Ashland County Juvenile Drug Court Mentoring and Family Teaming

The goal of the Juvenile Drug Courts Mentoring and Support Services Initiative is to build the capacity of states, state courts, local courts, units of local government, and tribal governments to enhance juvenile drug courts by developing and establishing a comprehensive support service initiative that would include mentoring and other appropriate support services (i.e., educational services, health services, employment services, community services, recreational activities, parenting programs, housing assistance) to serve substance-abusing youth who are assigned to the juvenile drug court program. This program is authorized under 42 U.S.C. 3797u.

The Ashland County Juvenile Offender Prevention Initiative (JOPI) seeks to prevent and reduce delinquency and victimization of youth. The organization seeks funding to establish new mentoring and family teaming programs. The goal is to raise the rate of program completion to 70%. The organization will design and implement a mentoring program for all youth in Juvenile Drug Court and for selected youth in their Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (BIRT) program. They also plan to design and implement a Family Teaming program in which key players in the youth's life form a team that consciously work together to support and assist the youth in his or her efforts to change directions. Mentoring will encourage positive relationships with caring adults and will begin to work directly and supportively with families to develop shared expectations, treatment plans and crisis plans for their children, as well as the skills to execute these plans. Both the mentoring program and the Family Teaming Initiative will be coordinated by a newly-hired staff person, the Mentoring/Family Teaming Coordinator, who will report to the JOPI Director. The organization has participant data systems in place and can easily add fields to measure the impact of mentoring/family teaming.

CA/NCF