As we reported late last week, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has ended its support for the National Center for Youth in Custody, an entity it created in 2010. The funding runs out in September.
This was not something OJJDP announced; Youth Services Insider found out through multiple sources and confirmed it with the National Partnership for Juvenile Services (NPJS). This left YSI curious about two things:
1) Was the decision to terminate this grant singular, or part of some office-wide review of grants that could result in other terminations?
And if the answer is that it’s not the only terminated grant,
2) Has OJJDP decided to cancel any other grants?
OJJDP Administrator Robert Listenbee gave us a somewhat cryptic answer on question one: The agency “identified the need to increase coordination of projects delivering training and technical assistance” due to “funding reductions in fiscal year 2014.”
It is a statement that suggests that, in fact, the National Center for Youth in Custody would not be the only grant getting pulled. But OJJDP has not responded to several attempts to follow up on question two: have other grants been cancelled?
What we do know is that the 2014 spending deal was not particularly kind to OJJDP. We also know that NPJS Director Carol Cramer Brooks told YSI that she had only met Listenbee once, in a hallway, but got the sense from people close to OJJDP that “he isn’t a real fan of training and technical assistance centers.”
If this is true, it might be the case that the agency’s slate of training and technical assistance partners are on the chopping block (or for all YSI knows, have already gone under the guillotine). Here is a list of the organizations receiving 2013 funding from OJJDP (a total of $9.1 million) to conduct training and technical assistance:
Fox Valley Technical College, Innocent Justice Foundation, Search Group, National White Collar Crime Center: All four organizations received grants totaling just over $3 million to assist the Internet Crimes Against Children task forces, created to identify and apprehend child porn proliferators.
Center for Children and Family Futures: Received two grants totaling $1.4 million to assist with family drug courts.
National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges: One of OJJDP’s longest-tenured partners, which received $2 million to assist on juvenile drug courts.
ICF: Received $300,000 for assistance to the State Advisory Groups (SAG). The SAGs are convened by governor-appointed leaders, and in theory have discretion over prevention funds from OJJDP. But that money is now routinely set aside for various projects by Congressional appropriators before it reaches the states.
IIR: A $175,000 grant to do training and technical assistance for the National Juvenile Justice Information Sharing Initiative. This was a one-year grant, although the solicitation said OJJDP “may provide continuation funding” for up to two more years. The website for the initiative is not available at the moment, so you know…not a good sign.
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center: $800,000 to assist OJJDP grantees providing services for youth with sexual behavior problems.
Educational Development Center: $1 million to handle training and technical assistance for OJJDP’s Tribal Youth program. EDC has been the grantee on this for about seven years, and tribal youth services are very protected by certain appropriators, so this grant ending early would be a shocker.
Youth Services Insider is mostly written by Chronicle Editor-in-Chief John Kelly.