This Draft Final Report lays out an overview of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Gang-Free Schools Initiative; it discusses the initiative’s cross-site results and outcomes, with one section devoted to each location: Houston (Texas), Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), East Cleveland (Ohio), and Miami-Dade County (Florida).
This Draft Final Report provides an in-depth description of the results from the national impact evaluation of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP’s) Comprehensive Gang Model: An Enhanced School/Community Approach to Reducing Youth Gang Crime. The evaluation featured three program aspects: implementation of data collection activities designed to capture both process and impact outcomes; development of individual site program logic models or theories of change specifying immediate, intermediate, and long-range outcome measures; and articulation of four case studies that focused on the grant sites’ continuing efforts to develop collaborative capacity to implement the Gang-Free Schools (GFS) model. The evaluation addressed two primary, overarching goals: to provide a thorough understanding in four communities of the development and process through which school and community collaboration leads to assessment and program planning activities; and to provide employable and functional outcome results through the use of process and impact evaluations. Lessons Learned, featured in the Executive Summary, include: information about community capacity for these youth services; the fact that the role of the Project Coordinator is one of the most critical elements that determine the success of the project; the location of the grant-funded intervention program may be more productive when situated and managed within the school systems rather than at law enforcement agencies; the range of interventions offered and age-span of clients eligible to participate will play a role in program success; and parental and community member involvement may be key to learning the true tone and inner-workings of a community.