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Tragedy Kickstarts Children's Services Network

CSN is "strengthening the impact of service provision."

Marcus Grier, a junior high-school student in Charlotte, N.C., was killed by random gunfire at a high-school football game. The tragedy shook the community, and frustration over the murder spread throughout the city and Mecklenberg County.



Many locals were incensed and baffled that such a senseless killing could occur so close to home, and some in the community decided to do something about it. Out of the tragedy, the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Children's Services Network (CSN) was born in 1993. CSN, governed by a board of directors that includes county commissioners, school board members and local businesses, has a single mission: "To ensure the well-being of every child in Mecklenberg County by strengthening the impact of service provision." Essentially, the mission is to build bridges between government agencies, nonprofits and social-service providers to create a tightly knit network through which it is difficult for a child to slip.

However, the all-encompassing vagueness of that mission has plagued the nonprofit organization since its inception. There have been times when the community funding threatened to dry up because it was hard for local leaders to see and gauge the results they were getting out of an annual $149,000 budget. In fact, it wasn't until a new director stepped in, in July of last year, that CSN established its first concrete goal.

CSN Retooling

It was then that Interim Executive Director Annette Nikonovich took a cue from technology, married it to an idea that had been kicking around CSN for several years, and began to recraft how CSN officials would accomplish their mission. That goal became the testing and establishment of a Decision Support Database that draws information from a variety of agencies that interact with the county's youth and utilizes it to make better informed policy decisions that guide the care of the county's children.

"CSN was formed as a reaction to Marcus Grier's murder, and the goal was to find ways to better coordinate child services in the area," said Nikonovich, who was hired as the permanent director in January. "To some degree, we can say that goal has been accomplished -- through our efforts and those of the other agencies in our community. So when I came on as interim director, it was easy to wonder what our purpose was or should be." Others had also begun to wonder what the organization's purpose was, and when Nikonovich was hired, she immediately took up the question.

"Our budget isn't large, but we want to make sure the money is used productively," she said. "I looked around and realized that we had a lot of nonprofits working in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg area. They do a wonderful job, and there was no sense in duplicating their work, but the idea of building the Decision Support Database had been around for a long time; it was something that people could get behind, something they could hang their hat on and say, 'This is what CSN has accomplished.'"

One Step at a Time

As a first step, CSN needed to determine the feasibility of creating such a database, and the best way to establish that seemed to be through examining a single pilot question, collecting the data and analyzing whether the information was useful. Previously, CSN had been asked by the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Department's Family Services Bureau to help the bureau in analyzing violators of the community's 2-year-old curfew ordinance. Approximately 1,100 juveniles were in the curfew-violator database, and CSN wanted to draw descriptive data on the violators from three very different services agencies: the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school system, the police department and the department of social services. This first Decision Support Database was called the Curfew Violator Characterization Study.

"We were given six months to prove the viability of establishing the database, and I realized right off that it wasn't going to be an easy task. There were the immediate technical issues to addressed, but there was also the need to establish relationships between agencies that normally operated in their own individual spheres," explained Nikonovich. "First, it was a challenge to convince these agencies that we were going to be able to use the information they gave us responsibly and will protect its privacy. We realize these privacy issues are a testy ground right now and that people have put a lot of trust in us." In practice, privacy is less of an issue then it at first appeared.

"Our" Children

What Nikonovich is producing is the same kind of statistical data that the federal government has been producing from census information and other sources for decades. Creating profiles of the typical curfew violator, for example, are based on everything from academic records to family history. Information is gathered on a child-specific basis, but by the time it leaves CSN, all identifiers are scrubbed, and it comes out in the aggregate. This type of information has always proven valuable in making policy decisions, but what could make CSN's data invaluable is its geographic specificity. "We will now have data that tells us about what is going on with 'our' children, we won't just be making guesses based on some national average that may or may not be accurate," explained the director. While Nikonovich played down the difficulty of applying the technology necessary to begin creating the Decision Support Database, it certainly wasn't the easiest aspect of the task, and there are still some challenges to be surmounted.

The information CSN needed was maintained with varying degrees of accuracy and no standardization at the various inputting agencies. What CSN needed was software that would be able to take data from a variety of formats and with differing standards for inputting everything from addresses to dates, and then provide a standardized, usable data output. The solution was AutoMatch and AutoStan from MatchWare Technologies, based in Burtonsville, Md. AutoMatch is an integrated process-management system that successfully links disparate records, while AutoStan is a pattern-recognition parsing system that optimizes name and address record conditioning.

For Nikonovich, the best part of using MatchWare's software was being able to run it on a single Pentium PC. "We didn't have a lot of money, and we didn't have to go out and spend a lot of money on new hardware, yet we are already, in just a handful of months, able to provide policy-makers with valuable information to support them in their decision-making process," she said. That first database was completed early this year.

In January, the North Carolina Governor's Crime Commission decided to offer special training in assessing the needs of youth in 10 counties across the state. Mecklenberg County is one of those designated, and CSN's information-gathering experience has been tapped to help support the program. CSN will lead the information and monitoring efforts, and the knowledge gleaned from the Curfew Violator Characterization Study will be part of the community assessment process. To Nikonovich it is the perfect role for CSN.

"What I tell everyone is that what we are doing is about developing relationships, bringing the community of social services closer together and sharing information," said the director. "Working to support the crime commission's program and training is one of many ways that we can be of help to those that are trying to reach the county's youth. Sometimes I still feel like we are having an identity crisis here, but the fact is that this is important information. Pulling it together and using it properly will help to plug the holes in the system through which children sometimes drop."

Raymond Dussault is a Sacramento, Calif.-based writer.

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