Making the Connection: 

Sharing Information and Data While Protecting Privacy of Youth Webinar

Speakers:

Ms. Michelle Boyd, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation

Dr. Brett Brown, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 

Administration on Children, Youth and Families

Ms. Mary Ellen Wiggins, Office of Management and Budget

Mr. Robert Sainz, Los Angeles Economic and Workforce Development

Ms. Debra Duardo, Student Health and Human Services, Los Angeles Unified School District

Mr. Apolonio Gonzales, Youth Presenter

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Hello, and welcome to “Making the Connection: Sharing Information and Data 

While Protecting Privacy of Youth,” a webinar sponsored by the Interagency Working Group on Youth 

Programs. I am Michelle Boyd, a policy fellow at the Department of Health and Human Services. Before 

we get into the webinar, I want to walk you through a few technical and logistical items. Please note 

that all participant lines are muted and will remain muted throughout the course of the discussion so 

you will not be able to be heard. Your questions are welcome. We will pause at multiple points 

throughout today's conversations to share your questions or comments with our guests. If you have a 

question during the question-and-answer periods or at any time during the conversation, please type it 

into the question and answer box located at the top left of your screen. We will try to get to as many 

questions as possible, given our time allotted. Any questions that we do not get to will be collected and 

answered in an upcoming brief published on FindYouthInfo.gov. 

Vulnerable youth populations such as youth transitioning out of the child welfare system and youth 

who become disconnected from school and work can find it challenging to navigate the systems that 

can connect or reconnect them to postsecondary education, training, or rewarding careers. These 

youth can struggle to reach the educational and employment milestones that set them on a path to 

economic self-sufficiency and a successful transition to adulthood. Effectively linking these youth to 

the services, supports, and opportunities that can help ensure the successful navigation of these 

pathways often requires considerable coordination among youth serving systems. Yet, too often, youth 

serving systems face a number of obstacles to this coordination. Barriers at the local, state and federal 

level include lack of data, limited understanding of best practices for data sharing, lack of 

accountability for data on specific populations of disconnected youth, and confidentiality concerns can 

make it challenging to provide services to children and youth and build collaborative partnerships. 

During this informative webinar, presenters will share information about new federal efforts to 

encourage greater cross system coordination, promising state-level practices around data sharing, and 

a successful collaborative partnership at the local level to reengage youth who have dropped out of 

high school and assist youth who have graduated high school but are not currently employed. The goal 

for today’s webinar will be first to understand the importance of data and information sharing for 

transition age and disconnected youth, also to learn more about policies at the federal level around 

data and information sharing, third, to identify a number of promising practices and new opportunities 

for enhancing data and information sharing by youth serving systems working with disconnected youth 

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and youth at risk of disconnection, and finally, to explore how to reach young adults and strategies 

employed by two successful programs. Our first presentation will be from Dr. Brett Brown who will 

provide an overview of federal level policies related to information and data sharing for transition age 

and disconnected youth and highlight some of the recent federal and nonfederal initiatives to promote 

data sharing across systems. Dr. Brown is the Director of the Office of Data, Analysis, Research, and 

Evaluation at the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, or ACYF.

Prior to joining ACYF in 2012, he was Vice President for Child and Family studies at Walter R. McDonald 

and Associates Incorporated, where he led a national, multi-site randomized controlled trial evaluation 

of differential response. Prior to joining WRNA, Dr. Brown was the Director for Social Indicators 

Research at Child Trends, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research firm. He is an internationally-recognized 

researcher with over 20 years of experience in the development and use of social indicators to inform 

child and family policy. We will now turn it over to Brett. 

Dr. Brett Brown: Thank you, Michelle and good afternoon everyone. I am going to provide a little 

overview of what federal agencies are doing around administrative data sharing, including some of the 

guidance on the restrictions around privacy issues and also some of the promotional efforts to increase 

data sharing. This defines the central tension within data sharing efforts. On one hand, administrative 

data has tremendous potential to inform the work we do both in terms of the research that helps us 

understand how to deliver higher-quality services and more coordinated services and in terms of the 

real-time service delivery; the more information one has access to in making decisions for youth or 

whoever one is serving at the time, the better off the decisions are likely to be. So, that’s good and 

there is a great deal of untapped potential where administrative data is concerned. On the other hand, 

or the other half of that tension though, are the legitimate concerns for privacy on the part of those 

that we serve. There is a lot of very sensitive data that are collected and present in administrative data 

systems, and sort of the challenge is to figure out how to make best use of that information to 

maximize our understanding and our knowledge while still respecting the legitimate privacy needs of 

American citizens. So, I would put it that way and I would not put it in terms of balancing one against 

the other but how to make sure that we respect both. There are a number of reason one would want 

to use shared data. One is for knowledge building purposes. A lot of research is dependent on 

administrative databases and on the linking of administrative data across multiple systems in order to 

get a more complete picture and a more longitudinal picture also of what is going on with youth. And 

there is also a movement, fairly recently I think, to link administrative data systems in order to support 

low-cost, high-quality experimental evaluations, design evaluations. Once these linked administrative 

data systems are in place, then being able to do these RCT evaluations, one can do IT at relatively low 

cost and high speed, so there is a great deal of interest in that. Second, besides just basic knowledge 

building are statistical purposes, and that would be doing a needs assessment, system performance 

monitoring, to see how well organizations are doing. That can be done within particular administrative 

data systems, but the value and possibilities for what one can do when one links multiple systems 

together are a very important representation of a large step forward. And most of the exceptions to 

federal laws that guide privacy really work around statistical uses of data tools which we will see in a 

moment. And the third use was for coordinating and improving services. And one can imagine that for 

youth, if one is serving youth and trying to coordinate services for high-risk youth who are usually 

involved in multiple systems at the same time, being able to see, let’s just say you are in education, 

what is happening with that child in juvenile justice with that child, with child welfare with that child, 

can help make better decisions and help you coordinate the services across those agencies. So as I said, 

that also involves opening the data up to a lot more people and that creates problems with privacy. 

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Data can be shared in number of forms, some of which more or less sensitive. The most sensitive are 

identifiable individual records. So, those are records that have got names, birth dates, and social 

security numbers - direct identifiable information. That is absolutely necessary, I would say if you want 

to be able to link records for service use. Not necessary when you want to use them for research 

purposes. The second, formed data can be shared is de-identified individual data, and these are

records but in which the social security numbers and the birth dates and other information has been 

removed. And I’ll give you an example, in our own agency, we have adoption and foster care data, 

AFCARS data, the child abuse and neglect data system, both of which have case records from all over 

the country for every case in the country. And also, the National Youth Transition Database, which is 

for youth who are transitioning out of foster care. And what ACYF has done is worked with states over 

the last 10 or so years to give kids, each case, a unique identifier. What that allows us to do is, they 

give us the data and we can’t tell who the individuals are but we can link a youth’s AFCARS record with 

their NCANS record with their NYTD record for research purposes. Finally, there is also aggregated data 

which is the safest, least sensitive form. Even here, there are cases which, depending on how rare an 

event, say you’re crossing detailed race information by child welfare abuse and neglect information, 

you can still end up with exposing private information if you're not careful. 

There are a number of laws that protect confidentiality and privacy, federal laws, including the 

“mother of all these laws,” the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, which applies to many of the federal data 

collection efforts. The Privacy Act requires written consent to share identifiable records, written 

consent of the youth or the parent. There are a number of specific exceptions: for statistical purposes, 

for what they call routine use, there are a number of others. This is intended to cover many different 

data collection efforts. There have been a number of amendments to cover very specific situations. 

The one I’m familiar with is the Uninterrupted Scholars Act. That is an amendment to the Privacy Act, 

which specifically allows child welfare workers access to educational records of the children they are 

overseeing in foster care. In addition to that, there is the HIPAA law that specifically covers health data. 

The HIPAA Act was specifically intended to facilitate the sharing of health record information to those 

who needed it for an efficient health system. So insurance companies and doctors and hospitals should 

all be able to see one’s record, but that sort of expanded the set of people that need to use it, that 

presents a lot of additional risks to privacy. It goes into quite a bit of detail on who may see those data 

and under what circumstances. There are some exceptions to the confidentiality in HIPAA, for service 

purposes and statistical purposes in some very specific circumstances. FERPA is the educational 

equivalent to HIPAA. It gives the same kind of restrictions for the purposes for which it may be used. 

There are some exceptions for educational research on behalf of educational institutions, but in most 

cases, one would have to get written consent in order to use the data for other purposes. 

In addition to these federal laws, there are also a host of individual state laws, so, if one is going to set 

up any kind of a data sharing agreement for an integrated data system, one would want to know what 

state laws cover the sharing of data and also probably be familiar with the attorneys, the particular 

attorneys general interpretation of the federal laws and there can be some substantial differences 

across states and how the attorney generals interpret these laws. And then of course, there are many 

federal regulations associated with these laws, so, laws lay out the basics circumstances under which 

data can be shared, not shared, and the regulations go into a great deal more detail in order to give 

adequate guidance. Now, for those were looking for a little bit of an introduction to this, there is a nice 

piece by the Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy called “Connecting the Dots.” It was a publication 

put out several years ago that summarizes the legal issues pretty well. 

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We have already discussed the exceptions to the privacy and the most common exceptions in the 

federal laws are for the gathering of statistical data and for research and there are also many of these 

laws that have specific exceptions for law enforcement needs. 

Legal agreements to facilitate data sharing. When your data sharing goal does not fall under any of the

exceptions for the federal laws I was talking about, one is required to get written consent of the youth 

or parents in order to set up a systems. It’s not uncommon and it’s very achievable in most cases, but it 

does require forethought. Because if you do need to get written consent, one of the big advantages of 

administrative data is one can link the data and look back in time to see how things are going. Unless 

the data use falls under one of those exceptions, if you need written consent, you can only look at data 

for youth that you have that active written consent for, which is something that requires advanced 

planning. And then there are data sharing agreements, like memorandum of understanding. These are 

most commonly, you'll have a data sharing agreement, either between agencies who want to use each 

other's data for specific purposes, or you may have an agreement between agencies and a research 

group, which is the circumstance that I am more familiar with. And there, really, you spell out in great 

detail who is to have access under what circumstances, how the data are to be safeguarded, and that 

will include things like the data to be locked in safe and what kinds of uses that data can be put to, and 

finally, once the particular project is over, how the data will be disposed of or destroyed so that we 

don't have to worry about the people's personal information being on folks’ computer hard disks.

Now, a lot of what we have been discussing up to this point has been focused on the restrictions and 

this all sounds very legal and there is that part of it. But, federal agencies are very enthusiastic about 

encouraging organizations to share their data and to use integrated data systems to help inform their 

service and to inform research. And, I have a few examples here, the Office of Management and 

Budget just put out a guidance earlier this year on providing and using administrative data for 

statistical purposes. So, it’s a guidance for Federal agencies but also it would be very useful to local 

groups who are looking to use this kind of data. The Administration for Children, Youth and Families, 

which is where children work, last year put out an informational memo actively encouraging data 

sharing by state child welfare agencies. We have a lot of grantees who have an evaluation component 

to their grants that requires that they have access to this sort of administrative data in order to do

their evaluation. So, the agency has a strong interest in encouraging that kind of sharing. I already 

described to you some of our efforts to build in link-ability into the ACYF administrative databases. 

Many of you who are involved in education will be quite familiar with the statewide longitudinal 

educational systems program from the department of education, where for some years, they have 

been strongly encouraging and financially supporting the development of the longitudinal education 

records that eventually would cover from preschool all the way through college. This is hardly an 

exhaustive list, but I just wanted to give you a sense for what is out there. Administration for Children 

and Families, which is one level above ACYF in the HHS hierarchy has something called the 

interoperability effort which was connected with the Affordable Care Act, and this is data sharing on a 

slightly different level, and that is in working with different administrative data systems to be able to 

have the same sort of data structures and definitions so that systems can talk to each other directly. So 

they have been looking at how healthcare data systems and Medicaid systems can also be talking to 

FNS systems and child welfare systems. 

So, finally, there are also a number of non-federal efforts to promote data sharing. Again, this is not 

exhaustive, but there are two groups that are doing some very good work in this area. One is the 

Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy out of the University of Pennsylvania, which is headed up by 

Dennis Culhane and John Fantuzzo. They have a network of communities and states that have been 

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developing administrative data systems. I think there are 40 or 50 members to this network and they 

are a mutual support group and are also developing various toolkits to help those who are interested 

and I think that it can be a great source of information for those who are interested in building their 

own systems. It is primarily a research-oriented group, as opposed to a service-oriented group, so 

there is that caveat. The second group is working out of the National Neighborhood Indicators 

Partnership overseen by the Urban Institute and the Annie E. Casey Foundation has provided funding 

for six of their NNIP sites to develop integrated data systems that can rely on work and use those for 

needs assessment, social indicators work of various sorts. All right, so that is my presentation and I 

have 13 seconds to spare. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Thank you, Brett, for that very informative and thorough presentation. We really 

appreciate it. Before moving onto the next presentation, I first wanted to address a couple of questions 

that came through the question-and-answer box. To address those questions, I want to let everyone 

know this slides will be made available after the webinar and we are also recording this session and 

recording and slides will be made available. We also want to continue hearing from you so please 

submit your questions to the question-and-answer box and we also want to use this time to present

one of our polling questions, and we will pull that polling question up shortly. So, the polling question 

that we have presented to you all is that we want you to indicate what services sector you represent 

and so we have a number of choices. When you have a chance to respond to that question. And as you 

are responding, I will go ahead and transition and let you know about our next presenter. So, now we'll 

hear from Mary Ellen Wiggins about the Performance Partnership Pilots initiative. Mary Ellen works in 

the White House Office of Management and Budget and is the co-project manager for the 

Performance Partnership Pilot. She previously served at OMB as the Program Manager for Partnership 

Funds for Program Integrity, which is authorized to identify ways to improve the effectiveness and 

efficiency of state-administered federal assistance programs. She also served as the Program Examiner 

for the Department of Veterans Affairs Compensation Pensions Program. Mary Ellen has also worked 

as a vocational educational counselor for the Phoenix House Adolescent Drug and Alcohol treatment 

programs, and as a coordinator for the global learning school enrichment programs in Central America. 

So I will turn it over now to Mary Ellen to give her presentation on the Performance Partnership Pilots. 

Ms. Mary Ellen Wiggins: Thank you, so much, and thank you for the opportunity to be here with all of 

you today. I'm really excited to get to talk about this important topic and of course, to hear the other 

wonderful presentations that we have going. I’m sorry but I have to start off with a technical question. 

Oh, never mind, it was resolved. So jumping into our Performance Partnership Pilot for disconnected 

youth. So, the headline here is that this is really an exciting and unique opportunity to test innovative 

cost-effective and outcomes-focused strategies for improving results for disconnected youth. The basic 

premise here is that state, local, and tribal governments working together with nonprofits and other 

partners can propose ways to blend together funds from different youth serving programs into one 

pot, agree with federal agencies on flexibilities that are needed, and then be accountable for 

improvements in education, employment, and other key outcomes. So basically, what this does is it 

supports a youth-centric approach. Folks in the field can start off with a series of questions, first asking: 

who is that you’re trying to serve? What works for that population? What are eligible funding streams 

that you can use? What are the rules and requirements for those funding streams that would need to 

be waived or be modified in some way to make your pilot proposal possible. Then accountability again 

is focused on outcomes. So, once you have funding all blended into one pot, instead of having the 

same detailed, process-oriented compliance activities that might normally go along with all of those 

separate funding streams, we’d be thinking about, what are some domains for outcomes for youth 

we’d really want to measure like employment, education, and other key areas for example health or 

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recidivism. Our hypothesis here is that the flexibility to blend money and get waivers will help state, 

local, and tribal governments really overcome hurdles to improving outcomes for disconnected youth.

Here are a few key features that you’ll see here on the slide. It was given to us in January by the 

Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014, otherwise known as the Omnibus. Funds that are included 

are FY 2014 discretionary funds. That basically means competitive and formula grants from the 

Department of Health and Human Services, Labor, Education, and related agencies, such as the 

Corporation for National and Community Service, the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and 

some others. Our authority lets us do up to 10 pilots, and those pilots are going to be governed by 

performance agreements between a lead federal agency, which may be different for each pilot 

depending on what it is trying to do, and all of the government jurisdictions that are involved in a 

particular pilot. That might mean multiple agencies from any level of government, like multiple local 

agencies, multiple state agencies. It might also involve multiple levels of government; everyone who 

would be involved in implementing the pilot or responsible for funds that are being used. 

Let's go over some of the key elements of P3. The first one is blending funds. So what does that mean? 

When you’re blending funds that means you are taking individual funding streams and you can merge 

them into one pot of money, under one cooperative agreement. Once you have that single pot, it is

governed by one set of reporting and other requirements and that one set of requirements may be 

different than the original requirements that were attached to each of the programs that are 

contributing funds. So waivers are a really important part of this because places might need flexibility 

in order to do things like aligns some of their requirements and make sure the process is streamlined. 

So P3, as we’re calling Performance Partnership Pilots, lets the heads affected federal agencies waive 

anything they are already able to waive under their program requirements. Also, and this is new, they 

can waive any statutory, regulatory, or administrative requirements that they are not otherwise 

authorized to waive. So, they can do whatever they are able to do now under the regular program and 

really waive any other requirement with some really important safeguards. These safeguards are that 

the waivers have to be consistent with the statutory purposes of the federal programs involved. Any 

waivers have to be necessary to achieve the pilot’s outcome and they cannot relate to important 

things like nondiscrimination, wage and labor standards, or allocation of funds to state and sub-state 

levels. So that means where there are already allocations that exist, for example, you can’t have one

locality take from another locality’s regular allocations. 

The third element is performance agreements. As I said before, these are between the lead federal 

agency, which might differ depending on what the pilot project wants to do, and all of the participating 

jurisdictions at the state, local, and tribal levels, and these agreements are really going to spell out the 

terms of the pilot. So, all of the federal and any nonfederal programs that are contributing funds, the 

target population that’s being served, outcome measures and interim indicators, as well as the 

measurement methodology for how those things will be gauged, oversight procedures and any 

corrective actions that might be needed along the way if the pilot is not getting the results anticipated

at first, and then waivers and any other flexibilities that are provided. 

So there are important limitations to note as well. No mandatory or entitlement funds are eligible to 

be included, so that means TANF, Medicaid, foster care, those are not eligible for inclusion in the pilot. 

And, and you can’t use funds from other departments that I did not mention, such as the Department 

of Justice or Housing and Urban Development. They can use any flexibility that they already have, but 

funding from their programs can't go into that single pot. This is also only for FY14 funds. There is an 

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administration proposal before Congress to be able to add in funds that are appropriated this coming 

year to pilots that are awarded this year. There is also a proposal to start new pilots in 2015. In 

addition, the administration has proposed to add authority for the Department of Justice funds to be 

blended. So, Justice funds cannot go into the pot this year, but it’s possible that in the future, they 

would be able to. 

So P3 really introduces some exciting possibilities for how states, tribes, and localities can achieve 

better results for disconnected youth. There are also some larger expectations. So, P3 really responds 

to state, local, and tribal needs by enabling a much more grassroots process. To propose new ways of 

serving this population, based on what’s worked and what is needed in specific places. It also helps 

leverage resources to improve opportunity and social mobility and empowers communities to innovate 

and how to coordinate and deliver services in a really cost-effective and outcomes-focused way. 

Important for today’s discussion for sure, it has a strong role for both performance management and 

also for evaluation, so, it can really just help us advance what know about what works, and also help 

communities learn along the way and also introduces a new accountability model. 

So, who are the disconnected youth? The definition is up here. It’s pretty broad and inclusive. We get a 

lot of questions about where applicants should focus. It’s going to be important to conduct a needs 

assessment to help identify the highest priority populations where a pilot can make an impact. Here

you'll see some examples of potential pilots, and I'm going to kind of move quickly through this slide 

because we are short on time today. But, we have a consultation paper that’s posted online on 

FindYouthInfo.gov as well as some other recorded webinars. If you go look at that consultation paper, 

it lays all this out in more detail including some examples of what pilots might do, and also seeks 

feedback. Really important to today’s conversation also, is that performance measurement and 

evaluation are really cornerstones of P3. We’re contemplating a three-tier approach. What you see on 

the screen now are things that would be required for all pilots. That is kind of the floor. And this next 

screen shows things that stronger candidates and strongest candidates might bring to the table, so in 

addition to having outcome measures and interim indicators in education and employment, other 

measures, reliable data, cooperation in a federal evaluation, you could also think about whether your 

jurisdiction is able to come to the table to provide baseline, show expertise in managing, using data, 

and is looking at really proven strategies or interventions to serve disconnected youth. 

So, importantly, who can apply and who can be partners. State, local, and tribal governments are 

eligible to apply. Nonprofits are extremely important both in developing, designing, and implementing 

many of these pilots and we encourage heavy involvement along the way according to the local 

partnership. It’s also important to emphasize that partnerships should include all public and private 

stakeholders that have an interest in the pilot, and should really be founded in already very mature 

community partnerships (this is based on feedback we’ve been getting from the field). 

So, the application process and the review process are going to take place over the summer, and will 

include competing for start-up grants of several hundred thousand dollars a-piece. In addition to laying 

out the specifics of what you would like to do with the pilots, the kind of flexibilities and existing funds 

that your jurisdiction already gets that might want to draw on. More details about that will be coming 

out in the coming months, including a specific date when the solicitation will be released and then 

when applications are due. And, with that short overview, I would like to point people again to 

Findyouthinfo.gov, which has a section on Performance Partnership Pilots that again has the 

consultation paper, more details, and other recorded webinars and other sources that will be helpful in 

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understanding this initiative and of course, we will be updating that and be providing more information

as we go. And, thank you very much. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Mary Ellen, thank you for the presentation on the Performance Partnership Pilots. I 

wanted to return to my initial request about questions and answers. If you have any questions, please 

feel free to submit them in the question and answer box in the bottom corner of the screen. I also 

wanted to return to the poll results of the poll we asked about the different sectors that people 

represent. We’ll be pulling those results up shortly. One more moment. Well, while we are waiting for 

those results, we will also be posting a few more polling questions for you all about the Performance 

Partnership Pilots, one being whether or not you would want to have follow-up information for the 

Performance Partnership Pilots, so when you do have that poll option, you can respond accordingly. 

So, as far as the first question we asked, when we asked what services sectors do the folks who are on 

the line represent? It seems as if there is representation from child welfare and “other” represents

35%, and child welfare represents 21%, and then the next being Education. This gives us an idea of who 

is online and how we can respond appropriately to your questions so thank you for responding to that

poll, we appreciate it. The polling question that I was referring to a few seconds ago about the 

Performance Partnership Pilots is whether or not based on what you heard today, you know, would 

you want to follow up about the Performance Partnership Pilots? When you see that question, you can 

respond accordingly. 

As I mentioned, we will continue asking questions or taking your questions and we will field those to 

the presenters. And then, for the next presentation, we also want to present another polling question 

around the barriers which folks may perceive as the most significant impediments to data sharing. And, 

your options are laid out. So the first being, whether federal laws or statutes such as FERPA, HIPAA, or 

others, and the options are whether it is local policy, local practice, or you don't foresee any 

impediments to data sharing. 

So, during this webinar, we also want to share insights from the field. We have three presenters to 

discuss the work of the Los Angeles YouthSource Centers, including a young person who receives 

support services from a YouthSource Center. First, Robert Sainz and Debra Duardo will describe the 

collaborative work that they have undertaken in Los Angeles to engage youth who have dropped out of 

high school and to assist youth who have graduated high school, but are not currently employed. The 

collaboration is primarily based out of the city’s YouthSource Centers. To give some brief background 

on Robert Sainz and Debra Duardo, Robert Sainz serves as the assistant general manager for 

operations for the city of Los Angeles’ Economic and Workforce Department. Through his work, he 

manages over 100 million in public agency grant funds but more importantly he has impacted the lives 

of thousands of young people and adults, creating opportunities for them to return to school, enter 

employment, and start careers. Robert has over 20 years of public service experience, specifically in 

local government. Throughout his career, he has addressed many difficult social problems facing the 

community’s low-income residents, including the challenges of juvenile delinquency, youth and adult 

unemployment, and poverty. He is presently engaged in policy development, program development, 

and program implementation of a number of youth and community intervention programs. During his 

time with the city of Los Angeles, Robert Sainz has been instrumental in reinventing the workforce 

develop system, establishing the Family Source System, and founding the LA Youth Opportunity 

Movement. So, I will now turn it over to Robert for his presentation. 

Mr. Robert Sainz: Hello, this is Robert, and what I would like to do is actually start the presentation 

with Debra going first, and then I’ll just in from there. So, Debra? 

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Ms. Debra Duardo: Good afternoon, everybody, it's a pleasure to be here today and share some of the 

things that we have been doing in Los Angeles to really make sure that we are reaching out to our 

students who are most at risk and our youth that are out there unemployed and not in school. Just to 

give you a little bit of background information, the reason why we entered into this partnership and, 

we being the Los Angeles Unified School District in partnership with the city of LA's Economic and 

Workforce Development Department, is basically because we have a serious problem — excuse me, 

could you go to the next slide? I'm sorry we are trying to figure out how to forward the slides. I thought 

we had control of that. There we go. Okay, go back one. Sorry. The reason why we entered into this 

partnership is basically because we are very concerned with the high number of students that have 

dropped out of school, students who have either dropped out maybe even finished high school but are 

unemployed. In Los Angeles, as across the nation, it's a serious problem with the number of students 

that are dropping out of high school, resulting in, you know, lost income and really, serious problems. 

Some of the consequences that we found, and many of you know, of our students who drop out of 

high school, many of them end up in prison. 90% of juveniles in the California Youth Authority have 

dropped out of school and in today's workplace, 60% of adults who dropped out of high school are 

unemployed. So, we were really concerned about this problem and Robert and I started having some 

conversations on how we might work together to better serve this population, and one of the things 

that we found is an issue that was addressed earlier was that we had problems sharing information

due to the confidentiality and privacy laws. But, this next slide gives you an indication of kind of what 

we are looking at in Los Angeles. Every year, or at least in this school year, we have 15,726 students 

that dropped out of high school within the 2012-2013 school year. You have to realize, LAUSD is the 

second largest school district with a population of about 680,000 students, but still, we were losing 

way too many. In addition to the students that were dropping out of school, we found that we had a 

real serious problem with the number of students that were chronically absent. So you can see that we 

had over 31,000 students that we consider chronically absent, missing more than 10 days of school in 

the school year. We also had a large population of homeless students, over 13,000 homeless students, 

and over 8,000 students that are identified as foster youth. When we started doing in LAUSD is really 

tracking and looking at our data to understand where some of the problems are. And one thing that we 

started looking at is the students that were dropping off by ethnicity, and we became very concerned 

with the number of Hispanic and African-American students that were disproportionately dropping out 

of school, and we were really trying to come up with some solutions to that problem. In addition, we 

were looking at dropouts by grade, and we are very concerned with the number of students that 

weren't even making it into our high school. So the students that were transitioning from middle 

school to high school that we were losing before even had the opportunity to see them in high school. 

Mr. Robert Sainz: So, for many years, as we move forward in trying to address this issue, but truth be

told, the city was often doing its own programs and efforts, the school district was doing theirs, our 

nonprofit community doing theirs, and the community college district having their efforts. And many 

issues stopped us from moving forward, but the biggest one was data. No one actually had a real good 

handle on how many young people we had that were out of school and out of work. We did 

commission a study going back to 2004. We had Dr. Herrington from Northeastern at the time d a 

study that looked at our 16 to 24 population and the bottom line was that one out of five kids, nearly 

100,000, were out of school and out of work. With that, we had to actually have a discussion, an

intense discussion, between the city and school district on how we were going to align our resources. 

And often times, that issue of FERPA and sharing of data was often one of the bigger roadblocks. As 

Debra mentioned, it really did start with her team and my team from the city sitting down across the 

table and trying to find a solution. As a part of our solution, we wanted to integrate our staffs and one 

of the ways that we are able to do that was to have counselors from LAUSD that had the information, 

9 
and had access to the educational status, maintain control of that data. At the same time, we had to 

work with WIA resources that we were in essence meeting the minimum requirement of 30 percent in 

WIA. We shifted that as a policy to serve 70 percent of our young people that were out of school. At 

that, we did an RFP which included the placement of an LAUSD counselor at every site. The counselor’s 

role, the PSA counselor’s role, is very, very critical. Because, not only do they have access to 

educational records, they have access to all of the educational solutions that our workforce folks 

traditionally did not have. We also applied for the Workforce Innovation Fund that we focused

specifically 100 percent of our folks on high school dropout. We connected that to a clear pathway for 

healthcare, green technology, and construction and we opened three additional sites. We currently 

have 13 sites that are funded through WIA and then the three sites are funded through WIF. So, in the 

city of Los Angeles, as you can appreciate the large geographical area that we cover, the 16 sites are 

located in the areas of highest need. Some of these are sites, like Watts, have an 80-90 percent youth 

in poverty ratio, but at a minimum, most of our sites have between 40-50 percent youth in poverty. 

And the correlation to the dropout data is that this is the right place to put these centers to serve these 

young people. 

Ms. Debra Duardo: As Robert said, one of the things that we did early on place our LAUSD counselors 

are these YouthSource Centers, or these reengagement centers, and what these counselors bring is 

that they have a Master’s degree in social work and school counseling and they are the expert that can 

basically look at the student’s record, identify what the problem is, assess what some of the needs are, 

and then assist the student in engaging back in school. So, some of the things that these counselors 

actually do is, one, they do a lot of outreach to students and families in the community. Often times, 

we have services that families are not aware of so one thing is reaching out to families, making sure 

that they are aware of services available to them. Once the families come into the center, our

counselors will sit down with the students and families and do a psychosocial-educational assessment, 

basically determining where they are at. The look at their history, their credit information, find out 

what has worked for them in the past, what hasn't worked, what are some of the special conditions 

that they're facing in their life, maybe they are a parent at an early age or they have other 

circumstances that are creating barriers from them being successful in school, and then they 

determine what would be the best educational option for that student, what would work best for 

them. In addition, they provide training to the staff at the YouthSource Centers, so we have crosstraining with staff at the reengagement centers that are training our LAUSD staff, and then our LAUSD 

staff are also training them as well. So, it's really an integration of not only the counselors at these 

centers, but also engaging the local schools that are nearby so that everyone has access to the 

information and is aware of services available to them. Some of these services offered Robert will tell 

you about. 

Mr. Robert Sainz: So, the key, especially for this particular subject, is that the counselors maintain the 

integrity of the data. And, we, as city officials, or community officials, do not have access to LAUSD 

databases or any other confidential information. Once we have the young person inside, and if they 

are over 18, they do sign a waiver to allow us to share information that we collect through the WIA. If

they are under 18, we do get a parent waiver. But, the services that we offer in addition to educational 

planning and educational assessments are the work readiness training, internship, job placement, 

financial assistance to complete goals, GED services, and adult education. We have twin goals that 

we’ve now married the educational support with the WIA dollars which is to get the young person back 

to school and on an educational track, and then to give them that first work experience and the

support of that work experience. Here, we have two large bureaucracies that have really boiled down 

to wanting to serve the young person the best way we can and have our resources targeted to their 

10
assistance. With that, we would like to turn it over to a young man to speak, Apolonio, and give his 

story. 

Mr. Apolonio Gonzales: Yes, hello, this is Apolonio Gonzales. Basically I went in school to Southgate 

High School and the reason I did not stay there is is because I was getting bullied and things were not

really working out with me. I would go to supportive staff that could help me with the situation but 

even when I did that, it still kept on going. I did not feel too secure. I didn’t feel too positive so, with 

me even finishing at school so I was just like, I guess, in a difficult situation you could say. But, I got 

referred and from there, I went to the Youth Center and I met Ms. Alcito. She helped me to discuss the 

options that I had and it was either an alternate to an adult school or a regular high school, but I chose 

to finish school there. And then, I graduated in the summer, but then, I got introduced to a program 

called WIA, which helped me get a paid internship, training, like security and work training, which 

really, you know, I was out there and accomplishing on my own because obviously I wasn’t referred to 

that before. But when I went to the Center, to the WIA program, I was referred to the training and, you 

know, other workshops, and they really helped me a lot, Ms. Alcito really helped me a lot, and 

everybody included. It was really hard for me, to be honest with you. I did not think I was going to 

graduate. I did not think I was going to be going to college. But, now I attend Los Angeles Trade Tech 

School and am hoping that in the future or soon enough, I will actually have a stable employment and 

from there, go to a university where I will major in anything, and I'll have a minor, to be honest with

you, I don't really know at this point but I'm thinking about it. And I'm just a young man trying to 

survive this world, trying to do positive things and stay out of trouble like I have been doing. Nothing is 

holding me back. I'm going straightforward because I don't believe in giving up, I believe in keeping on 

pushing until I succeed and to me, that is something like big education, that’s something big to me. 

That’s not something I just want to throw away because if I throw it away, the only options I might 

have is, well, no options. This is really good that I could do something for myself and there are actually 

people that care, when it comes to education and it's really building up as time passes by in me, a

different mentality, and more hope. Before, I had negativity when I was younger, say 14 or 15 years 

old, I did not even think I was going to graduate high school or go to college. But, I just kept on going 

with it and everything worked out fine and so far, I'm just doing what a young man has to do. Focus 

and never give up or listen to any negative commentary that some people have got to say, just because 

you’re doing something good with your life. 

Ms. Debra Duardo: Apolonio has done an excellent job and he’s just one example of many students 

that just demonstrate that if we have the proper supports in place and we are working together in 

terms of the city and school district and other providers, then we can really do right by our students 

and Apolonio is an excellent example of what works when we all have our act together. 

Mr. Robert Sainz: So, the last slide I’d like to share with you is about our data. So, we started this in 

July 1, 2012, and traditionally, with our WIA funds, we would serve about 2,700 young people, 

specifically for WIA. In 2012 and 2013, under the partnership, the added value that we were able to 

bring is that we had nearly 5,400 educational assessments by the PSA counselor. That was out of about 

8,000 young people that walked through our doors in our 16 sites. The importance of having 

educational assessment because this gave a roadmap to the young people and how to get back either 

into school, if they were formally dropped out of high school, or if they had graduated but were 

struggling in terms of their next steps in terms of postsecondary work. And then, we did enroll 2,900 

into the WIA youth system. We had an additional 1,000 people that we enrolled in CDBG and other 

workforce programs and 972 high school dropouts were returned to school officially. And then, 

probably hundreds more that made their way back one way or another through the work of the team. 

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And in 2013-2014, so far as of April, we’ve had close to 4,400 assessments, and are well on our way of 

meeting the same numbers as of last year. So the program is richer, the federal dollars that we have in 

terms of WIA and the local educational dollars now have been going much, much farther than before. 

We have been able to develop outcomes, not just on WIA outcomes, but local outcomes that 

measured folks returning to school and high school graduation rates, and then lastly, we were able to 

utilize many of our other programming in terms of employment. Thank you. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Thank you. We are very fortunate to have the presenters from LA present on the 

YouthSource Centers and a special thank you to Apolonio for presenting and giving and sharing your 

story and experiences being a student in LA school district and how the centers have helped you to 

achieve your academic and professional goals. I did not get a chance to mention Debra Duardo’s bio. I 

want to ask people who are continuing to offer their questions to the question-and-answer box, I 

briefly wanted to touch on her experiences. So, Debra Duardo is the executive director of Student 

Health and Human Services for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is responsible for the 

administrative oversight of support services and district programs including student medical services, 

school nursing, school mental health, pupil services, dropout prevention and recovery, health 

education, community partners, and Medi-Cal programs. She has over 20 years of professional 

experience working with at-risk students and their families and her unique life experience as a high 

school dropout and her ability to overcome those obstacles and rise to the position of executive 

director drives her passion to ensure that all students receive an education in a safe and caring 

environment and that every student is college-prepared and career-ready. So we were very fortunate 

to have those presenters from the LA program, and so we thank you for your time on that. 

Also, I want to remind folks that you have submitting many questions and we appreciate that. I want to 

remind people that the slides and recording will be available after the webinar. So, you'll be able to 

access those items after the webinar. So, I want to address some of the questions, or pose some of the 

questions, to our presenters. One I just wanted to share with Mary Ellen and see if you’ll be able to 

address this one. One question came in asking how you will be able to engage tribal agencies to 

participate in the pilot program. I want to see if you were able to speak on that briefly. 

Ms. Mary Ellen Wiggins: Sure, and thank you for the question. So, it certainly is very important to us 

that tribes interested in pursuing the pilot be able to apply and the way that the pilots work, as I 

covered at a super high level before, where there is a state, local, or a tribal government organization 

that is interested in applying for a pilots, they would be the ones to actually submit an application, but 

could work in partnership and did work in partnership with other government organizations that need

to be involved, or would like to be involved, as well as nonprofits or other organizations that support 

their work. So, if there are, for example, sometimes associations that represent different government 

organizations, whether it's tribes or local governments, an association like that could be instrumental 

in helping to develop a pilot, but in order to submit an application, they would need to have the buy-in 

and willingness to submit from the organizations that they're working with. And, that could be, you

know, a single tribe, it could be a single local government or state, or it could actually be a consortium 

of multiple governments getting together to do something on a regional or broader basis. But it is 

certainly very important to us to engage and do outreach to tribal governments as well as state and 

local governments. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Thank you, Mary Ellen. This is a question I want to pose to all of the presenters, 

especially our LA presenters who have experience on the ground doing this on a day-to-day basis. But, 

if you all have insight or ideas about best practices for sharing between partner agencies, for instance, 

12
if you have any does or don’ts that you would suggest to individuals trying to pursue this collaborative 

work in the sharing across agencies that have chosen to form you partnership in this effort. 

Mr. Robert Sainz: Well, I will say that the first “don’t” is don't give up. I think at the local level, not only 

were we dealing with federal rules and regulations, we have the state rules and regulations, and then 

we have our local rules and regulations and each of our bureaucracies from education here in Los 

Angeles areas is governed by a school board that has its own jurisdiction separate from the city, and 

the city has their own rules and regulations. And with that, it could be very daunting. And like I said for 

decades, we were running these programs independently and there was always one hurdle or another 

that was seemingly in front of us. But, it really did take courage and I really applaud Debra and her 

team for having the courage inside the school to address this issue and then to be able to come out 

with a creative way to maintain the integrity of the data and privacy but at the same time not lose sight 

of what is best for our young people out there. So, don't give up. 

Ms. Debra Duardo: This is Debra, I'll just add to what Robert said, in terms of not giving up. But, I think 

the other thing that is really important is to find the right people in the right positions that can get 

things moving. You know, a lot of times this work can be overwhelming and you need to focus on the 

people that are interested in moving forward and get around people that aren't. So, I think having 

Robert as a partner, someone in the city, we are able to connect immediately, figure out what is best 

for kids, come up with a plan on how we can both introduce it to our own executive staff that we 

needed to move forward in our boards. But, it really is about finding the right people that will do this 

work. And, that is really important. If you find someone that is just not interested, move to the next 

person. Don't let one person stop the whole process. Continue to look for people that are interested in 

keeping children first and moving forward.

Dr. Brett Brown: This is Brett Brown. I wish I had a lot of good, thoughtfully constructed toolkits and, 

you know, guidelines to give folks, but, unfortunately, they don't really exist, at least in the data 

sharing area. Yet, this is a relatively young area. I would recommend keeping my eye out over the AISP 

group and possibly if you're really interested in talking in-depth to a group that has been there before 

you, to contact the head of that network and see if they can hook you up with somebody who would 

be willing to share their experiences. 

Ms. Mary Ellen Wiggins: Brett, this is Mary Ellen and I was going to build on your response and say that 

AISP (Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy) has some case studies on their website of state and local 

governments who are doing this work. So, in addition to talking to folks looking at those might offer 

some really good insights, and that is www.aisp.upenn.edu, so it's run out of the University of 

Pennsylvania. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Thank you, Mary Ellen, for following up on and thank you, presenters, for your 

response to the question. I also want to pose a question to Apolonio about what you felt were the 

features of the YouthSource Centers that kept you engaged and that you found most helpful in 

achieving your goals and the type of services and assistance that they provided. 

Mr. Apolonio Gonzales: Basically, what helped me stay engaged, I mean, not every day is there an 

opportunity to actually do things that — my bad, I kind of got stuck on that one. Sorry about that. My 

case manager, [Pause] sorry about that. 

Mr. Robert Sainz: Take your time. 

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Mr. Apolonio Gonzales: Constantly, he's been helping me a lot and contacting me about services being 

offered by the WIA program, and that is the way that I got into LA Trade Tech also because he, you 

know, provided that information of the automotive which I am taking right now. Other stuff I could do, 

but I chose automotive. And, basically, the trainings that I got are really helpful. The forklift and 

security training is, like, good things to have on hand because a job is a job. But, just so many options 

that I have been offered, but I just choose the ones I think I will be successful in. But, I know that if I 

give it a try, if I fail or succeed, but there is a lot of stuff that is in this program which is really helpful. 

Sometimes, it depends on what is being offered and I'm just really grateful that I'm in this WIA 

program, I could say, and it is just been an honor. And it's just giving me more and more hope and 

actually going on and actually seeing this, because before, I did not think anybody cared. I thought I 

cared more about myself but it's not even like that. There are many people that care about youth and 

your education and getting it on the right path. But, yeah, I just, you know, do the best I can. But, thank 

you, I appreciate it. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: No, thank you. We really appreciate you sharing your story. I wanted to present 

another question to Robert and Debra about the actual process that the Los Angeles YouthSource

Centers use. Can you walk us through what it actually looked like for the sharing of records? So, is the 

YouthSource Center able to log into the school district system and obtain student records? Is there a 

health or healthcare component? If you could speak more into how the actual structure works. 

Mr. Robert Sainz: Sure, sure. And I will start and then we’ll turn it over to Debra to give details. But 

what we knew from early on was that city staff or non-school staff could not have access to the LAUSD

record database. I have sat around tables for years, everyone trying to figure out that, because they 

thought that was the most important. And, although it is important, they never get past that to do the 

implementation of fully sharing. So what happens is we do outreach in two ways. One is through our 

caseworkers at the city YouthSource Centers. They are partnered with credible nonprofits that we 

work with. And so, we do get folks that walk in that way, and word-of-mouth. The second way is 

through Debra’s staff. They have a list of kids who should be in school who are not in school and 

they're basically folks that haven't showed up, or reenrolled, back on their list and they do that 

outreach. When the young people do come back in, they come to an orientation session that is jointly 

held between us and the school staff. And then after that, they actually receive the one-on-one with a

school counselor. And, during that one-on-one with a school counselor is when they develop the 

educational plan. After that, we do collect the information that goes into the WIA system, and with 

that we are able to share that information back with the school counselor. But, all educational records 

are maintained under the auspices of the school officials. So, Debra? 

Ms. Debra Duardo: You know, FERPA exists for reason and it is to protect the privacy of our students, 

so we really do respect it. But there are ways to go around FERPA in terms of making sure that our 

students and families are getting services that they want and need. So as Robert said, we do not share 

information. I can’t hand over my list of dropouts to Robert and say, here, have your staff go look for 

these students. But, what I can do is I can place one of my counselors who can go online, access all of 

the student information and records, bring that student in, introduce them to the services that are 

offered, and then get them or their parents to sign consent where then we are able to share all of the 

information. So, it's just that initial outreach, getting them in, giving them the information, then we are 

able to share once the parent or student signs off on consent. So, the other thing that I'm not sure if it 

was clear when we talked about sharing resources is that the city pays for half of these counselors that 

are at the re-engagement centers and the district pays for half. So, it really was us working together 

and finding a new way to share resources and come up with a way of doing things systematically across 

14
the city, across the district to make sure that we have supports in place. The district does have a 

partnership with the Department of Children and Family Services, as Brett was discussing earlier. We 

do have a data sharing process where DCFS informs LAUSD every time a student enters into their 

system. We in turn take that information and provide information to the DCFS social worker, so we 

give them updates on student attendance, student enrollment history, their grades, and whether or 

not they're on track to graduate. That took several years to develop but we do have that in place 

where we are sharing individual information between the Department of Children Family Services and 

our school district. 

Dr. Brett Brown: This is Brett. How is that being shared? Is that over the phone or real-time 

electronically? 

Ms. Debra Duardo: It is shared electronically. So, if DCFS sends a file to our IT folks within a couple of 

days there is a turnaround where basically, weekly they’re getting information, so it's real-time. They 

are able to know whether students are attending school, whether or not they are passing classes, and 

whether or not — how they are doing in terms of grades and being on track to graduate. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Thank you for that helpful answer. One thing I failed to mention is that we actually 

did a collaboration profile on the YouthSource Centers that is available on FindYouthInfo.gov so that 

people can go to and learn more about what Robert and Debra spoke about in the presentation and

learn about the work that they're doing there. But, I did want to pull out two of the lessons learned 

that you all discussed in the collaboration profile. One was rolling with resistance and the second was 

negotiating a shared commitment. I was wondering if you all could speak to that a bit as far as the 

lessons learned during this process, some of the challenges you faced and how you address them, 

specifically speaking to those two lessons learned. 

Ms. Debra Duardo: This is Debra. I will speak a little bit and handed over to Robert. One of the things, 

the challenges that we face, was some resistance. And the reason that we had that resistance was that 

it happened to be as we were trying to create this partnership, we were in the worst fiscal crisis we’ve 

ever been in at LAUSD. We laid off 7,000 teachers, we were in a very difficult time, and here, we were 

talking about placing LAUSD counselors at an off-site facility. So, there was resistance on our end from

board members and people within the school district saying, you know, why are we going to place our 

counselors in an outside facility when there is so much of a demand and need for them at our school 

site? And, that was a big challenge that we had to overcome. At the same time, I know on the city end, 

and Robert, some of the challenges he met with the city folks were saying, well, that's the school 

district’s job. They are supposed to be looking for dropouts. You know, why are we going to take some 

of our money that has been going out to the contractors that have been doing good work with this 

population and give it back to the school district? So, those were some of the challenges that we faced, 

but, when we brought people together and we show the systems that we were looking at creating and 

demonstrated that we would do a better job by our students and families of giving them services 

where they were at working together in combination. So some students, it may be best for them to 

come back to a comprehensive high school and for others, it is better for them to go into another 

system, to connect students with work and job training opportunities. Those were some of the things 

that when we put the whole plan together and were able to share it and once people actually 

experienced having the opportunity to work together, they realized that they were better able to 

accomplish their goals by working together. So, the reengagement sites that previously did not have an 

educational expert were challenged with a student coming in, did not know how many credits they 

had, did not communicate their school history, now they had a school expert there that had access to 

15
the student record, they did not have to send a student back and forth and lose them sometime in 

between. So those are some of the challenges but I think once they started working together, they 

realized they could do a better job by working together than in isolation. 

Mr. Robert Sainz: And negotiating commitments was probably the easiest parts. It was really about 

getting a common belief in these young people. Dealing with out of school youth, you know, 

oftentimes there is not a large number of advocates working with this group or an organized group of 

folks. So you know, it was the folks that are in school, you have your school board and administrators 

and folks are talking about the in-school kids. On the employment inside, you know, folks that are 

working, you know, they'll have their employers talking to them. But the kids who are neither in school 

nor working, who is advocating for them? That is the area that we really took up. We did not take it up 

from a juvenile justice perspective that these kids were all bad. As a matter of fact, we knew, and these 

are our families that the vast majority of these kids were just like Apolonio; young guys who needed 

the support and educational system, needed to be what taught what pathways were available to them 

and what options were available to them. So, having the strong belief in the people that they can 

succeed, once we were able to give them the opportunity. So, by putting that as our value system, we 

were able to get commitments not just from the executives within the two larger organizations, but 

directly from the mayor, directly from the superintendent, directly from the counsel, to the school 

board. That we were going to do what was best for the young people walking through our doors. So we 

do have the commitment that we do an assessment and that we find the right educational place for 

them, and then we find the right workforce options for them. And for many kids, it's trying different 

things. And then once they are able to really find what their passion is, really, it's about us getting out 

of their way. Because often, there will be kids just like Apolonio who is just across the desk from here

who have the fire in their eyes about what they see as possibilities and options for their own careers. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Thank you for addressing that question. I also want to pose a final question to 

Mary Ellen and Brett. Since you both speaking from the federal perspective, I wanted to see if you had 

any more to say or anymore that you would like to say about how you think or hope these federal 

efforts that you all discussed are supporting or will support what is going on the ground, especially 

after you heard some of the things that our LA presenters had to speak on, based on their efforts. 

Ms. Mary Ellen Wiggins: This is Mary Ellen. Thanks for the question. In terms of the Performance 

Partnership Pilots, I think that the information we are putting out about the pilots and what they need 

to do really underscore the importance of this kind of work in terms of being able to share data and 

look at outcomes and understanding who the populations are that you are trying to serve. So, I think in

that sense, it really kind of lifts up and highlight how we at the federal level are trying, and how we 

hope that others will use data in smart and inappropriate ways to deliver better services. I think also 

that just the flexibility that these pilots offer, let jurisdictions, any jurisdiction that is already doing a 

good job of maintaining strong partnerships and looking at outcomes propose ways to kind of take 

their work a step further by pooling funds and having streamlined administrative requirements that 

might not otherwise be possible. 

Dr. Brett Brown: Well, I can tell you that inside the Children's Bureau, they have already taken a good 

step forward with their memorandum to encourage data sharing and have followed up by asking my 

office to develop follow-up materials that provide more concrete guidance into how to proceed with 

the data sharing. And so we're in the process of reviewing existing resources that could be useful for 

that, and I believe will offer them in some organized fashion to the larger field. I expect that to be 

ready sometime this year. Also, I would say that the intention for the Performance Partnership 

16
program is to provide technical assistance to the pilots to help them in a number of areas, including 

the data development area, but exactly what format that’s going to take is still being discussed. 

Ms. Michelle Boyd: Thank you for those last points. I just wanted to make one other point before we 

sign off today. I just wanted to point people to the Models for Change website. There is also an 

information sharing toolkit that you can find there that might be a helpful resource for people. And we 

just wanted to take the last few moments to think our presenters for their very informative and

thorough presentations on the topic and I think this is a topic that many people are interested in and it 

has important implications for young people, especially those who are the most vulnerable. So we just 

want to thank you for spending your time with us this afternoon and participating in this webinar. As I 

mentioned before, I wanted to remind people again, that the slides and recordings will be available 

after the webinar today and we hope that you’ll be able to access those resources and use them and 

they will be available on FindYouthInfo.gov, along with some of the other resources mentioned today 

including the collaboration profile on the YouthSource Centers and information on the Performance 

Partnership Pilots and there is a page devoted to that initiative. So we thank you for joining us today 

and enjoy the rest of your day, thank you. 

End of File

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