Dr. Goodfellow is conducting a multi-year evaluation of a school-based juvenile probation program in a large urban district. In this program, the probation officers are assigned to five or six schools that have the highest number of students on probation. Their offices are on campus in the hope that schools, families, and probation officers can have ready access to each other. One of the major components of this evaluation is a series of interviews that Dr. Goodfellow has conducted with participants in the program. here are some summaries of recent interviews at Roosevelt High School/ Jonathan’Greco:’School’Probation’Officer ’ Jonathan Greco has been a juvenile probation officer for five years. He initially got into the field because he wanted to help children. Each year, however, it got harder to identify any successes, and he felt like he was failing the children. For the most part, Jonathan believes that his perceived lack of success was due to a number of factors such as an extremely high case load, lack of adequate training, and the large number of parents who do not seem interested enough in their children, and who did not trust him. He felt there were limits to what he could do to help his clients because he could not affect the reasons for his limited success, and the factors in his non- success never seemed to change. His boss tried to help, but he seemed to believe that there are just some people who have the ability to be good probation officers, and some who do not; a lot of these abilities cannot be learned. Jonathan starting worrying that his supervisor might start to see him as one of those who did not have it. Because of this, Jonathon became reluctant to share his concerns and non-successes with his boss. Also, because he had input into case assignments, he started assigning cases to himself that were more likely to be successful. Eventually, this bothered him because he was often assigning the toughest cases to the least experienced officers. He knew something had to change so when the new school-based probation program began, he volunteered. It was a good move for him. Since taking on this job, he has found renewed excitement and enthusiasm. His clients are more likely to see him as trying to help them, and he is surprised at how much he enjoys going onto classrooms to talk to students as part of the prevention effort in this program. Patricia Ramirez: School Counselor Patricia Ramirez is the school counselor at Roosevelt High School who is assigned to the in-school probation program. Like so many school counselors, this is just one of several roles she serves. For example, in addition to this program, she is the counselor assigned to the 300 sophomores in the school and she coordinates a mentoring program that connects at risk students in the school with college student mentors who are graduates of Roosevelt High School. One of the requirements of the in-school probation program is that the students must be enrolled in school and attending regularly. However, many of these students have been in and out of school, and when they were in school long enough to earn grades, they tended to earn Ds and Fs. Historically, even though school attendance is often mandated as a condition of probation, the students on probation were not given much support. Many of them just quit coming to school. Patricia has made it her responsibility to try to reverse this trend by providing these support services for the students. 1. She has assigned mentors to the students in the program. These mentors come from the same neighborhoods as the students and have faced many of the same challenges, including legal difficulties. The hope is that they can show the students in the program that this type of success is possible and what they did in order to succeed. These mentors
