The National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors, Inc. (NASADAD) “…purpose is to foster and support the development of effective alcohol and other drug abuse prevention and treatment programs throughout every State.” NASADAD has recently achieved this purpose by the development of the State Adolescent Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Recovery Practice Guide (see link below).
Want to change the system -- not just the juvenile justice system, but entire neighborhoods -- to reclaim the futures of the kids who live in your community?
Then dream big.
To help you, we're giving away a copy of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, by journalist Paul Tough. "This is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time."
Here are the rules: drop me an email (sorry, posting a comment doesn't count) with the subject line "WHATEVER IT TAKES," and please include your name and full mailing address. We'll take all entries until 12:00 pm PST/3:00pm EST on Thursday, March 27th March 26th and then the Random Number Generator will make its merciless decision. Good luck to all entrants!
(Please note: I will add all entrants' e-mail addresses to our mailing list to receive our weekly email digest unless you request otherwise.)
Want to have your juvenile justice agency share information with adolescent substance abuse treatment providers? Worried about protecting youth privacy? Then I've got good news and bad news.
The good news? The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Information Sharing To Prevent Juvenile Delinquency Project has two free webinars on the subject:
[John Kelly, pictured below, is Associate Editor at Youth Today. His complete article is available to subscribers on the paper's website.-- Ed.]
In Indiana, a couple of techies built a case management system, Quest, that connected all the integral parties associated in juvenile and family court cases. It enabled judges to handle motions and docket changes online, staff to draft orders in real time, and juvenile justice officials to measure data and progress seamlessly.
Staffs in counties that use Quest swear by it; observers usually leave in awe when they are first introduced to it. I first saw how the system works when Indianapolis Judge Marilyn Moores off-handedly showed it to an audience during a presentation about truancy courts. About half the crowd stayed after the session to ask questions, but not about the truancy court.
Judge Bettina Borders has some questions for you.
Judge Borders is first justice of the Bristol County Juvenile Court at the Reclaiming Futures site in Bristol County, MA. Her site is in the process of developing a uniform drug screening tool.* As part of the process, the judge would like to hear from other jurisdictions about the following:
Does your state have a plan for improving treatment for teens with substance abuse problems?
Jim Vollendroff and I had the privilege to attend numerous meetings and contribute to the creation of a Washington State strategic plan on adolescent substance abuse treatment. (Jim is the Chemical Dependency Coordinator for King County, WA, and a Reclaiming Futures Treatment Fellow.) The Reclaiming Futures Model was our concrete framework to assure that the entire group focused on system areas that need to be addressed and/or changed.
Here's an introduction to the plan from David Jefferson, the former CSAT Grant Coordinator housed at the Washington State's Division of Alcohol and Substance Abuse (DASA):
If you don't live in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, or Washington, I can't actually tell you how your state measures up with regard to clients initiating and engaging in treatment.
But that's the point: only a few states in the nation can answer that question, and that needs to change.
Which is at least partly why
When you've assembled all the players in your Reclaiming Futures initiative for the first time, can you tell if the collaborative will be successful? Are there ways to help it along?
Are girls becoming more violent? Evidently not.
