Efficiency of youth programs subject of new bill

Terry Harrak spent her senior year of high school living on the streets because, she believes, government bureaucracy left her there. “I would go to one place for health care, run to another place for employment, go to somewhere else for education, run all around town, fill out all kinds of forms,” said Harrak, 25, who had to leave foster care in the capital's Virginia suburbs when she turned 18. “We can't ask young people to maneuver through this complicated web of services.” A bill introduced in Congress Wednesday would untangle that web by coordinating the slew of federal youth-service programs that the sponsors said are well intentioned but poorly organized.

The Federal Youth Coordination Act of 2005 would spend about $1.5 million to create a Federal Youth Development Council to serve as a primary means of communication between departments and programs that serve disadvantaged young people. Rep. Tom Osborne, R-Neb., sponsored the bill and said the federal youth-service programs are a “classic case of mission fragmentation.” “There's no coordination,” he said. “Everybody means well, but there's no way to focus and get the funds where they need to go.” Shay Bilchik, president of the Child Welfare League of America, said one example is that similar mentoring programs exist in three federal agencies — Health and Human Services, Education and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The bill is shaped around recommendations made in a report by the White House Task Force on Disadvantaged Youth, created by President Bush in 2002. Karen Morison, senior vice president of Civic Enterprises and a member of the task force, said that in 2003, the federal government spent $223.5 billion — roughly 10 percent of the federal budget — on 339 youth-related programs. The report also found that 10 million teens are at risk of not succeeding as adults, Osborne said. The Council would research the needs of youth, assess what programs and methods work well and recommend how to integrate overlapping programs. President Bush announced in his State of the Union address two weeks ago that first lady Laura Bush would lead a nationwide campaign to steer youths away from gangs. Bilchik said government youth-service programs have to fight to win over American youth. “Gangs seem to have gotten the youth-development model better sometimes than we have nationally,” he said. “They go out and they recruit youth, giving them skills to do something. They give them opportunities to then perform those skills. They give them great recognition for having performed them. They give them some type of belonging. We can't let gangs take that role from us in positive youth development.”

Bilchik said the bill calls for the council to complete its work in five years. “I don't think anybody in this room or anybody who supports this legislation believes that this is a silver bullet, a panacea that just corrects things overnight, but it is a good next step,” Bilchik said.

Harrak, now a youth leadership coordinator with the Child Welfare League of America, said she hopes the legislation will help other disadvantaged young people avoid the difficulties she faced. “When you've been in that experience, you can look and you can see and you recognize other homeless young people on the Metro, at the mall, anywhere. And I think, 'Wow, how far away are they from walking down the street just miles away from a federal program because no one's told them about it?'”

Joe Rominiecki
16 February 2005

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