April 30, 2018

Students Served by Multiple Systems of Care Deserve Better

By Bellwether

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At any given point in time, about 5 million kids are served in one or more of our nation’s child service agencies. These young people are living through traumatic and disruptive experiences ranging from homelessness to foster care placement to incarceration.
As I wrote in this piece nearly two years ago, these children are navigating a fragmented world of adults, programs, and agencies, often operating as the only central point among all of the services.
In our latest publication, Continuity Counts, Hailly Korman and I offer our recommendations for addressing this fragmentation and improving cross-agency coordination. However, our project differs significantly from most other policy papers because we approached our research using human-centered design. This means that we started by talking to the very people who are impacted by agency fragmentation: the children and youth served by these agencies. We also talked to the direct-care providers working in various agencies. The goal of these interviews was to better understand the needs, wants, and constraints of both the youth and the care providers, in order to build a set of recommendations that addresses the challenges they face.
Through our human-centered design approach, we identified two key levers for change: continuity of people and continuity of information. By identifying a single adult to operate like a child’s “chief of staff,” we can mitigate the need for a child to interact with a myriad of adults. By improving data collection, sharing, and storage, we can reduce the burdens on youth and their caregivers that result from missing or incorrect information.
The silos that exist among agencies did not appear overnight and will not disappear quickly. However, just because agencies have always operated in relative isolation from one another does not mean it must always be like this. Eliminating, or at least substantially reducing, the fragmentation that exists among schools, government agencies, nonprofits, and community-based organizations is possible with deliberate and concerted effort over a long period of time. And doing so is necessary if we ever hope to provide youth with a cohesive, streamlined system of support throughout their education trajectories.
Read our full report here or our op-ed in The 74 here.

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