Spotlight on Pennsylvania: Internal and external collaboration aims to improve transition planning

By Jennifer Slivka

Every day, delinquent youth make the transition back to their homes, communities, schools, or jobs. Whether or not that transition is successful depends upon the services and programs provided to them by the juvenile justice system. The Pennsylvania juvenile justice system decided it must go through its own transition process to improve the facilitation of transition services for this population of youth.

Working from the inside out, the Keystone state is seeking to improve communication and collaboration between all interested parties involved with these youth. A pilot project involving a new transition model is currently being implemented at the Loysville Youth Development Center, the Loysville Secure Treatment Unit, and the Danville Center for Adolescent Females (Pennsylvania's maximum security facility for girls).

Youth Development Centers (YDCS) encompass detention treatment units, development centers, secure treatment units, and forestry camps (low security programs for youth who are determined not to be a high-security risk).

“We’re looking to strengthen the relationships between providers—the Department of Public Welfare and the Department of Education, which is the West Perry School District for the Loysville facility,” said Jim Keeley, Director of Juvenile Correctional Education in Pennsylvania. The Department of Public Welfare runs the institutional programming, while the Department of Education is in charge of the schooling provided to the youth during their stay at these facilities.

Keeley works for the Department of Education and is responsible for running the educational programs in institutions. He has opted to contract local educational agencies (LEAs) with five-year contracts and has stipulated they must meet all state laws and regulations.

“We’re establishing a working relationship around transition guidelines to research and establish an effective transition plan that starts upon a youth’s arrival and is completed at release,” said Keeley. “This requires a lot of collaboration with residential treatment staff, health, and medical staff to work actively with the educational staff.”

Every month, each youth attends a formal meeting and a multi-disciplinary team meeting. A delinquency report and a student’s educational progress are used to demonstrate a youth’s progress.

“We don’t really separate between the two,” said Keeley. “It’s a seamless approach; each department is expected to attend monthly meetings so the review of progress can be determined—whether it’s right or needs to be adjusted.”

The Master Case Planning System (MCPS), a treatment and service plan, guides these meetings. The MCPS details everyone’s role in developing a comprehensive treatment, within a timeline, that should be used for the youth’s transition plan.

“We refined ourselves on the inside, so we can get timely information on each youth we work with,” said Keeley. “It’s a counseling process that tries to be realistic as they are young and their interests will change.”

According to Keeley, the meetings have become more focused as a result of strengthening the internal relationships between institutions and staff.

The transition planning is also impacted by Pennsylvania’s adoption of the Balanced and Restorative Justice (BARJ) philosophy into Pennsylvania’s Juvenile Act. It’s a juvenile justice-wide system based on the premise that clients of the juvenile justice system not only include the offender, but also include the victim and the community.

According to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency Web site, BARJ stresses that each of the interested parties “should receive balanced attention and gain tangible benefits from their interactions with Pennsylvania's juvenile justice system. This concept also requires that the system seeks to address goals regarding community protection, offender accountability, and the development of competencies in each case, and that ‘system balance’ should be sought through the allocation of the resources necessary to achieve the goals associated with each client.”

The values upon which the new purpose clause is based include: Offender Accountability, Competency Development, Community Protection, Individualization (emphasizes that each juvenile offender has a unique set of circumstances and factors that contributed to his/her offense behavior), and Balance (stresses that justice is best served when the community, the victim, and the juvenile offender receive balanced attention and all gain tangible outcomes from their interaction with the juvenile justice system).
According to Keeley, from the day a juvenile is picked up, goes through treatment, and is released from the institution, the staff support the BARJ principles.

“Infusing the principles into the curriculum are major and teaching the student competencies—academic and vocational skills,” said Keeley. “Also we will work with the institutional projects and programs in their victim awareness and community involvement, though it’s not the educational staff’s main focus. But it’s a reciprocal relationship.”

BARJ is also supported in the transition planning process when representatives from the youth’s community and home school district are encouraged to attend the monthly MCPS meetings along with the youth’s family and probation officer.

Keeley cites this as one of the most difficult challenges to overcome.

“Community input, distance, interest, and time issues effect someone’s attending the meetings,” he said. “Community involvement is not very good, but it’s what we are working on, and it is getting better.”

Distance often proves a tremendous obstacle to family and community participation. Pennsylvania is a decentralized state, meaning that juvenile intake, probation supervision, and aftercare services are organized at the county level under the administrative authority of the juvenile court judge. At the county level, detention centers are merely holding facilities until their conviction/adjudication is determined. There is no central classification or distribution, and as such, a juvenile is assigned to an institution based on his or her delinquency. State-run facilities like Loysville, located in the center of the state, are often located several hours away from a juvenile’s home community, making it difficult for family and community members to attend the meetings. There are 12 state sites, with 15 buildings for education spread over these sites.

Although they have set up a teleconferencing system, Keeley said that it doesn’t always work if those on the other end do not have similar capabilities. Community groups that attend the monthly meetings provide a continuity of service and complement the services the youth receives while at the institution. Groups that can get involved in mentoring often include addictive resources for substance abusers, wellness services, mental health services, and Big Brother/Big Sister.

It is often difficult to convince the youth’s home school district to attend these meetings as well.

“The kid’s kicked out of school,” said Keeley. “There is not going to be a warm and fuzzy issue. The relationship between institutions and home communities is still being developed.”

Another hurdle to overcome is the high staff turnover at the Danville facility, whose residential programming is privately run. There are five residential institutions run by private organizations on behalf of the Department of Public Welfare. This turnover interferes with the internal communication between the various parties, as the staff is constantly in flux. At Loysville, the residential staff are state employees and school staff is provided under the local school district. They agree to run it on contract, although it’s under Keeley’s discretion and could be cancelled and changed to another provider as he sees fit.

Although they have experienced some challenges with the new system, Keeley said they are making progress.

“There’s not a clear definition of what transition is or what a program entails,” he said. “The gamut is extremely broad, but we are doing something.”

 

Published June 2004