Order ID | 53563633773 |
Type | Essay |
Writer Level | Masters |
Style | APA |
Sources/References | 4 |
Perfect Number of Pages to Order | 5-10 Pages |
Ruby Lake Homelessness Task Force Assignment
Karen Goldberg
Hello, there. I’m really glad we have a chance to talk in more depth about the Second Chance program. What I really hope I conveyed when we talked before is that I think it’s a great, valuable program but I also feel like we’re just too darned busy administering it to get a chance to look for the process improvements that we absolutely know must be lurking in there somewhere. Heck, I’m not even a hundred percent sure that the metrics we’re tracking are the right ones!
So, I told you last time that this is a program we collaborate with another organization, Second Chance RBC. Theoretically, the split is that we at RCAC work with students involved in the juvenile justice system, trying to help them into alternative school programs, while Second Chance RBC does the same thing with students at risk of expulsion. Honestly, that split is more notional than real, since there’s a lot of overlap between those two populations. A lot of time, it comes down to who happens to get the phone call, or who has more capacity between me and my staff and Second Chance RBC’s Brad Heath and his.
One thing that’s on my mind as I think about the program: there are essentially four different alternative schools that we work with, as well as a few more unconventional options like home-schooling and online schools. Both of which, wow, can they be problematic in this context, although sometimes they’re the right ways to go. Anyway, we do an OK job of tracking overall outcomes in terms of graduation rates for kids placed into alternative schools, and we can segment that out pretty well between the two tracks. But, maddeningly, the central system just tracks “placed” or “not placed,” with the specific info about where they were placed — like, one of the four alternative schools, or one of the home options — kept just in their paper file. Which means that we don’t really have anything more than anecdotal evidence about whether any of the destinations work better than any of the others. That doesn’t seem right at all.
We also pay rudimentary attention to the socioeconomic status of students coming in to the program by noting whether or not they participate in free school meal programs. But good lord is that a blunt indicator! We act like that tells us what we need to know about their situations, but really it tells us very, very little. It’s just the only data we have! There has to be a better way.
I feel like I’m talking a lot about data and record keeping, but, well, that’s where a lot of my concerns are. So here’s one more. I co -administer this program with Brad Heath over at Second Chance RBC…in fact, our data setup is something we basically inherited from them, since they initiated this program and then partnered with us to scale it up. In practice, that means that now we have two sets of records, and two databases, and I don’t trust at all that the two systems are synched up. We have a tiny IT department here; Brad has a caseworker who’s good with computers who handles IT in the margins of his other work. Everyone involved is talented and means well, but that’s just not a situation that inspires confidence in the infrastructure. The databases are supposed to synch up with each other once a week, but we’ve had all kinds of foul-ups where synchs didn’t happen. I’m terrified of the thought of a kid falling through the cracks because of that!
Thanks for talking to me. I think if you take a look at our program data for the past few years, you’ll get some sense of how we’re doing and maybe what else we need to think about if we’re going to do better.
Program 1
Juvenile Justice System, Second Chance (In Cooperation with Second Chance RBC).
Josh Wilson
Hey! Thanks for stopping by.
Let me tell you some more about the school completion program! We work hand-in-glove with the school system, both at the district level and at the four individual high schools that we’re concerned with. For what it’s worth, that’s Vagle High, Ellison High, Loria High, and Petersen High. All four were identified in cooperation with the district when we started exploring the idea of a pilot program; our contacts at the district suggested those four as places where the student body could use the help.
In practice, the two most important services provided by the program are tutoring and counseling. But those are both pretty big umbrellas. Counseling especially… in practice, that means a lot of things. We help kids with anger management issues. We help kids deal with difficult home situations, which, I mean, it’s not news that this is a huge obstacle for kids staying in school. We provided pregnancy and parental counseling to students who get pregnant and have children. We help kids who’re dealing negatively with bullying situations. I mean, basically, you name just about any frequently-recurring thing that would keep kids from finishing school, we’re probably addressing it under the aegis of our counseling mandate.
My numbers tell me clearly that things are getting worse: across our four schools, we had an 84% completion rate a few years ago, and it’s steadily ticked down year by year to 69% in the most recent. That’s not a nice trend, but I can’t say with any certainty why that’s happening. I see it cutting across some–but not all–ethnic groups. I think and hope that answers are out there, but I don’t know if they lie buried in data that we’re tracking or not. I also really wish that we had more of a firm breakdown of what’s happening in our counseling programs. Like, we know anecdotally that pregnancies can really derail an academic career. What if there’s been a surge of them? That might explain some things. Of course, even then we’d have the secondary question of what would be causing this theoretical surge.
If you should choose to look into this program and how well it’s doing, and what we could be doing better, I think that’d be a real opportunity to help us improve a lot of lives. Like we keep saying, every kid we help through this program is one that doesn’t fall into the Second Chance program, and that’s a good thing on a couple of levels.
Program 2
School Completion Program
Population by Grade 2016
Data Collection and Ethical Concerns Scoring Guide
Due Date: End of Unit 3
Percentage of Course Grade: 15%.
CRITERIA | ||||
Discuss important information concerning the data and the participants for a chosen study. 30% |
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Examine the ethical implications of a study concerning a chosen human services issue. 45% |
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Communicate in a manner that is scholarly, professional, and respectful of the diversity, dignity, and integrity of others, consistent with the expectations for members of the human services field. 25% |
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