Smith County 321st District Court Judge Carole Clark is retiring. She is pictured in her courtroom on Thursday Dec. 20, 2018. She made both of the quilts hanging on the walls. (Sarah A. Miller/Tyler Morning Telegraph)

The red, white and blue quilts adorning the walls of the 321st District Court courtroom are being packed up and taken home by the woman who made them. That woman is the judge who has presided over the court for the last two decades. 

Judge Carole Clark spent the past 20 years presiding over the designated family court in Smith County. She will retire on Jan. 1 when Robert Wilson is sworn in as the new judge. 

Clark is an avid quilter and knitter when she’s not at work. She has no plans to slow down, but she is planning to take a vacation with her husband. 

“I’m taking a vacation to West Texas,” she said. “My husband is going to hunt and I’m going to do some quilting.” 

Clark noted she hasn’t taken two weeks of time off since the 1990s.

The judge, who put trauma-informed practices in place in her courtroom and insisted Child Protective Services caseworkers and family law lawyers learn about childhood trauma and its effects on adulthood addictions, will continue working and educating people about those principles. 

“Texas Christian University made a documentary film about my court,” Clark said. “‘All Rise for the Children’ is coming out in April.”

The film was produced in conjunction with the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development at TCU.

Clark said she will work with the organization to take the film and the knowledge about Trust-Based Relational Intervention to other cities and possibly overseas. 

Clark acknowledged she has critics when it comes to her approach to childhood trauma and how it affects people in adulthood.

“Some do criticize it,” she said. “They think its social work-like. I tell them it’s science and I do what science says.”

Clark said she was able to put about 76 percent of children who were taken away from their families back with their families. 

She said she worked to get the family court onto the first floor of the courthouse — a move she sought because of security concerns — and also was instrumental in getting bullet-resistant glass and benches into her courtroom now located near the courthouse entrance on the first floor.  

Clark said she also plans to get her 2-year-old dachshund trained as a therapy pet so she can take him to the adoption day activities in the court.  

“I’m going to miss the relationships that we developed,” she said. “We worked hard to get kids home to their families. We also worked hard in the drug court. It’s been shown that spending three to five minutes with participants in a drug court” greatly reduces recidivism.