Improving Communities through Integrated Data Systems: The Effects of Child Welfare & Juvenile Justice System Involvement

Center on Poverty and Community Development   (Cleveland)

June 2013 - December 2015

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development (CUPCD), based at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, is working with the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive (OLDA) at Ohio State University’s Ohio Education Research Center to understand how involvement in the foster care and juvenile justice systems affect high school graduation and early adult outcomes. The study aims to identify characteristics of both at-risk youth and youth who succeed, understand the differences in educational attainment and future success between system-involved youth and youth who are not system-involved, and examine youth and their systems involvement at the neighborhood level in order to develop suggestions for neighborhood-based policies to improve outcomes for the affected youth.

The study targets students entering the ninth grade in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and will follow their progress until age 20. Neighborhood information including social, economic, health, and housing characteristics, will come from CUPCD’s NEO CANDO. In addition to administrative records from foster care and juvenile justice system providers in Cuyahoga County, CUPCD’s CHILD system, an IDS, will provide data on family and child demographics, public assistance participation, school attendance, proficiency test passage, high school graduation, and all residential and school address for each youth in the system. To supplement these systems, CUPCD will link to the OLDA, which is the State Longitudinal Data System for education data in Ohio, to obtain individual-level data on high school, college, and employment records. Linking to the OLDA will also allow CUPCD to track students who moved out of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District after 9th grade.