The First Offender Program Contains Everything you need to BUILD YOUR OWN SCIENCE-BASED PROGRAM …Based on Your Culture, Your juvenile population, and Your Program – as you run it!
The high-priced programs listed on “science based” web sites often have absolutely no scientific evidence that they will work with Native American youth and especially the population of youth that you work with. The large target population used to document “effectiveness with youth” may not have even had ONE Native American youth in the test group.
Something that worked in the inner city of Boston has a very little chance of being successful in Indian Country. The sad news is that many “science-based” programs listed on various websites may have only had minimal success. In other words, some recommended programs only barely worked at all. This is probably not what you want.
The First Offender Tribal Youth Program was developed for and has only been used with a Native American population of youth and their parents. The basic program that you will receive has been “field tested” with over 500 Native American juveniles who were arrested for a first offense.
If you purchase a “science-based” program, you will always have to use their curriculum and attend their trainings to maintain “fidelity” to how the program is suppose to work. If you don’t get good results – it will be blamed on you because you “failed to maintain fidelity” to how the program was suppose to be implemented.
The First Offender Tribal Youth Program has an entire chapter devoted to helping you set up and measure your program in such a way that within three years you will have extended measurements which tell you detailed program results and outcomes. You can even:
- Build your own science based curriculum.
- Modify and test the program to meet your need.
- Document and measure the results.
- Change and adapt the lesson. Delete something that would be offensive. Add something meaningful to your culture.
- You can put it into the printed lesson plan — because you have all the lesson plans in Word format.
Effectiveness in a diversionary program is measured by recidivism outcomes. Program modifications occur as a result of high recidivism. If the program is not working – make some changes and test those.
Once base line information is collected, (Chapter 11) the information entered into the computer tracking system provided with the First Offender Tribal Youth Program can be used to generate comparisons. Over a period of time, program effectiveness will be enhanced as program adaptations are measured against recidivism or drop out rates.
The First Offender Brief Intervention Program has built in follow-up materials which can be used at four months, six months or a year after the client completes or drops out of the program. This information can be used to compare the status of juveniles who dropped out of the program with those who completed as well as the historical data on juveniles who did not participate in the program.
