As the nation celebrates the class of 2020 and the resilience of graduates during a worldwide pandemic, it can be easy to forget that some students face huge challenges to high school graduation even in “normal” times. Living in foster care can make school feel like a perpetual marathon. In Jefferson County, a program called Fostering Opportunities helps them cross the finish line.
Multisystemic Therapy (MST), a community-based intervention targeting youth ages 12-17 who are involved or at high risk of involvement in the juvenile justice system, has a proven record of success. It is delivered by trained teams of therapists over the course of 3-5 months with multiple home-visits per week. This project extended MST to regions of the state where the service was previously unavailable.
Family First Prevention Services Act is sweeping child welfare legislation aimed at keeping families together with a focus on preventative services. This project supports the state in developing and implementing the evaluation components of the Family First Prevention Services Plan.
Following child abuse and neglect reports, families can become involved in investigations that span multiple government systems including law enforcement, child welfare, and the health system. With so many entities involved, the investigation process can be confusing and frustrating for families. This study assesses the impact of a coordinated multidisciplinary team response used in an urban Colorado county as well as caregiver perceptions of the investigation process.
Preventing homelessness of youth formerly in foster care begins with understanding characteristics of those most at risk. This project connected child welfare to homeless services data in the Denver metro area to inform policies and practices aimed at ensuring youth aging out of foster care have stable housing.
Colorado Department of Human Services is changing the culture of child support from an enforcement model to a 2Gen customer service model. The project is an 11-county randomized trial that examines potential of a 2Gen model to increase child support payments and identifies ways to strengthen implementation.
Some non-custodial parents pay child support one month and not the next. This project describes the feasibility of using routinely collected administrative data to identify employment-related reasons that relate to churn for the cohort of child support cases.
A large number of Coloradans find themselves in need of services from multiple public systems, and government leaders struggle to understand the best way to coordinate a shared response for these multisystem utilizers. This project starts the work of building common metrics of public system utilization across state agencies so that state government leadership and their teams can make more informed decisions about how to meet the needs of multisystem utilizers.
Only one in four Colorado students who experience foster care during high school graduate with their class. Jeffco Public Schools and Jefferson County Human Services developed a solution – the Fostering Opportunities program. This innovative student engagement intervention is the first proven practice in Colorado to improve educational outcomes for students in foster care.
Youth who run away from home are likely to be involved in the juvenile justice or child welfare systems within one year. This Pay for Success project examined the impact of “rapid responders” on connecting youth and families to evidence-based services that ultimately prevent deeper juvenile justice or child welfare involvement.