NCJ Number
80792
Date Published
1981
Length
6 pages
Annotation
Project New Pride is an experimental juvenile diversion program whose currently ongoing evaluation at 10 sites across the country is described in this summary.
Abstract
New Pride originated in Denver and was replicated at nine other diverse locations. New Pride clients would otherwise be sent to institutions, but in the program they are given special education, counseling, job placement, and a set of graded behavior objectives instead. Despite the diversity of New Pride replication programs with respect to location, wealth, demographic characteristics, and sponsoring organization, they shared needs for technical assistance, case management, staff reporting, and generation of evaluation data. Constraints on the national evaluation arose from the geographic dispersion of the sites, their differing clienteles and legal environments, local staff inexperienced in evaluation, and the competing requirements of the local project and those of the evaluation. The data processing and communications strategy employed in the New Pride national evaluation is significantly different from that of similar projects in its use of a shared computing system with capabilities for online conference and message transmission and data base management of clinical, administrative, and evaluation data. The use of this single computing system provided the national and local evaluators with a common computing vocabulary and environment. It has been in operation about 1 year and has received acceptance and participation from the staff at all sites. A future step is to help staff of the local projects to use the computer system's report-generating capabilities to produce reports suitable to their needs. No references are cited.