Dept. of Human Services v. A. R. S.

A juvenile court may not continue wardship over a child or change the permanency plan for the child from reunification to adoption based on conditions or circumstances that are not explicitly stated or fairly implied by the jurisdictional judgment.

Mother and child appealed a permanency judgment that denied their motions to dismiss jurisdiction over child and continued the plan of "return to parent." Among other things, they assigned error to the juvenile court's denial of their motions to dismiss jurisdiction and its determination that mother has made insufficient progress toward ameliorating the bases for jurisdiction to enable the child to be returned to her. They asserted that wardship should have been dismissed because mother had adequately addressed the bases upon which jurisdiction was established and the juvenile court improperly relied on different basis--including mother's purported personality disorder--for maintaining jurisdiction. On that same basis, mother and child challenged the permanency judgment in that DHS failed to establish the insufficiency of mother's progress toward ameliorating the bases for jurisdiction that had been pleaded and proved. The Court of Appeals held that a juvenile court may not continue wardship over a child or change the permanency plan for the child from reunification to adoption based on conditions or circumstances that are not explicitly stated or fairly implied by the jurisdictional judgment. Accordingly, the Court concluded that the juvenile court erred in relying on mother's purported personality disorder in assessing mother's progress toward reunification and in denying mother's and child's motions to dismiss jurisdiction over child. Reversed and remanded.