HMSV 8110 CU Teen Homelessness and Diversity in Riverbend City Essay

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Humanities

HMSV 8110

Capella University

HMSV

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dentifying a Chosen Issue and Its Background

This is the first assignment in your Action Research Project. Before you begin, review the course project description and all of the project assignments at this time. Pay particular attention to the elements needed for the final project assignment in Unit 9. Also, examine the Identifying a Chosen Issue and Its Background Scoring Guide in order to familiarize yourself with the requirements for this assignment.

In this assignment, you will build the content for the Introduction and Background for the Study sections of your final report.

Assignment Instructions

Choose a human services issue that has been examined in a study for a program within a human services organization. You will use this issue as your focus throughout the course project. You may choose to base your project on a program and organization presented in the Riverbend City multimedia scenario for this course, or on an existing study that you must acquire on an issue in a real-world program at your current organization or the organization where you wish to do your future doctoral research.

  • If you choose to base your report on an issue presented in the Riverbend City scenario, you will need to work with the data and background from the Riverbend City scenario to develop an analysis of your own that would be equivalent to a study that has been conducted on the issue. You may find you need more information for the project than is provided in the scenario. If so, create realistic information, using your own local city or community population or data.
  • If you choose to base your report on a study that has been conducted on an issue at a real-world organization, you must be able to access sufficient information about the study, issue, program, and organization to complete all of the project activities.
    • Important: Consult your instructor before submitting this assignment if you wish to use a real-world issue and organization.

Once you have chosen the issue for your project, examine the associated study (or the Riverbend City multimedia scenario) thoroughly. Conduct research that addresses or relates to your chosen human services issue, including its history and previous work that has been conducted on it in the field. Apply theoretical frameworks and systems thinking to your chosen study (refer to your Unit 1 readings).

Write a paper in which you provide a detailed profile on the issue and the study from your chosen organization. Include the following components:

Introduction
  • Briefly describe the human services organization and the program being examined.
  • Explain the focus of your chosen study.
  • State what the study is attempting to learn and understand about the issue.
  • List the specific research questions of this study. (Note: You will outline them further in the next section of the paper.)
  • Identify your overall goals for the issue, program, and organization. (Note: You will define them further in the next section.)
Background for the Study
  • Discuss research that addresses or relates to your chosen human services issue, including the following:
    • Explain what you have learned about the research.
    • State the history of the issue and how the history is relevant to the current state of the issue.
    • Describe the previous work that has been done on this issue.
    • Analyze how other research relates to this issue.
  • Analyze the background of your chosen study.
    • Address the population, governance structure, and leadership models.
    • Outline the specific research questions of this study.
  • Examine your chosen study using theoretical frameworks and systems thinking.
    • Investigate how this issue relates to other problems within the organization.
    • Examine research that discusses this issue and related problems, using theoretical frameworks and systems thinking.
    • Define your overall goals for the issue, program, and organization.
  • Provide a references page, including at least two resources used in your paper.

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Riverbend City ® Activity Action Research Topic • • • • Introduction Action Consortium Offices Conclusion Credits Introduction In this series of simulations, you will assume the role of a high-level staffer at Riverbend Community Action Consortium (RCAC), a human services organization in a mid-sized Midwestern city. You will put the principles of action research into use as you examine one of RCAC's programs and identify ways to gauge and improve effectiveness. RCAC provides a variety of services for its community, some of them in cooperation with other agencies. While RCAC's staff work to provide the most effective services in the most efficient way possible, focusing on the immediate needs of a given day can make it easy to lose track of the larger picture. Someone removed from the day-to-day, looking at longer-term data, can offer valuable insights into the effectiveness of programs and how they can be improved. Three RCAC programs are available for review: the Ruby Lake Teen Homelessness Task Force, the Northside School Completion Program, and the Juvenile Justice System/Second Chance Program, operated in cooperation with an organization called Second Chance RBC. You should go talk to some RCAC staff about these programs to get an initial sense of what they do and how they work. Riverbend City Action Consortium Offices Talk to RCAC staff to hear a quick overview of their respective programs. Karen Goldberg Second Chance Program Hi, thanks for asking about the Second Chance program! So, this program is one that RCAC works on in cooperation with another agency…in this case, it's Second Chance RBC. I serve as the main point of contact on the RCAC side, and my counterpart over there is Brad Heath. It's a pretty tightly cooperative setup; I wind up working more closely with Brad than I do some people here within RCAC. But don't get me started about what it's like trying to synch up the budgeting cycles of two different nonprofits! Anyway. What do we do in the Second Chance program? We exist to help students- mostly high school and junior high, some middle school - who are in danger of falling out of the traditional school system, either through expulsion or getting tied up in the juvenile justice system. Or both. We work with judges and the Riverbend City School District to route these kids into alternative schools, and then try to provide resources and support to help them graduate. Second Chance RBC performed this function on their own for several years, and kind of ran into problems with their own success when they couldn't scale up to meet the demand. So we started partnering with them a few years ago, since we have resources and staff that they just don't. The way things are distributed now, we at RCAC theoretically focus more on students who're involved in the juvenile justice system while Second Chance RBC does more to cover kids at risk of expulsion. But in practice, that distinction doesn't always mean a lot, since there's a lot of overlap in those populations. There's a lot more I could say, and a lot of figures I could show you about the program. But the director asked me to stick with a high-level overview for now, so let's leave it at that. But we'll talk again! Josh Wilson Northside School Completion Program Hey there! So I guess I'm supposed to tell you about the Northside school completion program. Well, I don't want to blow your mind, but the program is all about improving school completion rates on the north side of Riverbend City. Crazy, I know. There are four schools that we work with in the program, with some variance in their demographics and the socioeconomic status of their student bodies. We partner with school administration, faculty, and guidance counselors to provide resources to students to keep them on track. You know the Second Chance program? In some ways, we're upstream of that. If we're doing our jobs, there'll be fewer students who need help from the Second Chance program. Of course, we're under no illusions that we're going to get that number to zero. We have a *lot* of challenges with this program. Since we work in partnership with the school district, we're exposed to a lot of chaos on that end. A couple of the north side schools have a lot of turnover, for instance, both in faculty and guidance staff. Which means that we find ourselves starting over from zero over and over. And it's very hard to maintain institutional knowledge for the program in those schools. The problem exists to some extend in all of the school, but it's especially bad at Petersen and Vagle. We keep a lot of statistics, but I don't know that we do a great job of doing anything useful with the information. Completion falls off a cliff at Ellison after 10th grade. That's good to know! Seems like it's a thing we should address! But what do we do about it? Same stuff we've been doing. Geri Patel Teen Homelessness Task Force Hello! So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the homelessness program. Ruby Lake is a particularly disadvantaged neighborhood here in Riverbend City, and has a very elevated homeless population. The task force is a grant-funded project within RCAC to try to mitigate homelessness among the population. We do a lot of face to face work with the population, which is rewarding but very time consuming; so we spend a lot of our high-level time thinking about how many staff hours we're spending per program participant. Which sounds so cold! But managing the program requires thinking about participants in the aggregate like that. If Jane Doe is a 19-year-old from an abusive home who has developed an opioid addiction, that's an individual who we're going to try to help with counseling, outpatient substance abuse treatment, and temporary shelter. But to figure out how to help all of the Jane Does, we need to think about the population in the abstract. How many homeless people in Ruby Lake have children? How can we help them? Do people with substance abuse problems soak up a disproportionate share of resources? Since we're always in triage mode, these are questions we have to be asking. Another circumstance we have to deal with is the funding situation. This program was initiated with a 3-year grant, with the idea that we'd roll into operating out of RCAC's unrestricted funds. The amount of funding RCAC has been able to contribute from the unrestricted budget has actually gone *down* as we've moved through the grant period. I have assurances from higher up that we'll be taken care of in year 4, but I lose some sleep wondering about that… Conclusion Now that Karen, Josh, and Geri have talked to you about the programs they administer for RCAC, you should take a moment and reflect on what you've heard. Reflection Questions If you're going to embark on an action research project on behalf of the organization, which of these three programs—the Second Chance program, the School Completion program, or the Homelessness program—would you like to focus on? Your response: This question has not been answered yet. What is it that appeals to you about this program Your response: This question has not been answered yet. What avenues for research present themselves on that program? Your response: This question has not been answered yet.
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The Difference in Pittsburgh & Rural Tennessee on Education with Support that Parents
being there Matters More Than Living Area

Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Name
Instructor Name
Date

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The difference in Pittsburgh & Rural Tennessee on Education with Support that Parents
being there Matters More Than Living Area
The old saying that geography is destiny assumes that where one lives determines the
kind of life that they are going to have in the future. Some neighborhoods have better-rated
school districts than others, implying that children are more likely to attain better educational
outcomes in some areas. The immediate surroundings of an individual also affect the kind of
opportunities available to them as well as the kind of people they will interact with. While this
may be particularly true, parental involvement in a child’s education is more impactful than the
geographical location. Parental involvement refers to the involvement that parents show towards
their children's education by motivating them to do better in school, assisting with school work,
maintain contact with teachers regarding the student's performance and progress, among others.
Parents are considered one of the essential stakeholders of education (Sapungan & Sapungan,
2014). While studying in the highly-rated schools that are found within well-developed urban
areas is essential in a child's development, this alone cannot assure excellent educational results.
This paper evaluates how students in Burns, TN, whose parents are openly involved in their
education would be better positioned than students in Pittsburg, whose parents are not actively
involved in their education.
The Pittsburg area has several school districts that have numerous highly rated schools.
They include Fox Chapel area, Mt. Lebanon, North Allegheny, Upper St. Clair, Hampton Town,
South Fayette, Quaker Valley, Peters Township, Montour, Moon ares, Pine-Richland, Greater
Latrobe Franklin regional among other school districts in the area. On the other hand, Burns is a
small town in Dickson County, Tennessee, near the Nashville area. The town has lesser
prestigious schools in Dickson County than those found in the Pittsburg area. In this small town,

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parents may not have a variety of school choices to enroll their children. Many people can easily
argue that studying in Pittsburg would yield better academic outcomes than studying in Burns.
However, this argument may only hold if parents are significantly involved in their children's
education.
The most accurate predictor of academic achievement is neither the geographical
location, socioeconomic status, nor how prestigious an educational facility is. The most accurate
predictor lies in the extent to which parents are involved in their children's education (How
Parent Involvement Leads to Student Success, 2018). This involvement includes how families
encourage students at home and how committed they are in education. When the whole family
engaged in their children's educational lives, the children have the support they need from their
homes and the knowledge that they not only have to complete school-issued work but also
develop a lasting love for education.
Schools that focus on family engagement often see notable changes in their learning
environments. When many family members are near, it becomes easy to engage them in their
school activities and progress. A student in Burns, TN, who has their extended family in the area
is likely to involve them in his education. The more the family is involved in a student’s
education, the better the student’s motivation, behavior, and grades become. Being a rural area, it
more likely that you may find an extended family in Burns compared to Pittsburg. A student in
Pittsburg who lives with a single parent is more likely to miss out on their involvement in
education. Pittsburg is a big city, and with only one parent in a household, it is correct to assume
that this parent is the sole bread winner. As such, the parent may constantly be at work fending
for the child and may miss out on crucial after-school interactions while at work. In such
situations, the children may find themselves doing the assignments and other academic activities

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on their own since their only parent is out at work. Contrarily, a student in rural Burns, TN, who
has an extended home is more likely to involve them in the educational practices. With an
extended family, it is easier to assume that the student is more likely to find someone at home to
consult or help with homework after school.
Encouraging parental engagement in education is one of the most efficient ways of
creating a positive learning environment for every child. It is indisputable that this engagement
can be achieved in both Burns, TN, and Pittsburg. Engagement involves the teachers and parents
sharing a common responsibility to help students achieve. Families have been termed as the
smallest schools due the significant role they play in a children’s education (National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019). The foundation established and nurtured by
families not only impacts educational outcomes but also success later in life.
A student in Burns, TN from a family structure that has both parents and stab...


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