After Foster Care and Juvenile Justice: A Preview of the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation. Policy Brief.
A p r i l 2 0 1 2 time making a successful transition to adulthood and independent living. Compared with others their age, they have relatively low levels of educational attainment and employment, and they are more likely to experience poverty and housing instability. Policymakers and practitioners are searching for ways to improve these outcomes. However, while a number of programs have been designed to help youth who were formerly in foster care or the juvenile justice system, or both, little rigorous evidence exists to identify which services are effective and for whom.
Independent living programs: Do they make a difference?
Children are entering foster care at an alarming rate. There were an estimated 429,000 children in out-of-home care at the end of 1991, which is a 64% increases since 1982 (Tatara, 1990). The largest proportion of children in out-of-home care are between the ages of 13 and 18 (Mech, 1988; Tatara, 1989). Each year, an estimated 16,000 (Sims, 1988) to 18,000 (Ryan, McFadden, Rice, & Warren, 1988) youth are emancipated and leave foster care to assume independence. Many of these young adults are not prepared for self-sufficiency (Barth, 1986, 1990; Festinger, 1983; Westat, 1988). Adolescents from varying out-of-home care settings are eligible for a set of services—Independent Living Programs.The findings of this study suggest that Independent Living Programs may have positive impact on the ability of youth to be self-sufficient at the time of discharge from foster care programs. The youth who participated in the ILP program were more likely to complete high school, have employment history and employment at discharge, and were more likely to be self supporting at the closing of the case.
Evaluation of independent-living programs.
The program report that states must submit to the federal government under the federal Title IV-E Independent-Living Initiative is, in essence, a program evaluation report and will require comprehensive program and evaluation data to complete. Because the program report will be a key factor in determining the future of this federal initiative, it is important that states improve their information system capability to generate the range of necessary data. This article offers detailed suggestions for ways in which states could establish their independent-living program information systems to produce program and evaluation data; and presented two examples of approaches to evaluating the Title IV-E independent-living program, one in Pennsylvania and another in Texas. These states were selected for the purpose of illustrating two different approaches and not necessarily for the presentation of exemplary evaluation practices.