Coordinated Entry: Boot Camp and 100-Day Challenge

This week homeless youth advocates went to boot camp.  There wasn’t a lot of yelling and push-ups, but there was sweat-inducing policy planning and some ice breakers that got a little intense.  

On Monday and Tuesday, along with the Interagency Council on Homelessness and Community Solutions, DCAYA co-hosted a DC policy boot camp on coordinated intake and referrals for homeless youth.  Participants came from Office of State Superintendent of Education, DC Public Schools, Department of Behavioral Health, Department of Human Services, Children and Family Services Agency, Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, The Community Partnership, Latin American Youth Center, Sasha Bruce Youthbuild, Wanda Alston House, and Covenant House.  Together, they mapped out a working plan to build a District-wide, coordinated entry system for unaccompanied homeless youth. 

Coordinated entry is a system where a homeless youth can show up at any “front door” government agency or community-based organization, be assessed by a standardized assessment tool, and then be referred in a standardized way to best-fit programs.  It sounds simple, but it is actually really difficult to get all the pieces in place to make this process work.  

Think about it, dozens of government agencies and community-based organizations, each with their own requirements and missions, have to come together to select and hone a standardized assessment tool.  They have to change their current referral protocols and habits to a semi-standardized referral protocol based off the chosen assessment tool.  They have to create and maintain a living database that shows available housing slots and service slots. Then they have to figure out what happens when a youth is assessed and referred, but there are not enough services for them.  And those are just a few of the challenges.

That’s why the boot camp model doesn’t end after the two-day planning period.  Now starts the 100-day challenge to implement the work plan.  DCAYA and its fellow participants have only 100 days to make coordinated entry happen. This is a very rapid timeline, meant to keep the momentum going to bust through the obstacles that have kept coordinated entry from happening in the past.

This 100-challenge is nationally historic.  While this model has been very successful in implementing coordinated entry for adults, this is the very first time it will be attempted for unaccompanied homeless youth.  The unaccompanied homeless youth system presents more challenges than the adult side: stricter privacy laws, mandatory reporting laws, working with the 18-24 age group that is often mis-resourced, etc.  But we know DC is ready for this challenge.  

DCAYA has been chosen as the lead organization for this challenge.  We are slightly daunted by the massive amount of work that we are facing over the next 100 days, but we know it is worth it.  It will be incredibly rewarding to collaborate with hard-working, creative, compassionate people from government agencies and community-based organizations. Our youth deserve a coordinated entry system when they come to us for help, and we are going to make it happen.

Katie Dunn is the youth homelessness and expanded learning policy analyst for DCAYA.  She is listening to Rocky pump-up music to get through this 100-day challenge.

Pushing Students Out of School and Into the Streets

The following blog is an installment in the DCAYA “School Climate” series where we asked experts, community members, and youth to write about variables affecting school climate. Guest blogger Alex Peerman from DC Lawyers for Youth discusses the correlation between suspension rates and the number of high school drop outs.


The negative effects of dropping out of high school are firmly established: higher unemployment, lower wages, and greater likelihood of incarceration, to name a few. Consequently, discussions on high school dropout rates frequently focus on how we can re-engage at-risk students and encourage them to stay in school. But simultaneously, many schools employ practices that actively push out their students, namely suspension and expulsion.

Disciplinary push-out is a larger contributor to high school dropout rates than most realize. A new report from the Every Student Every Day Coalition shows that during school year 2011-12, DC schools imposed over 18,720 suspensions, and over 13% of students were suspended at least once. Perhaps more shockingly, these suspensions are not limited to older students; the highest-suspending elementary schools suspended approximately 25% of their students. From very early ages, students are labeled as “behavior problems” and put on the track to high school dropout.

The effect of each one of these suspensions is significant. As a result of being excluded from school, many suspended students remain unsupervised during the day. Instead of keeping up with their schoolwork, suspended students end up watching TV or playing video games at home. Instead of building relationships with teachers and school-engaged peers, they become more likely to build relationships with dropouts and other suspended students. They return to class further behind, less invested in school, and less ready to learn. Quantitative research demonstrates the effects of this missed classroom time. The largest study on the effects of school exclusion showed that suspended students are far more likely to be held back or fail to graduate than their peers. At the school level, higher rates of suspension have been found related to lower graduation rates.

These trends seem to hold in the data available for DC. As the figure below shows, schools with higher suspension rates tend to have lower graduation rates. Of course, some of this relationship likely reflects other factors, like students’ poverty and the school’s instructional quality; a more in-depth analysis could attempt to control for these confounding variables. However, previous research has found negative student-level effects of suspension even when controlling for dozens of these possible alternative explanations. Based on the strength of those findings, this first look at the DC data also likely indicates genuine negative effects of suspension on students’ likelihood of graduation.

On reflection, it seems like common sense that there is a relationship between being excluded from the classroom and dropping out of school. Getting suspended inherently sends a message from school to student: “We don’t want you here.” Unfortunately, many students receive this message loud and clear, and eventually choose to drop out.

It is remarkably self-defeating to maintain practices that actively push kids out of school, while at the same time seeking methods to keep them from dropping out. Thankfully, there are alternatives to exclusionary school discipline, alternatives that can support rather than undermine our goal of having every student in school through graduation. The leading evidence-based practice is Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which focuses on introducing, modeling, and reinforcing good behavior rather than merely punishing bad behavior. Restorative justice is another promising practice, one intended to engage all key stakeholders, hold the offender accountable, repair the harm done to the victim, and facilitate the offender’s reintegration into the community.

Exclusionary school discipline is an important contributor to high dropout rates. If the District wants to maximize its graduation rates, decreasing suspensions and replacing them with alternatives keeping students engaged in school would be a good place to start.

Alex Peerman is the Policy & Advocacy Associate at DC Lawyers for Youth. Alex is one of the authors of "District Discipline: The Overuse of Suspension and Expulsions in the District of Columbia," (PDF) a recent report published by the Every Student Every Day Coalition.

The Big (Budget) Picture for Juvenile Justice in the District of Columbia

As budget season has gotten underway, I have received numerous questions about whether I believe that the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services – which is seeking a $105M appropriation (a decrease of 1.5% from FY2013) – needs the money requested in the various line items. My response – perhaps not necessarily the response that people wanted to hear – is that I believed they were asking the wrong question. If our goal is to find cost-savings, then we should not be asking where we can cut DYRS’s budget and short-change the youth under DYRS supervision, but how we can prevent youth from coming into contact with DYRS in the first place. The answer to this question requires taking a bigger picture view of the budget, instead of focusing on the line items proposed by DYRS. Taking a broader view of the budget starts by recognizing three key characteristics of the District’s juvenile justice system.

First, we have to understand that DYRS is merely a part of the juvenile justice system in the District of Columbia. While many think that DYRS is responsible for supervising and rehabilitating all court-involved youth, the reality is that DYRS’s role is actually limited to housing detained youth prior to disposition and housing, supervising, and rehabilitating committed youth. In the juvenile justice world, we call DYRS’s role the “deep-end” of the system.

Second, we have to understand that DYRS plays this “deep-end” role in a juvenile justice system where control, financial responsibility, accountability, and data-collection are split between federal and local control. Indeed, as illustrated in the chart below and explained in more depth in our budget brief, youth involved in the delinquency system in the District often bounce between federal and local agencies within and between the various phases of the process. Commitment to DYRS is often the place court-involved youth land when other interventions have not worked.

Third, we have to understand that the District juvenile justice system as a whole currently serves as the safety net for far too many youth in our city. 95% of the youth who get arrested in the District live below the federal poverty line. Over 70% of those arrested live in under-resourced neighborhoods with failing schools, high unemployment, and low rates of educational attainment. Because of the circumstances into which many are born, our District youth have a razor-thin margin for error. As a result, every time a youth is suspended from school, is denied much-needed special education services, or slips through the cracks of the District’s behavioral health system, the youth becomes far more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system.

So what can we derive from this big picture look at the District’s juvenile justice system in terms of the budget process?

First, we must all recognize that so long as we rely on the juvenile justice system as a social safety net, it is going to cost the District a significant amount of money. This is especially true of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services because of the agency’s “deep-end” role in the system. High-need, high-risk youth require rigorous rehabilitative services, whether it be 24-hour around-the-clock surveillance and confinement or intensive, community-based wrap-around services. As Frederick Douglas stated, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” It turns out that it is far cheaper to do so as well.

Second, as we started off this blog post by stating, the best way to save money on the deep-end of the system is to make sure a youth does not come into contact with the deep-end in the first place.

At the micro level (i.e. the juvenile justice system level), this requires increased coordination between federal and District agencies to create additional programs that successfully rehabilitate youth at the least restrictive level consistent with public safety. In particular, we would propose that additional investments be made to strengthen or create diversion programs at all stages of the juvenile justice system – diversion from arrest, diversion from prosecution, diversion from probation, and diversion from commitment. We would also propose a renewed commitment to decreasing our reliance on pre-disposition incarceration.

At a macro level (i.e. the full cradle-to-adulthood continuum of youth development), this means that “front-end” agencies not only need to be held more accountable, but also must be given the resources to invest in proven programs and strategies that ensure that our youth do not fall through the cracks. In particular, we would recommend that the District be as aggressive with school push-out as it has been with truancy going forward. Every student should be in school every day. We would also recommend a renewed commitment to providing special education and behavioral health services to youth in a timely and accessible manner. If youth do not have the wrap-around services that eliminate the barriers to success in the classroom, they will not be able to learn and engage.

Hopefully, in future budget cycles we can take a step back and look at the bigger picture of youth development in the District and conduct our budget oversight – as policy makers and advocates – with a eye trained more on how we can save money by investing wisely rather than merely through cutting or shifting spending.

Eddie Ferrer is the Co-Founder and Legal & Policy Director at DC Lawyers for Youth (DCLY), a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve the DC juvenile justice system by advocating for reforms that promote positive youth development, effective legal representation, and supportive relationships between the community and DC’s youth. For more information, please follow DCLY on Facebook and Twitter. Eddie can be contacted at eferrer@dcly.org.