Cross-System Work

Youth service delivery systems tend to operate in silos, with separate missions and separate funding.  A good number of our at-risk youth float in and out of these systems, receiving services including educational services with educational plans that have no continuity across systems.  At student may be attending a high school in Denver Public Schools, get in trouble with the law, and end up at Lookout Mountain, and go to school at the Lookout Mountain school.  After a year and a half, he is discharged, but the youth has nowhere to go back to, so ends up on the streets of Denver.  He is approached by an Urban Peak outreach worker, and soon he is staying in a shelter for homeless teens.  His educational case manager at Urban Peak attempts to pull his transcripts from Lookout and has difficulty translating the credits from teh Lookout Mountain system into DPS credits.  The case manager links the youth up with Academy of Urban Learning for homeless and highly mobile teens, but the principal can give no DPS credit for the educational work the student did at Lookout Mountain.

To combat this siloing issue, CYC has partnered with the City of Denver's Office of Education and Children to secure a technical assistance grant from the National League of Cities to bring together youth services providers to collaborate more effectively in serving the needs of disconnected youth ages 16-24.  Representatives from this group attended a national conference in San Antonio in October that brought together recipients from this grant from cities across the country to learn how to move forward to this work.  In Denver, a group of 25 community partners representing diverse organizations has been meeting since the summer of 2007 to start this collaborative undertaking.  The first event on the radar is planning an April 2008 Dropout Summit on Multiple Pathways to Graduation, which will take  place at the Denver Convention Center.