As of Friday, August 21, 2020, All MCC Legal Call and VTC Requests Must Go Through Skedda Not Airtable
EFFECTIVE FRIDAY, 8/21, you will schedule your own legal call and VTC requests for MCC through an online scheduler (Skedda) rather than by sending us the call request form (Link to MCC Skedda). This will allow you to choose your own date and time, based on your availability.
Note that if you have already requested a call or VTC through Airtable, we will schedule those, so do not re-book calls or VTCs for which you have already submitted a form. We will continue to accept and schedule MDC legal calls through the Airtable legal call requests form.
There are a few key points for using Skedda:
You have to start by registering for a Skedda account. When you do so, register with the phone number at which you want the BOP to call you for your legal calls.
You need to know what unit your client is on before you schedule with a call/VTC with a client for the first time—if you don’t know, please complete this form and we will email you what unit your client is on. Make note of the unit for any future scheduling.
Please review the attached schedule to get a sense of when each unit has slots for calls and VTCs. These are the slots currently offered by MCC. MCC may well change or reduce these once in-person legal visits re-open. We will fight that battle when it comes, but please -- use the offered slots so we can show they are needed.
When you go onto Skedda for a particular day or week, it will only allow you to schedule a call or VTC if the slot you are trying to schedule is available, so if you receive an error message, try a different time or different length.
MCC only allows a total of 2 hours worth of afternoon VTCs for the entire institution. If you receive an error when trying to schedule an afternoon VTC that says that you've exceeded the quota for allowed hours, that means someone else has scheduled a VTC for that day and you may need to reduce the length of your requested VTC.
Skedda gives the impression of precision in selecting time slots, but is still subject to MCC following the schedule so still be prepared for the call occuring in a window (9am – 12pm for morning VTCs, 1 - 3:30pm for afternoon calls/VTCs and 5 - 8pm for evening calls at MCC).
As with the form system, we are still compiling a final schedule of calls to send to MCC 48 hours in advance. You will need to book your call slot at minimum 72 hours in advance of the call date (or by Thursday afternoon if you want a call on Monday or Tuesday). You can't make changes to your booking within 48 hours of the call. That means no cancellations or last-minute changes once the schedules have been submitted. We’ll follow up with any conflicts or changes from the MDC and MCC scheduling email addresses, but are hoping to have little reason for this.
If you have questions about Skedda or if you have an urgent call request and you’ve been locked out of Skedda because of the 72-hr minimum, please email NYS_MCCemail@fd.org.
Thanks for your patience as we move to Skedda.
