|
|
|
Recommendations
|
LEAP Evaluation: Final Report of Ohio's Welfare Initiative to Improve School Attendance Among Teenage Parents (08/01/97)
|
|
"The LEAP results suggest that it is sensible to include a LEAP-like approach as one element of a state’s welfare strategy"(ES-20).
"The LEAP experience highlights the importance of meeting the implementation challenges inherent in such programs, particularly the needs for ongoing case management and well-designed management information systems"(ES-20).
"The importance of initial school enrollment status as a predictor of program success underscores the need to prevent teen parents from dropping out of school. Recent program changes address this problem by limiting LEAP’s pregnancy and age-of-child exemptions, which could have accounted for some teens’ dropping out after becoming pregnant"(ES-21).
"LEAP’s impact on school attendance was encouraging, and would be strengthened if more teens responded to the program’s incentive structure. This outcome might be achieved by changing the incentive structure and its implementation, and by directly addressing teens’ reservations about going to school"(ES-21).
"In addition to stimulating school enrollment and attendance, programs like LEAP should provide incentives that specifically reward academic progress and school completion. Special school-based services may be needed to improve school outcomes for teen parents who respond to incentives and return to school"(ES-22).
"Special attention is needed for teen parents who had dropped out but who returned to school because of LEAP, and for older teens who were far behind their schooling when they dropped out"(ES-22).
"The 1996 federal welfare law poses important challenges for policy makers who develop and administer teen parents programs like LEAP. In addition to getting teen parents to attend school, program must address work requirements and time limits on receipt of federally provided welfare assistance that will affect young parents after they graduate or age out of programs like LEAP. Therefore, these programs may have to combine their education message and incentives with more employment-oriented activities"(ES-23).
"The problems facing teen parents on welfare are substantial and complex. LEAP successfully addressed one problem area by increasing these teens’ school attendance. However, more needs to be done to improve the self-sufficiency of these teens and to reduce the persistent poverty among them. The LEAP evaluation shows that there are no easy answers. More experimentation is necessary, both within and outside the context of the LEAP program"(ES-23).
|
| |
|
LEAP Evaluation: Three-year Impacts of Ohio's Welfare Initiative to Improve Attendance Among Teenage Parents (03/01/96)
|
|
"The findings also point to the limits on what incentives alone can do to increase high school graduation. LEAP gets more young people to the schoolhouse door, but too many subsequently walk back before getting a diploma. The greater success in Cleveland suggests some strategies for improving on these results. But more far-reaching changes in teen’s school experience will likely be needed if LEAP is to realize its full potential" (ES-13).
|
| |
|
|
