Independent Living Program - Florida's Center for Child Welfare

For Education• Programs that were implemented over a long period of time were more effective atimproving educational attainment. Two programs, New Chance and JOBSTART, weresuccessful at increasing high school diploma and GED attainment rates among participants. Bothprograms required a high number of contact hours and were implemented over an extended periodof time; New Chance had participation periods lasting up to 18 months, and JOBSTART wasimplemented for between 200 and 500 hours. Furthermore, programs producing mixed reviews foreducational attainment often had short-term implementation periods or open entry and exitpolicies.• Requiring youth to take topically relevant classes may lead to higher levels of schoolengagement. Three out of four programs assessing engagement found positive impacts. TheCareer Academies and Upward Bound programs provided students with academic courseworkrelevant to their vocational goals. These programs were associated with improved levels of schoolengagement in participating youth. One program, Youth Corps, required youth to take topicallyrelevant classes and produced mixed reviews on school engagement; however, the strategy wasnever entirely unsuccessful.MIXED REVIEWSAcross Outcomes• Programs that implement skills training techniques have been found to be effective atimproving some outcomes, but not reproductive health outcomes. In the employment realm,skills training involves teaching youth basic job skills (e.g., word processing) for high demandjobs. In the education domain, skills training often involves teaching youth how to make betterdecisions about their academic choices. In the substance use and delinquency domains, youth aretaught how to resist peer pressure to engage in harmful activities. Five out of six programs usingskills training and aimed at improving educational attainment, employment, substance use, anddelinquency outcomes were found to have positive impacts on at least one outcome. However, ofthe seven programs implementing this technique that were geared towards improving reproductivehealth, only one had positive impacts on even one outcome.For Careers• Program strategies specifically geared towards increasing employment have had mixedimpacts. Interventions aimed at improving employment rates among older youth typically usetargeted strategies such as vocational training, career counseling, and/or job placement assistance.These strategies were implemented in many of the programs we synthesized, but they were notconsistently associated with either success or failure.For Substance Use• Programs targeting substance use have not generally been found to affect all substance useoutcomes. Rather, they affect one substance or another substance and therefore arecategorized as “mixed” in this brief. Of the eight programs addressing problematic substanceuse, only two, the Alcohol Skills Training Program and Brief Strategic Family Therapy, hadpositive impacts on all of the assessed substance use outcomes. The other six programs were either3