motion for extension—reflects poorly on the State’s commitment to proceedings as serious as the permanent severance of parental rights.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the framework Michigan courts apply at the intersection of child-welfare reunification requirements and the ADA. For practitioners representing parents with cognitive or psychiatric disabilities, the opinion underscores that preserving an ADA-accommodation challenge requires a timely objection to the service plan—not merely a generalized appeal-level argument—and that the burden to show a better outcome from different services rests squarely on the respondent. Agencies defending termination orders can point to this case for the proposition that individualized, documented accommodations, even if imperfect, satisfy the reasonable-efforts standard when the parent cannot demonstrate how alternative measures would have changed the result.
The court’s pointed footnote criticizing DHHS’s 166-day delay in filing its appellate brief—and its citation to a prior case in which DHHS filed the day before argument—signals ongoing judicial frustration with the agency’s appellate practice in termination cases. While the late brief was accepted, the panel’s explicit warning that the State should “timely devote resources to defending lower court judgments” in parental-rights matters may prompt procedural reform within DHHS’s appellate unit.