Senate Bill 6020 (prefiled 01/07/26) amends multiple existing statutes rather than creating an entirely new agency. The bill proposes renaming or otherwise referring to the department of children, youth, and families oversight board as the "department of children, youth, and families social club" in numerous RCWs and makes broad changes to RCW 43.216.015 and several other sections, with creation of at least one new section. The statutory text retains the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) as an executive branch agency and preserves references to federal and state Indian child welfare law. The bill significantly revises board structure, membership, powers, and procedures. It adds specified members (including law enforcement, a child welfare caseworker, early learning practitioner, current or former foster youth under 25, a person under 25 with juvenile justice experience, a physician, and a judicial representative), sets appointment rules (legislative caucus appointments and gubernatorial nominations with legislative approval), four-year terms, a geographic residency requirement, and timelines for appointments. It defines the board’s powers and duties (including access to ombuds records subject to law, requesting investigations, receiving department outcome data and documents, reviewing and overruling certain internal licensing decisions, conducting annual contract reviews for performance-based contracting, convening stakeholder meetings, and issuing an annual report to the governor and legislature). The board selects an executive director exempt from civil service, is limited to one full-time equivalent staff, is subject to the Open Public Meetings Act with confidentiality limits, and has specified compensation and travel reimbursement rules for members. The bill also amends contracting, procurement, records, and court procedures. It requires and authorizes expanded use of performance-based contracts and statewide procurements to expand network administrator coverage, sets procurement and reporting deadlines (including RFPs by 9/30/2018, expanded implementation by 1/30/2019 if qualified responders exist, annual status reports beginning 1/1/2019, and a recommendation by 9/1/2020), and limits the initial financial risk transfer to network administrators during a three-year start-up period. Network administrators must assist caseworkers, manage service arrays, may redistribute funds with department approval, and must receive relevant data for performance monitoring; the department must actively monitor compliance and make performance data public consistent with privacy laws. The bill modifies juvenile records and confidentiality rules by allowing motions to correct or destroy records, limiting compelled testimony and disclosure of ombuds materials (with specified exceptions and a noted carve-out regarding the department entity), establishing disclosure rules for certain child welfare records to other agencies, and authorizing superior courts to create early childhood court programs with community teams, community coordinators, neutrally facilitated family team meetings, required parent counsel participation, and data sharing with the DCYF board entity. Several provisions and full texts are not included in the extracted materials: the membership list begins mid-series so earlier members are not shown, the exact edits that implement the board name change are unclear because the text contains editorial markup, and the full texts of the amendments to several cited RCWs and the new section(s) are not provided.

If enacted, the bill creates a more structured and empowered oversight body (referred to in the text as the department of children, youth, and families social club) with a larger, more diverse membership, the ability to request ombuds investigations and departmental records, to review and overturn certain internal licensing decisions, to hire an exempt executive director and one staff FTE, and to issue annual public reports and convene stakeholder meetings. It also requires the Department of Children, Youth, and Families to move more contracts to performance-based models, run procurements to expand “network administrator” coverage statewide for family support services, share performance data publicly (within confidentiality limits), keep expenditures within existing appropriations, and preserve tribal contracting rights and opportunities. The groups most affected will be DCYF and its contractors (network administrators and service providers), the new oversight board and its member appointers, county and tribal partners, courts running the new optional early childhood court programs, and families and foster parents. Agencies will face new reporting, contracting, monitoring, and training duties, potential administrative costs to run procurements and performance monitoring, and some shifts in how funds are allocated within provider networks (network administrators can reallocate funds with department approval and may be subject to limited financial risk in the initial contract period). The bill also creates program requirements for courts (community teams, coordinators, parent attorneys at meetings, data sharing) and tight confidentiality rules with some exceptions; however, several implementation details and the final effect of the proposed renaming and certain cross-referenced amendments are unclear from the provided text.