Keep Your Own Record: A Family Documentation Kit for Alabama DHR Cases

If DHR is in your family’s life, there is a file on your family. The agency writes it and the agency keeps it. This kit is how you keep a file of your own.

Secure checkout and digital delivery are handled by Payhip. Your download arrives by email right after checkout.

What is inside

28 printable pages that turn into a working binder: the court’s own timeline, your logs, your recordings index, and the letters that put everything in writing.

Part 1: Know the Record

What a Case Action Summary is, what to check on it, a worksheet to check yours, a master timeline, and a hearing dates tracker.

Part 2: Keep Your Own Record

RECORD EVERY INTERACTION. The Alabama one-party consent rule explained in plain words, call logs, visit logs, a drug screen and class attendance log, a recordings and papers index, and a people in my case directory.

Part 3: Put It in Writing

A hearing prep checklist, questions for your attorney, and four fill-in templates: request a Case Action Summary, follow up a verbal promise in writing, request records, and ask for a change in writing.

Part 4: When Something Goes Wrong

How to look up a worker’s Alabama social work license, a complaint facts worksheet, a complaint statement template, and the DHR chain, supervisor to county director to state office, if the worker holds no license.

How it works

Download, print, put it in a 3-ring binder, and bring it to every hearing, visit, and meeting. Log pages can be printed as many times as your case needs.

Questions

Is this legal advice?
No. It is general information and practical worksheets, built from Families vs. DHR’s published Know Your Rights work. For advice about your case, talk to your attorney.

Will it work outside Alabama?
The logs, timeline, and letters work anywhere. The recording rule, hearing, license, and agency sections are Alabama law and Alabama contacts.

How do I get it?
Payhip emails your download right after checkout. The PDF prints on regular letter paper.

Can I share the file?
It is licensed for one family’s personal use. Send other families to this page so they get the current version.

Alabama specific. General information, not legal advice about your specific case.