Pat Epstein<\/p>\n
Deputy Director, Second Chance<\/p>\n
Thanks for that overview, Anne.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To give a quick introduction for myself, I’m Pat Epstein, and I’m here in my role as deputy director of Second Chance RBC. Like Kim said with the One-Stop Center, we’re involved all over Riverbend City, but we do have a particularly strong presence on the north side. We’re a youth services organization that specializes in working with kids who are in danger of being forced to leave the traditional school system, either because of disciplinary problems or involvement in the juvenile justice system; we work to get these kids placed in alternative schools, and then work with them after placement to try to ensure their success.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our success rates are mixed. Kids who are referred to us because of disciplinary problems in school get placed in alternative schools 62% of the time, and 68% of those placed go on to graduate. Those numbers aren’t great, but they’re largely a function of how willing those kids are to work with us; or, alternately, how good or bad we are at convincing them to work with us. Referrals from the juvenile justice system tend to be a lot more successful- we place 86% of them in alternative schools, with a 74% graduation rate. Of course, the incentives for those kids are different, since they usually have a judge shepherding them into our program and some consequences looming if they can’t make it work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course, even in the more successful side, 74% of 86% still leaves a lot of kids falling through the cracks. Recidivism is definitely a problem, and kids definitely do fall off the map.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another problem we have is what kind of longer-term guidance we give to students. Our main goal, of course, is to make sure they get their diplomas. But we don’t want to end things there, we want to engage with students about what their plans are after they graduate. Now, several of our larger donors believe very emphatically that we should be advising each student to pursue a bachelor’s degree. That’s great when it works, but it’s not the right path for every single student. And that can hurt a student’s engagement if they feel like we’re pushing them in a direction that’s not right for them. So this absolute mandate that we work that way with every student hurts us! But it’s hard to say no to donors when we rely so heavily on their support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pat Epstein Deputy Director, Second Chance Thanks for that overview, Anne.\u00a0 To give a quick introduction for myself, I’m Pat Epstein, and I’m here in my role as deputy director of Second Chance RBC. Like Kim said with the One-Stop Center, we’re involved all over Riverbend City, but we do have a particularly strong presence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-93440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}