OCA Auditor Reports

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Issued: October 2004

SUMMARY

There continues to be a need for coordinating agency efforts to effectively address juvenile crime and truancy issues in Austin. Several police departments across the country, including the Austin Police Department (APD), have reported that daytime crime rates are a problem, in part, because students are committing crimes instead of going to school. According to research, some of the most common daytime juvenile crimes include burglary, aggravated assault, drug use, and vandalism. Truancy, or chronic, unexcused absences, has also been shown to correlate with adult criminality and other reduced quality of life measures. Research indicates the most effective response to juvenile crime involves a coordinated, system-wide approach. To address the daytime crime problem in Austin during school hours, APD has initiated a program addressing juvenile justice issues that is designed to work in collaboration with the Austin Independent School District (AISD), the AISD Police Department, Travis County juvenile justice agencies and local social service agencies.

The WDB and AISD have a partnership dedicated to participating in programs directed specifically toward at-risk youth and dropout prevention and recovery. The WDB funds a program focused on at-risk youth called the Youth Employment Partnership (YEP) which is a consortium of four social service agencies. These agencies include Goodwill Industries of Central Texas, American Youth Works, the Austin Area Urban League, and Communities in Schools. The focus of the YEP is to provide a range of social services that provide at-risk youth with comprehensive activities to assist them in achieving academic or employment success. Additionally, the WDB interfaces with AISD staff on the Youth Advisory Group (YAG) whose mission is to identify and address the needs of at-risk youth that includes addressing alternative education issues.

We found that AISD has staff devoted to dropout prevention efforts, expanded criteria for identifying students at-risk and a system in place that utilizes at-risk criteria to identify and intervene with potential school dropouts. AISD has assigned district-level responsibility for dropout prevention and recovery programs to appropriate levels of management from 1995 to the present. AISD is utilizing a program designed to address dropout prevention and intervention issues, and in addition, has implemented attendance and truancy support initiatives that encourage collaborative efforts among organizations in the community. By utilizing criteria that correlate with school dropout and truancy, AISD has an increased ability to identify opportunities to intervene before a student becomes a chronic truant and/or drops out of school.

Our earlier Juvenile Justice System audit recognized the need for such collaboration and local juvenile justice agencies sustained this effort until 2000. Before its dissolution, a Management Coordination Team (MCT) consisting of management level staff from various youth agencies functioned as a collaborative workgroup focusing on issues and strategies addressing common juvenile justice issues. However, we found the team did not take steps to formalize its operations in written policies or to assess the effectiveness of their collaborative efforts as recommended. Additionally, the MCT did not implement formal interagency agreements or policies and procedures for sharing information on specific juvenile cases across agencies as recommended in the original audit. Last, the MCT did not take steps to standardize interagency data collection, formatting, and evaluation techniques to enable system wide program evaluation. In an attempt to revive similar collaborative efforts, in August 2004, APD initiated a new program to address truancy and other juvenile justice issues, the success of which requires multi-agency participation. It is important to note that the agencies comprising the local infrastructure responsible for addressing juvenile justice issues in Austin are currently facing similar barriers to efficient and effective service delivery as those outlined in the 1995 audit

Click here to go to our audit request form to request a hard copy of this report (Report No. AU04202) or download the entire text of the Opportunity for Youth Dropout Prevention and Juvenile Justice Follow-Up Report (Size: 637 KB) in Adobe Acrobat. You will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to view these files.

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