Youth Services Insider came across this solicitation this week from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The agency has $150,000 to spend on a fellow of some repute to help assess the strengths and weaknesses of juvenile data collection on all levels.
You can read all about the solicitation in our excellent grants section. Here’s why YSI finds it particularly interesting. From the listing, with a word emphasized in bold:
The award amount may include salary, fringe, travel, and reasonable training costs.
And:
Applicants’ budgets should include travel for as many as two 3-day trips within the continental United States.
Compare that information with this passage from a Chronicle article a few months back about OJJDP Administrator Bob Listenbee’s absence from a major juvenile justice conference hosted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation:
Robert Listenbee, the administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Administrator, was scheduled to deliver a keynote address to attendees of a major conference sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Listenbee pulled out just days before the event, instead sending a recorded address that was played during lunch.
“If not for sequestration, he’d be with us here today,” Bart Lubow, director of Casey’s Juvenile Justice Strategy Group, told the crowd of 800, which included state and county judges as well as juvenile justice practitioners from around the country.
To recap: Not only does this OJJDP research fellowship include funds for travel, it is REQUIRED that he or she travel three times during the fellowship.
Meanwhile the head of the agency, for whom juvenile advocates and practitioners have been waiting for years, apparently will not be able to travel to major events in the field.