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Results for delinquency prevention (minnesota)

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Author: Schmitz, Connie C.

Title: The Ramsey County All Children Excel (ACE) Program: A Comprehensive Process Evaluation. Interim Report

Summary: The Ramsey County ACE program is a long-term intervention program for children under 10 who are found to be at high risk for serious, violent, and chronic juvenile delinquency. Founded in late 1999, ACE serves our society’s most vulnerable population of children: that is, those who have committed a chargeable offense at a very young age and who come from multi-generational, multi-problem families. Such children are estimated to have a 50% base rate of risk for becoming chronic juvenile offenders. In working with ACE children and their families, ACE takes a broad public health, intensive case management approach. Through an inter-agency service delivery team, the resources of multiple county departments, police, schools, and community agencies are coordinated on an individual basis. Child and family case management is provided weekly by community workers from the time of the child’s initial screening until age 18. The goals of ACE are to reduce problem behaviors, to increase school bonding and success, and to prevent the children from entering the juvenile justice system. Research and evaluation has long been a core feature of the ACE program. This current evaluation was undertaken in order to help the ACE program further refine the community agency portion of the ACE long-term intervention and develop a Healthy Development Curriculum and Staffing Guide. The evaluation was considered important and timely for a number of reasons: 􀂃 The ACE intervention had been implemented by several different community agencies and case workers since 1999. Over time, substantive differences had emerged between the programs as implemented by the two main agencies (the YWCA and St. Paul Youth Services). This led to important questions about the comparative efficacy of their two approaches. 􀂃 Case management is believed to constitute the “heart of the ACE intervention.” Yet the widely varying skills of case workers and the “un-chartered waters” of case management itself called for greater examination. 􀂃 After three years of operation and data collection, the ACE program was better positioned to look at preliminary youth outcomes. While program staff believed strongly that case management (when done well) “works,” they sought more tangible evidence of that belief. This report describes the work of an evaluation team, hired in January of 2004, to conduct a comprehensive process evaluation. Using qualitative and quantitative methods of inquiry, the evaluation team structured their work into five components. The five components were to: 1. Describe the ACE long-term case management model in terms of its history, current status, and underlying model. 2. Integrate all of the available data on ACE youth and program implementation in order to conduct subsequent sub-studies of interest. 3. Assess the psychometric properties of the ACE Risk Factor Profile (the initial screening tool and placement procedure). To do this, the team analyzed data on youth who were placed into short-term interventions (STI) as well as data on youth who were placed into the ACE long-term intervention (LTI). 4. Compare the YWCA and the St. Paul Youth Services in terms of their program implementation and youth outcomes. 5. Determine the extent to which ACE case management reduces delinquency outcomes, after taking initial risk factors and demographic characteristics into account. In these analyses, “delinquency outcomes” was defined as charged offenses that youth committed six or more months after their initial screening and placement into the short or long-term intervention.

Details: Minneapolis: Professional Evaluation Services and Professional Data Analysts, Inc., 2004. 57p.

Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 10, 2012 at: http://www.co.ramsey.mn.us/NR/rdonlyres/82A097AE-978C-4F63-9C68-30B6829A7A2F/1750/ACE_Interim_Report.pdf

Year: 2004

Country: United States

URL: http://www.co.ramsey.mn.us/NR/rdonlyres/82A097AE-978C-4F63-9C68-30B6829A7A2F/1750/ACE_Interim_Report.pdf

Shelf Number: 125241

Keywords:
Case Management, Juveniles
Collaboration
Delinquency Prevention (Minnesota)
Juvenile Offenders