Meeting Information

2.

(ACTION) Review and approval of Minutes of February 16, 2005 meeting.

Upon motion and seconded, the minutes were approved as written.

(public comment)

there were none.

3.

Public Comment on any matter within the subject matter jurisdiction of the Program Committee of the Juvenile Probation Commission.

Rich Perino raised the question of whether it would be more cost effective to allow Larkin St. Youth Center deal with some or all of the clients that Huckleberry Youth Services uses half a million to do. He asked if someone could be directed to look into this.

He also brought up the issue of contracting with CBOs at a cost sometimes higher than having city employees do the work (which he said is in conflict with the City Charter).  He specifically referred to the cost of letting PO’s to the work, which is subsidized by Title IVe.  The net cost is about $10/hr to the City. He doesn’t believe this can be beat by community contracting.  He asked the Commission to examine the contracts with this fact in mind, vis a vis the charter section that relates to it.  He said the union might be pushed to taking action in this regards.  Comm Queen asked him to put this request in writing.

Comm Queen also mentioned that Comm Rodriguez wanted to have more interaction between Dept staff and the Commission, and wanted to explore some ways of setting up meetings that would allow that to happen.

4.

(DISCUSSION/ACTION) Report from Liz Jackson-Simpson on the upcoming contracting process, timeline, providers, services, amounts and other issues in their regards.  

Liz Jackson-Simpson briefly reviewed that the JJCPA dollars will be reduced to 25% in 06-07.  JBAG funding will be reduced 70% this year.  TANF funds will not be reduced this year.  There is another pot of money in the state, Title V, and the City, via MOCJ has put together a proposal for that money, to go toward supporting Beacon Ctrs, and the Safe Haven operations.  If this is successful, those operations will be taken off the list of services supported in those other funding programs.

The plan is if no new funds comes into the city, the current JJCPA/JBAG programs will continue getting their funds, but at a 12% reduction.  TANF funded services will be recommended to continue. She said the court wanted the Dept to increase the funding support to the ERCs.

L. Jackson-Simpson said that previously the JJCC didn’t look at the overall picture of funding sources in dealing with this target population, but now with new people in MOCJ and DCYF, and new admin in the Dept, there is a willingness to look at the total picture to see how cooperative allotment of funding can be accomplished.

She introduced Steve LaFrance, who has the contract for PrIDE.  She said in the past year they have been working on streamlining the process. They are looking at ways of doing contract management and evaluation. The original program was very complex, with 6 forms to complete for each participant at various points in service. This was very academic and not critical to the needs of the Dept, so La France has been working to reduce it to now just 2 forms.  He said that both MOCJ and DCYF are looking at using the PrIDE system for their own needs too. 

Their annual assessment report will be done in May.

They are now in the process of going over to CMS to automate the forms and entry.  This is a vendor being used by DCYF. One limitation to this is that it cannot be merged with the  JJIS.

Sifferman asked if this would be able to work with the JDAI evaluation system?

(public comment)                                                     

5.

(DISCUSSION/ACTION) Initial discussion of format and planning of the community meetings between the new Chief and various district based consortiums in the communities, possible tentative schedule.

Comm Queen reviewed that the Commission had agreed at a previous meeting to co host meetings in the communities, along with district based consortium groups, so that they would be able to give the new Chief their opinions on the juvenile justice issues in their respective communities.  This would be organized in as many districts as possible, and there were key people/organizations that would take up the responsibility of doing it in their districts.  He handed out a suggested outline of how such a meeting would be set up.

The first item was the community group put together a short written report on the demographics of their respective districts, to that the new Chief would have a good brief snapshot of what the district was like.

Those present were from organizations that could/would take the lead to staging these meetings in their communities.

R. Corpus represented district 6, 9 and 11.

Comm Queen said that George Smith from Ella Hill Hutch Community Ctr would be the point person in district 5.

Roberto Vargas of the RAP Collaborative represented district 5.

Ron Stickles, from Sunset district 4,

Kwanza Morton is working with district 11. Comm Queen commented that Kwanza and his entire family are deeply involved in activities in their community.

He said that for district 3 Sarah Wan of CYC has agreed to act as the lead.

B. Sifferman asked the individuals to try and have the kids themselves come to these meetings to express their own views. He wanted to hear the issues formatted as opportunities for change.

(public comment)

Rich Perino asked if anyone had any data on the recidivism rates of CYA commitments from SF, from 2002.

Gary Thompson also said it would be useful to see what the success of youth have been.  S. LaFrance said that the focus has been developing a system to look at organization by organization, and now it is at a point where they can begin to look at the data for such results.

6.

(DISCUSSION) Public comment on any matter within the subject matter jurisdiction of the Program Committee of the Juvenile Probation Commission

There were none

7.

(ACTION) Announcements, future agenda items, Adjournment.
Comm Chuck asked for information about how the transition plan to the new JH is looking.
L. Jackson-Simpson mentioned a summit being held by DCYF sometime soon. 
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 6:18pm